Who Owns the Login? Settling an Estate With an Online Business Inside It

The situation

Reza had built a comfortable life around two things: a group of franchised retail locations he had grown over two decades, and a smaller online business he ran almost entirely by himself, selling a specialized line of products through his own storefront and a handful of marketplace accounts. When he died unexpectedly, his estate was substantial — real estate, investment accounts, the franchise interests, and cash reserves that together put the estate's value somewhere in the range of $2,500,000 to $6,000,000 once everything was accounted for. His son Arman, a technology executive, was named as estate trustee in Reza's will, with the estate to be split evenly between Arman and his younger brother Karim, who lived out of province and was glad to leave the practical work to Arman. Arman assumed the hardest part of the job would be the franchise locations, with their staff, suppliers, and lease obligations. It was the online business that turned out to be the more delicate problem.

Reza had run the online store from a laptop that only he used, protected by a password no one else knew, linked to a payment processor and a domain registration in his own name, with inventory sitting in a rented storage unit. Orders kept coming in for almost three weeks after his death. Automated systems kept charging customers, kept promising shipment, and kept generating customer service emails that no one was answering. Arman did not know how much money was moving through the business, what it owed, or even exactly what it sold in some of its product lines. He came to Treadstone Law within days of being confirmed as executor, wanting to know how to legally take control of something he could not physically open.

What the estate review found

An estate trustee's authority comes from the will and, once granted, from a certificate of appointment issued by the Superior Court — often referred to as probate. That authority applies to everything the deceased owned, digital assets included. The complication is not legal authority in the abstract; it is that most online platforms have no reliable way to confirm who the executor actually is, and their own terms of service were never written with a death in mind. A payment processor, a domain registrar, and a marketplace account each have separate rules about who can access an account, and none of them accept a copy of a will as self-evident proof of anything.

Our team's review turned up three layered problems. First, access: Reza's laptop was password-protected, and while some accounts could eventually be reached through password-reset flows tied to his email, others required identity verification steps built for a living account holder, not an executor. Second, valuation: the business had real value — recurring customers, a functioning storefront, inventory on hand, and reasonably steady revenue — but nothing about it had ever been formally valued, and the estate needed a defensible figure both for probate purposes and for eventual distribution among beneficiaries. Third, obligations: outstanding supplier invoices, a modest business line of credit tied to the storage unit lease, and unresolved customer orders all needed to be identified and dealt with before the business could safely be wound down or sold, because an executor who distributes estate assets while liabilities remain outstanding can be personally exposed to those unpaid creditors.

There was also a live decision to make: keep the business running as a going concern and sell it as an asset of the estate, or wind it down and liquidate the inventory. Reza's will was silent on the point, giving Arman discretion as executor but no direction.

What we did

1. Secured formal authority first. We helped Arman apply for a certificate of appointment of estate trustee, and in the interim assembled a package — the will, a death certificate, and a formal letter from our firm confirming his role — that platforms were far more willing to act on than a phone call or an email alone. Several account-recovery teams still required weeks of back-and-forth, but having consistent documentation from the outset shortened most of those exchanges.
2. Inventoried the digital footprint methodically. Working from Reza's email account, bank statements, and the laptop once access was restored, we helped Arman build a complete list: the domain registration, the storefront platform, the payment processor, two marketplace seller accounts, a mailing list service, and the storage unit lease. Each one needed its own access request, and each one needed to be either transferred into the estate's control, closed, or flagged for sale.
3. Paused the automated order flow immediately. Once access to the storefront was restored, the highest priority was stopping new orders from being accepted against inventory nobody was fulfilling, and issuing refunds or delayed-shipment notices on the backlog that had built up. This protected the estate from complaints, chargebacks, and reputational harm that would have reduced the business's value right when it needed to be sold.
4. Arranged a proper business valuation. Because the online business was a meaningful component of the estate's overall value, we arranged for an independent valuation covering revenue history, inventory on hand, customer base, and the transferability of the storefront and marketplace accounts. This gave the estate a defensible number to use both for the probate application and for treating beneficiaries fairly if the business itself was not divided equally among them.
5. Cleared liabilities before any distribution. We advised Arman to settle outstanding supplier invoices and the storage unit line of credit out of estate funds before distributing anything to beneficiaries, and to hold back a reserve against any late-arriving claims — standard practice for limiting an executor's personal exposure to estate debts.
6. Ran a structured sale process. With the beneficiaries' agreement, Arman chose to sell the online business as a going concern rather than liquidate it piecemeal, since a functioning storefront with an existing customer base was worth meaningfully more intact than broken into its component assets. We assisted with the transfer documentation once a buyer was found, including assignment of the domain and marketplace accounts and a clean handover of customer data consistent with the platforms' own transfer rules.

The outcome

The online business sold roughly five months after Reza's death, once the backlog had been cleared, the valuation completed, and a buyer identified through a modest, targeted sale process. The proceeds, combined with the value of the franchise interests, real estate, and investment holdings, brought the estate's total value in near the upper end of the range initially expected. Every supplier and the storage unit lender were paid in full before the estate was divided evenly between Arman and Karim, and Arman's decision to hold back a short reserve period meant no late claims surfaced to complicate things afterward.

What made the difference was speed on the parts that could not wait — stopping the runaway order flow and securing formal authority — paired with patience on the part that could: taking the time to value and sell the business properly rather than shutting it down in a panic during the first chaotic weeks. Arman later said the hardest moment was not any legal step but simply realizing, in the days right after his father's death, that a business could keep running invisibly while no one who loved its owner even knew it was happening.

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