More than 300,000 customers of ShopGoodwill.com were impacted by a recent data breach. The data exposure impacted 14% of the total ShopGoodwill.com customer base.
All of the impacted customers were contacted directly, according to Nicole Morrison, communication manager at Goodwill of Orange County, which operates ShopGoodwill.com. The breach did not affect customers or donors of other Goodwill affiliates not on the platform. With more than 2.4 million registered customers on ShopGoodwill.com as of early 2021, 14% of the customer base would be at least 336,000 customers.
“We were alerted to an issue on our website which resulted in the exposure of some personal contact information to an unknown, unauthorized third party,” Morrison said in a statement via email. “No payment information was exposed and ShopGoodwill.com accounts were not accessed. The issue was remediated within hours of detection and no customer data within our system is currently at risk,” she said. The programming error was resolved and the site vulnerability no longer exists, according to Morrison, but due to security, the organization is not elaborating further.
It’s unclear when or how Goodwill was alerted about the data breach.x
“We take this matter very seriously and we are working with qualified data security experts to ensure incidents like this don’t happen in the future,” Morrison added.
Almost a year ago, Goodwill announced that the site had surpassed $1 billion in sales, half of which was earned within the last three years. By September 2017, the site had surpassed $500 million in sales, with nearly 22% growth in 2020 over the $171 million in sales in 2019.
Santa Ana, Calif.-based Goodwill of Orange County created the platform in 1999 and it now includes 129 Goodwill sellers from across the country. The site culls premium items from Goodwill’s brick-and-mortar thrift stores, ranging from art, clothing, collectibles, electronics and jewelry, and sells them either at auction or through “buy-it-now” options.
Goodwill organizations that list items on the website receive more than 90% of the sale price when an item is sold. During 2020, six outlets surpassed $5 million in annual sales and 48 earned more than $1 million.