winding down baby gift store - what next?

[in2d]

i'm not sure if this is in the right place

Over Christmas something happened to my baby products / gifts website. Basically Google marked it as an unsafe site and allthough it still functions perfectly well, anyone trying ot visit it would get a warning come up saying 'this site may har your computer' I was crushed! Basically it rendered my site useless (as n o-one would visit) and i ended up calling it a day

My site was built on cs cart (for what it's worth) but to this day i have no idea exactly what went wrong.

Anyway, i digress somewhat. I have closed the store, told inland revenue, in the process of tying up VAT affairs and now i'm left with alot of stock. Does anyone have any suggestions of how i can deal with this? Obviously i am no longer able to officially trade since i am no longer self employed ... so i'm struggling ot see how i can sell my stock.

I welcome comments from anyone who has been in a similar situation or has any suggestions of how best ot deal with this. My house is overrrun and i could do with getting this stuff shifted!!!

Many thanks in advance

 

[WarringtonWebsiteDesign]

Job Lot sale on ebay?

 

[Beachcomber]

If you were tunring over enough to be VAT registered then you must have had a pretty good business going - seems a shame to throw the towel in because of a web site problem.

Isn't it worth re-building the site and getting back on track? You've got the stock which is the expensive bit, a few hundred quid would see you back up and running in no time.

How much stock do you have?

Job Lot sale on ebay?

If you did decide to get rid of your stock then eBay is probably the quickest solution - thats where I shifted alot of my old stock when I wound up my online store a while ago.

If your lucky you will get a bit of a bidding war going on and you'll get a good price.

 

[bekyed]

Theres your answer.
Put the stuff on ebay, not an ebay shop and sell as much as you can on there to build up your customers, and maybe make a living off ebay and dont have a website.
Car boots, market stalls are all good places to sell baby stuff too.
Get the capital behind you from the sales and start up again if you can just using ebay.
There are a lot of people making loads without a website on there.
Give it a try.

Bek.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Google would have done this if it detected a virus or trojan on the site. It is simply a case of removing the trojan, patching the shopping cart with the latest version, and filing a re-inclusion request.

It could have been done in a matter of days.

Shame it ended as it did. With regard the stock, car boots, ebay etc is probably the best bet.

 

[Robert Wheeler]

I can second the information that OldWelshGuy offers, there was definitely no need to shut down the business.

Google should make this information more readily available. It is incredible that this leads to the shutdown of a legitimate business. If they put a mark against your site there should at least be an option for them to automatically email you.

A trojan or virus could have got onto your site in any number of ways. It does not even have to be something you have done, it can be another user of the hosting service that triggered the issue.

 

[MartCactus]

The site compromise was very likely to have been the FTP one that has been doing the rounds, where a trojan steals the FTP details from the PC you use to update the site.

If thats the case you definitely want to do a good virus sweep of your PC.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

The site compromise was very likely to have been the FTP one that has been doing the rounds, where a trojan steals the FTP details from the PC you use to update the site.

If thats the case you definitely want to do a good virus sweep of your PC.

One of my clients got hit with this. fortunately my hosting company are ace, they changed all the ftp passwords and backed up from the previous nights backup. The store was back up and safe within hours.

This is exactly the sort of thing that should be brught to the forums.

 

[Robert Wheeler]

I am not sure what the exact term is for this, but it is worth making sure that all of the files on your server are set to "user write". Otherwise, on some servers, other users (and thus trojans operating on other users' accounts) can sometimes gain access to your folders and change and trojan the contents.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

File permissions are crucial, but what normally happens is that a store is set up, and exploit is found, a new version is released, but the store software is updated.

 

[Robert Wheeler]

Can't we just hang the people that make the trojans? Honestly, we all go through so much stress and timewasting trying to secure our sites from these idiots. I seem to spend 90% of my time jumping through the hoops created by nefarious blaggards.

 

I seem to remember posts here about moving/expanding baby stores. Maybe these people would be interested in your stock