We are no longer going to be offering the customized sports jerseys from Hardkor Sports that we had been selling since Hardkor was founded in 1997.
We started customized soccer jerseys in 2000 and have been selling customized football jerseys on Amazon since before there was an Amazon custom. HK Sportswear has been making custom sports jerseys and delivering 5 star rated personalized products on Etsy since 2016.
In March of 2023 we launched our new store, Yourteamsports.com as a new venture on the Shopify platform. We were hacked shortly after we started advertising on Google ads. Within hours, the hackers had blocked our Google Merchant account and launched a domain on Shopify that was one letter off from ours. We tried to recover our account with the cell phone number that was linked to the account for over 18 years and in good standing. We got nowhere with Google.
The owner started getting phone calls 2 days later on his personal cell phone from the new scam account. The hackers used the cell phone and home address and changed the hours to be 7 days a week. We contacted the FBI, Google, the registrar and Shopify. The only entity that responded in anyway helpful was Shopify. They shut the scam site down within an hour after it was reported that they had just lifted our policy pages directly from our site verbatim.
Then, Google's suggested that, since we couldn't get our original account back, that we start a new merchant account and upgrade our security. We did this and were able to build the account from scratch and were back up and running in about a week. Unfortunately, for some unknown reason still yet to be determined, Google flagged our new merchant account and suspended us for selling counterfeit goods and misrepresentation.
Multiple attempts to have this resolved, again led us no where. It also killed our business on the existing site that had been linked to Google Merchant Center for the past 18 years. This killed our business. We had to lay 2/3 of our staff.
As of writing this today, our Google Merchant account is still suspended. Every attempt to rectify this gets nowhere. We tried to just sell blank uniforms, then just our customized uniforms. Every time, the same thing - counterfeit goods & misrepresentation. It appears that Google as incorrectly flagged our business as illegitimate and unworthy to be featured on Google Shopping. Since Google Shopping is the cornerstone of any ecommerce business and the inability to pass this litmus test from Google will put you in a void, a netherworld of obscurity.
Our organic traffic is non-existent. Thousands of hours of work and money has gone to waste. People have lost their jobs and our business has lost it's footing and security that it has worked nearly 3 decades to build and protect. Gone. In a matter of minutes.
So, now what? We have purged our entire inhouse custom printing department and will be phasing out production. We will outsource our production to our vendors and other third party printing companies. We will reorganize in a streamlined fashion and provide our years of knowledge in the field on a consultation basis. We will continue to provide the same excellent service that we have been know for but as we move forward, we will not be making our own stuff.
We are going to keep our old blog listings to see what we used to do. We will still continue to offer our great products and services on Amazon and Etsy as we have been doing for years now. Hopefully, this new launch of a Hardkor-Free website will be finally accepted by Google and we can move forward with the business that we had been building since 1997.
Wish us luck.