Temporary closure of the Steinberg online shop

Steinberg Lounge
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@GoranGrooves

I have to admit, I’m very curious what you consider the advantages and disadvantages of your strong public criticism of Steinberg employees.

Do you think it will help or hurt your ability to attract new customers to your own business?

For example, before I do business with a company like yours, I typically do some web searching to find out what kind of individual(s) are behind a business.

Do you think, potential customers would be more likely to convert into real customers after reading your posts in this thread? Or would they be less likely to sign up for your services?

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Criticism of Steinberg’s employees? Where exactly did I criticize them? Perhaps you should re-read my posts, and then give them some thought.
The only one(s) I criticized is the upper management, the ones who make the calls.
I don’t blame, nor do I expect or would want to have someone like @dspreadbury to agree with me.

And what: I am not allowed to criticize a company, but it is ok for all of you unofficial Steinberg’s excusers just to pile up with personal attacks on me?
But to answer your misguided question: I don’t care.

So far none of you have provided actual arguments in a way of solid reasons to render my argument invalid. All you can do is resort to ridicule, belittling, and sarcasm. That’s on you.

Saying “Steinberg has been around for so long, surely they best know what to do” or “many others are doing it too” are not valid arguments.

And let me set the record straight on my point of view.
When Steinberg implemented Asknet for their online store that was at a time (many years ago), when that was probably the best if not the only way to accomplish what they needed. They may not have had a choice, or at least a comparable choice. That’s fine. It is not their fault that the company they used went bust.
Times have changed.

My criticism is not of that but of not using this major obstacle as a learning opportunity to do things differently and avoid similar mistakes in the future.

@Brent_Randall It is not an irresponsible decision, but a strategically bad one.

@mozizo

be responsible and learn from your own mistakes and experience, don’t use any 3rd party assets, build your own DAW !

False equivalence. I never said not to use 3rd party assets but to not place “all their eggs in one basket” as they have done in the past and are on the way to doing again.

@st10ss Has it occurred to you that the reason why UA didn’t get “correct receipts for German customers” for 10 years wasn’t because they couldn’t, but because it wasn’t their priority?
There are both service providers and plugins that accomplish the same goal of tax calculations, and currency conversions. And if you were to use a service provider, you don’t need to use the same service provider for all of your needs, which is the main point.

@dspreadbury It is good to hear that you are considering a backup plan. I encourage Steinberg to build and manage their own e-shop. You (and by “you” I mean “Steinberg” company) can absolutely accomplish that if you decide to do that.

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I just did. You are a true piece of … art! :rofl:

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Tell us you have no clue how a global retail business actually works, without telling us you have no clue how a global retail business actually works…

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Excited for the future Steinberg online shop

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All this hatred that is pouring through the internet shocks me more and more.
May be I am old, may be when participating to extending this internet feature in last 80s and until recently, I was not dreaming it could carry all this.

But let’s go back to Steinberg, I hope the real devs we have in touch here could take this ‘special time’ to fix all the old instruments and sounds that are still dependant of elicenser, doing so they would close this too long parenthesis.
And I give you one of my wishes, I know it has poor chance to occurs, but I hope Steinberg will take the new NKS wagon and transform their media lib in order to offer nks, bringing HALion to this universe gaining each day more adhesion.
Quite all the Steinberg’s external sounds and instrument providers, like soundiron as an exemple, already support NKS in mirror instruments/sounds for Kontakt, so bringing this to HALion should be easy for them. Thanks for reading.

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From my own personal point of view , Steinberg are doing their best to resolve the situation and i trust they are doing that ,plus i don’t think the management are that naive that they will allow this situation happen again , who knows what’s going on in the background for security of Steinbergs online outlets , i just think your comment about “Sack everyone” and start a fresh was slightly OTT , ok that’s your opinion fair enough but how many other companies would have continued communication to keep you in the loop about them resolving the situation .
Steinberg part of Yamaha ,so i can imagine they can gain some pretty hefty knowledge on what’s right or wrong for the future , if a mistake like this doesn’t rear it’s head again for another 37 years then this is a good call , They have my full trust on the situation .

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Having backups is a good thing, as we all know.

You’re just experiencing a major disturbance to your business, yet you’re willing to call this event “unlikely”? :upside_down_face:

That’s why backups exist, to assist in the case of unlikely events.

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I was the CEO of a large US company when I was younger and I can tell you that this is a major “cock-up” that would have certainly cost my job and my CFO’s in a matter of seconds
Depriving a company of its bloodline and leaving customers unable to buy their products thru a major sales channel is what comes closest to financial suicide.
Not to mention a serious loss of credibility.
A serious company “must” continuously review the financial situation of their major suppliers (and institutional customers if any)
I am a pure hobbyist, I have been a Steinberg customer for more than 20 years and I wish them to recover from this difficult situation
I love you Steinberg!

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Hi there, it’s been 15 days since the online shop went offline. Can you provide an estimated timeline for when it will be available again?

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And that sentence right there is the core of the issue. It’s easy for a sole developer to build a functional clone of almost anything in a week… a webshop, Netflix, Twitter, etc. As I’m sure you’ll already know, there are tonnes of tutorials on YouTube and elsewhere that any relatively skilled software engineer can easily follow. “Hey, look I just built a Twitter clone! Wow, that was simple - the only difference between my version and Elon’s is the number of users!” or “Hey, I just built a webshop, with user accounts, password functionality, credit card transactions, receipt emailing… wow, I feel so powerful, I guess can build and sell anything now!”

But the key words in your sentence are “at scale” …everything works beautifully until you throw a million users at it. Or as Mike Tyson said - “Everyone’s got a plan until you get punched in the mouth!” And I say that as someone who’s been building solutions for multinational corporations with the help of AWS and Google Cloud for many years. Even when using a cloud backend that supposedly handles all your logic and spins up new servers as and when required, you will still face issues with scaling that are unique to your business - not something you can easily find an answer to on StackOverflow or by quickly asking ChatGPT.

So that’s why Steinberg are taking their time choosing and implementing a third-party online shop partner, and not building their own from scratch, using open-source tools or not. Because those third-party operators have already taken all those punches to the mouth and gotten back up again, and worked through all the issues that software engineers inevitably encounter when trying to do anything serious at scale.

That’s why you “put your eggs in someone else’s basket”, as you say. Because you build the best eggs, and they build the best baskets.

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The term “unlikely event” has lost a lot of its deceptive reliablity lately, wherever you look in the world, has it?

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I think you are being a little unrealistic. If its that easy, why don’t you do it? Go buy a COTS software and setup a server and start taking payments from people all over the world. See how you fare.

FWIW. I once worked for a fundraising corporation that was mainly in the business of pitching and collecting money from donors. They had their own network and server systems, but when it came to payment and collecting e-payments, they outsourced that to a external company that specializes in that sort of thing. Leadership is usually too scared to have 100s, of 1000’s of peoples names and credit cards on their own systems. And they rightly should be if they don’t know how to do e-commerce.

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The way I see it is that it would take a very long time until Steinberg could set up its own worldwide online shop. Whereas with the cooperation of a payment service provider it only takes a few weeks. And you then know that it works quickly without months of testing. You don’t have to hire numerous merchants or programmers overnight.
If I see it correctly, Native Instruments , iZotope, Waves … have their own online shop and even the subscription model is billed in-house and not through Gobbler. And the sales tax exemption for self-employed people also works there.

But Steinberg would have had to slowly build up the decision to do it in-house two years ago. I don’t think you can pull something like that up in 4 or 8 weeks. I’m sure people at Steinberg thought about it.

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I’ve bought several SB products from Sweetwater with no problems.

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Not a detailed one, no. As we said a couple of days ago, we are nailing down the final contractual details with our new provider. The technical work required to handle our products has been done in parallel, so as soon as the contract is signed, we will run a pilot scheme over the course of a few days to try to get transactions from a number of countries in different currencies to make sure that everything is working well, before we fully reopen the shop and can start rolling out new products. It won’t be long now.

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Would you like my email to try C13 Update transaction ? :crazy_face: :grin: :grin: :joy:

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I apply for an Absolute 5 to 6 update transaction test :grin:

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@GoranGrooves You should not be so harsh with Steinberg.

We live in a very specialized, work-sharing society. This has been the case since the ages of hunters and collectors. Everybody is doing what they do best. Hunters hunt, collectors collect.

What Steinberg is very good at is creating sophisticated audio software. They are probably not very good at implementing their own global ecommerce shop system. After all, they are, obviously, a bunch of tech nerds and music afficionados, they are not the company of accountants they would need to be to create their own global online shops.

A specialized merchant of record partner is much more experienced in doing that, and thus also more efficient. Imagine if you as a Steinberg customer had also to pay the salary of a dozen more accountants and web shop admins with your Cubase license fee? Would you want that?

The only valid criticism, as I see it, that Steinberg must face is that their upper management should have known better and earlier about the situation with Asknet. After all, this is their main responsibility: to shield the company they lead from business risks. If I as a layman in these matters can dig in for 20 minutes, and can easily find that Asknet had whacky balance sheets for quite some years, the more Steinberg management could have seen this beforehand, and could have reacted more pro-actively!

But I’m sure they will have learned their lesson. I’m sure they will strive to build a bit more redundancy into their online sales channels now, after coming back with them at all.

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They way I read what GoranGrooves wrote, he’s actually supporting Steinberg, not being harsh, or criticizing them.

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