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Here's something interesting to know - O'Reilly's online store wasn't an in-house operation. They contracted with an ecommerce company called MarketLive, and th

Here's something interesting to know - O'Reilly's online store wasn't an in-house operation. They contracted with an ecommerce company called MarketLive, and then all the ebook stuff was an extensive (and, as far as I know, tightly-coupled) customization. But all the add-to-basket and order-processing and order-confirmation-emails stuff was through MarketLive. This is significant because early last year MarketLive was purchased by private equity, merged with some other ecommerce companies, and relocated to Texas. So it's quite possible - and here I have no particular knowledge - that the MarketLive platform is being deprecated or entirely abandoned, and this was a more attractive option for O'Reilly than trying to rebuild all that stuff on a different platform.

toyg 9y ago
O'Reilly have always been pretty transparent with their readers; I'm sure if they'd come clean on this people would have given them the benefit of the doubt. "Sorry, in a few months we are scaling down the website because our supplier is borked, bear with us." Man, I'm sure someone would have helped them for free / cheap. Trying to cover a supplier issue with bullcrap about "market trends" is not great; doing it from one day to the next is just terrible for customer relationships.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Why can't both things be true? It could very well be the case that they would have been happy to carry on with the market if it still all worked, but they didn't feel like they could justify the trouble of migrating it to a new platform.