A message from Selar
To our merchants and their customers, we are deeply sorry for the interruption in our service and the inconvenience this has caused to your business, and your ability to access the products you have purchased.
You have placed your trust in us to securely deliver our promise to you – to create an innovative ecosystem for buying and selling digital products online, and we would like to believe that over the last five years, we have earned that trust. We are committed to furthering the creative digital economy and our journey of growth together has been exciting to witness – from 10 creators in 2016 to over 17,000 creators in 2021, some of who are earning over $10,000 in sales today. Therefore we take our responsibility to you and your products very seriously, and we would like to explain what has happened over the past few days.
On October 30th, 2021, we noticed that a portion of our creator’s product images and files had been compromised – customers were able to transact as usual, but could not access their ebooks, courses, videos and other downloadable materials. Since then, we have spent countless hours with all hands on deck to restore these files, working closely with our platform providers and data and encryption security experts to no avail – unfortunately the compromise was irreversible.
Our vision for our company may be unimpaired, but humans are not, and in this instance, neither is our technology. Growing a world class platform like Selar comes with a lot of challenges and lessons; none that we haven’t been able to meet head on and conquer.
So what have we learned?
Our engineering team has implemented processes to create image and file replications across multiple servers and storage solutions to ensure the redundancy of such occurrences in the future. We are also actively working with third party data and security experts to plug any existing holes or breaches on our platform.
The way forward:
We’ve reached out to our merchants whose files have been affected to re-upload some key data: this could be in the form of product images, videos or files (downloadable files, read online files, course and membership files, and so on). Our aim with this is to help you resolve this as quickly as possible and we have determined this to be the best way to resume your business as usual.
A message to our merchants:
This part isn’t easy – in fact, it sucks. But for your customers to access your files on our platform, we need you to reupload their key data: Your product images, your files, videos, courses and so on. We totally understand how painfully tasking this can be, especially when you have multiple products or courses that have multiple files. Our aim with this is to help you resolve this as quickly as possible for you and your customers, and our customer support team is prepped to answer any questions you might have about this.
We recommend you start updating the images and files for your most active or most purchased products, and work your way down to all your products.
We want to reassure you that our utmost priority is restoring the service you know, trust and love. Your information, products and transactions continue to be safe and secure with us. This has only heightened our urgency to build you an even better product that will be resilient to future shocks. We apologize once again to those who have been affected and for the inconvenience incurred.
Here are walkthrough videos to guide you on how to re-upload your product on Selar.
