Usually if you walk in a store and you see empty shelves all the time with less staff the natural assumption is the business isn’t doing too well and is about to close shop. Therefore, you should avoid buying things like gift cards. But what if it is online? You can’t exactly see who is in the office for the day or how busy it really is. However, there was one example I was reading today where one big signal could simply be if the company is extremely slow in responding to enquiries.
It’s more apparent if they usually respond very fast but then all of sudden take days to do so. I remember this with a webhost I was with as they were fantastic and very prompt in replying to people. They even had a public forum which gave people the confidence to continue with them. But after about two decades It became evident that something was wrong. Customer service agents who would usually reply in a few hours would now show up maybe a few days later. Then it became obvious as service disruptions were frequent as well to the point where eventually it closed shop.
A lot of people including myself started to leave once the service issues were frequent. But again, the key signal was the slow customer service response. Makes you think how speedy responses for online businesses are very important for consumer confidence as well.