Considering it's Hasbro I'm sure they can afford the site being down for a bit...

 

Considering how many EZ Bake ovens go on a daily basis, yeah, they're losing a fortune.

 

Alucard, close your eyes. Think of how many years of sales and SDCC and other various things HTS has done over time. Then repeat to yourself "It's run by monkeys....it's run by monkeys". Now open your eyes. If there were any logic to how their webdevs handle things, you would be the one hired to do the job and not Bonzo the Orangutan.

 

I don't think the site is "down" at all, but they are undergoing some sort of redesign or change. Not sure what the big deal is, it's not like anything is going out of stock while they are changing whatever it is. Maybe it is a new order system, maybe something else.

They aren't losing any money, they aren't losing any business. It's like when a brick-and-mortar store closes for a week with a sign out saying "undergoing renovations."

HTS isn't going anywhere, and there will be plenty of Transformers when they come back live.

 

No, it's exactly like Alucard said - when you redesign your site, you do it in a test environment while keeping your old site. When you're confident the new site is fairly stable, you pull down the old one and put up the new one - no week of "renovations". Your comparison to a B&M is kind of inappropriate, considering physical renovations might force the B&M to close for safety reasons - but even then, my local Walgreens got major renovations (store floors gutted and everything), but they never closed - they just moved shelves around and did their best to continue functioning.

I'm not worried, but it is seriously odd that HTS did this (putting it nicely). Putting it more realistically, what they did is unprofessional and hurts their business. Especially in today's malware climate, it wouldn't surprise me at all if some customers got nervous about a hack or other problem - the only reason websites go down for such a length of time today.

(Besides: the "renovations" delay they're doing is bound to bring disappointment when the next version is inevitably similar or same-y to last website!  )

 

People are overthinking this. But then, that's the Internet for you.

It's also what happens when a bunch of people who don't work in software act like they know what they're talking about.

Hasbro is fine. They wouldn't shut down their site if they couldn't afford to. They also have had people talking about their site for a week now, leading up to Force Friday.

 

Reasons to pull down web site w/o notice or alternative:

Security reasons (vulnerabilities or active hacks).
Database updates (generally web sites are just front ends for a back end database, if you're migrating to an entirely new database system you may want to freeze changes to the old one for the migration).

A few other reasons I could think of.

 

A site overhaul is another big reason. Sure, people are like "But why can't they keep the old site up..."

Well, simple: Hype.

 

One possibility, they're taking the site down completely and just going to refer people to third-party sellers (TRU, Amazon, etc).

 

Well, the new site is up and it's... different.

I can't seem to log into my account..

Ended up having to reset my password.

You can't seem to sort by newest to oldest... I don't like it...

 

Combiner wars has an AOE figure in there...

 

Still shows "Coming Soon" on my end. Looks to be a regional thing.

 

Here's a pic for those that can't see it...

 

Tried to use the website, and it tells me my password was reset?

 

It did the same thing to me. I ended up having to reset it

 

Looks like a huge rest.

As stated a few posts above, no more sorting by newest... Bummer.

 

Ooof! This is sucking at the moment. No sorting by newest, only 18 per page maximum veiwing. Hope it gets a few tweaks here and there.

 

Can't seem to check out...

 

SDCC Devastator listed as $0.00, looks as though you can check out if you have something else in your cart. Not going to try it personally, but it's there for those who want to.