I am not going to bore you with the details. But let’s just say one of the better ecommerce/online shopping carts on the market has been having technical issues over the past 48 hours (and some would say longer) . People are extremely pissed off and they are looking at alternatives. The thing that is breaking my heart is seeing the PR fiasco. I believe if they do not pony up big time and pony up fast they are going to lose more customers due to poor PR than actual downtime related to their technical issues.
My thoughts to the Volusion management:
What your company really needs right now is some serious transparency from the management level down. Your CEO needs to personally address these issues either with a letter or a short video up on YouTube – Video updates from the CEO would really look good in your PR stock. I am going to give Volusion every chance because we have another store with a company that ends in ahoo and it is a POS compared to Volusion . But these outages combined with the fact that the company is silent (besides their great community evangelist Ryan) on a root cause and a plan to fix it is going to kill you. People are going to start to leave (and some have) like rats on a ship. I have been browsing the forums this morning from your competitors. There are people that would rather have no store right now than be up on Volusion’s service. We want to open two more stores at Volusion but I am going to hold off. It would just irresponsible of me to do it watching what everybody else has gone through recently.
This is a chance for you guys to really get some good PR by just coming out boldy and saying how screwed up this is and what you are going to do to fix it. This could be a big win if you guys handle it right. But the lack of communication is killing you as much if not more than the downtime. PR (as I am sure you know) is all about managing the impression of reality, not the actual reality. The other carts are making a killing off of this bad PR and they are owning the PR picture right now. By you doing nothing you are giving them default control of your message for you. You guys need to take that PR back and own it.
I am pulling for you.
I think you hit it on the head Patrick. This is one more example of how the Intenet has changed the face of PR as well as communication. If you aren’t part of the conversation, you’re going to be owned by the people that are.
Thanks Tanner. It was just staring me in the face. And it is frustrating that I cannot do anything to help them.
Unfortunately for Volusion (and us), we need more than PR – we need performance.
The fact that there is still no explanation of yesterday’s failures – and that another occurred last night – is certainly not a confidence booster. Volusion can not expect its merchants to pay with their sales for Vs OTJ training while they figure out how to run a data center.
Could not agree more Beth. While my new store has not seen near the issues that others have I dread to think what this will be like when my store gets bigger. And I have multiple stores.
Yes, Patrick they need to begin honestly sharing as soon as possible. PR doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so not participating doesn’t equal absence of information… just absence of *correct or on-message* information.
Not having a crisis communications plan is an all-too-common PR fail among companies large and small.
Thanks Mandy – Good to know I was not off base on this one.
Do you really think Volusion and their CEO give a damn about the customers? If they did, we would have never been removed from Rack Space. It’s all about those Benjamin Franklins. Hmmm, stuff a managers office with balloons or get the server issues fixed. They made their choice.
Yea John, that MUST be the case and the only reason they moved away from Rackspace – because they don’t care about their customers… Get real. Yea, it was definitely not good that a bunch of sites went down, but this also happened to my site once back when Volusion hosted it with Rackspace, so good luck finding ANY hosting company that has not had any network issues. We have been customers for over a year now, and though this has not been a great experience, we would not trust the well-being of our business with anyone else.
Volusion CTO responds to customers about the outage in this letter: http://www.seony.com/20091021-volusion-website-service-outages/
Thanks guys for the follow up. I had not seen it yet.
Volusion is entirely down yet AGAIN. I find myself up at 2 in the morning trolling forums and online posts from doing a Google search on “VOLUSION SUCKS” because I am so fed up with their service (or lack thereof) and inability to address an issue THAT HAS BEEN GOING ON SINCE JUNE, when they completed the server migration.
All hail Volusion’s new Data Center. Not. IT SUCKS!!
Interesting. I knew Volusion was complicated, but I wasn’t aware of how irritated everyone is with them.
I already switched to BigCommerce, couldn’t be happier!
Good to hear – got time to tell me what the top 3 things you love about it are, and what they can do better?
Hi John.
I want to see what a finished site looks like on Big Commerce. I’m checking them out too. I’m curious to see what your site looks like since making the move from Volusion…
All of our stores will be leaving Volusion in 2010.
They just dont seem to care about down time or customer care. I am tired of paying for there on the job training
Thanks James. How many stores and what are you moving to when you move away from Volusion?
This is very accurate, I was once a techy for volusion. I understand how it goes down to myself, and the (former)customer(s). Tech Support could do alot better but the level 2′s, 3′s and the tech support mgr discourage level 1′s from speaking to servers admins, asp devs, customer care reps, etc. giving them poor experience skills. also the server admins are not 24/7 like tech support so downtime is common with volusion.
Here’s something I posted on their forum…chances are, it will be deleted within a few minutes…
http://forums.volusion.com/t5/Report-a-possible-issue/A-plea-give-the-people-a-choice/td-p/40206
J,
Volusion support has gone down the drain. When we first signed up a few years ago, I got excited for a few basic reasons:
- Young, fresh company…looking to make dramatic change in the ecommerce shopping cart scene
- Feature rich (for back then) and the promise of constant innovations in shopping cart software. This was the vibe
- Simple fees. No percentage fees, no transactions fees, fixed fees any small business owner could budget
- Great reviews
Today, after 2.5 years of using Volusion, this is how I feel now:
1- Customer support SUCKS
2- No product updates showing large investment in R&D, no innovation, hardly any improvements in the software.
3- Product releases disorganized and the product itself, buggy at best.
4- There really isn’t a cost saving using Volusion. Paying $500 a month in bandwidth overages on JUST ONE of our sites is INSANE. Bandwidth is cheap!
Winter Crap ’09, as it should be officially renamed, is garbage. If Volusion actually beta tested the program like any other real software company, they would have been aware of all these issues popping up. They sure spent some effort with their write ups and introductory videos… pity they didn’t dedicate any more time to polish the software instead.
But you can’t blame the programmers…I’m sure they are very talented. You can’t blame technical support, they aren’t on the development team, nor do they make up policy. Help the folks in customer support…I feel for you guys. Not your problem. You guys take beatings from us all the time and have to constantly click those canned responses as if you’re emotionally dead.
It’s not the staff to blame. This all comes down to management. Maybe the company is too successful, maybe it grew too fast, maybe its falling victim to typical corporate greed tendencies, who knows, and who really cares.
Bottom line is, Volusion isn’t the same Volusion it used to be…or the Volusion many of us envisioned it would become. It is management that sets the tone of any organization and for Volusion to look as bad as it does in my eyes today…boy…the people in management have really lost touch. Either they’re too busy tapping themselves on the back for having thousands of users or they’re out playing golf all day (maybe that’s why NO ONE IN YOUR TEXAS OFFICE HAS A CLUE WHERE YOU GUYS ARE, or what your telephone extension numbers are).
I can go on and on…I’m not trying to defame anyone, I’m genuinely pissed you guys are hurting my bottomline. I can preach and complain, but most likely this thread will be locked, deleted, moved, or archived somewhere so as not to be found.
With all the service issues Volusion has had over the last few months…matched by constant disappointment in the software, I really don’t know what to say. What has really made leaving Volusion difficult is our constant grow. I love it how you guys justify the bandwidth charges too, “Remember that increased traffic to your website can be directly correlated with increases in sales.” Jumping ship to another shopping cart is a big step. Maybe some of us need to revisit this option.
Again, I want to stress it’s not the staff of Volusion (Ryan, I know even you are in touch with what’s going on, though you take the Cyber Forum Cop role to another level). It is the management. Management that doesn’t take responsibility but rather sets a negative tone. This is scary. Makes me rethink if I really want to do business with Volusion on principle alone.
Good thing that you shared it in mutiple places then huh?
Lucky for me I have not see the issues that others have so I am still fairly happy with them. But I feel for you. I really do.
Guess what, they’ve banned me from posting…even though I’ve not used any profanity and spoke only the true, the forum police is in full pursuit.
Sure enough they have banned my account and when viewing the locked volusion forums from a different account, I can see they are even reseting the page views!! What a desperate attempt to cover up their crappy software. If only they have the integraty to come out clean on the management level and express their sincere apology for putting their long time supporters on the limb like this.
my extended review on Volusion’s Winter Crap ’09 virus downgrade is here:
http://www.fixyourdlp.com/2010/01/15/volusions-winter-crap-09-upgrade-share-your-experiences/
Quite a few recommendations for BigCommerce here, and I would recommend it as well. I am expecting big things from them (pardon the pun) and so far they have delivered with killer releases packed with lots of features.
Shame on the Volusion forums. Transparency really is key for companies like them. They will see it sooner or later. Probably will be too late.
Thanks Reggie. We have looked at BigCommerce before for customers and I think there are some things it lacks for a really large store. It may be good for some though – obviously all of these solutions are good for some people if they are all in business. Thanks for stopping by – we’ll have to look at BigCommerce again at a later date.
Volusion’s method of selling their bullshit product is to bad mouth their competition. Have you ever spoken to one of their sales people. They are full of crap and say anything they can think of to BS a customer. I’m sick and tired of their poor tactics and wouldn’t recommend them if they were the last ecommerce cart company alive. FU Volusion!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks Steve. What specifically did they say? Who did you end up doing business with?
Today, February 22, 2010. Volusion is down again. Their entire domain is down too. Tried to call them and get a fast busy. It’s going to be another long day with these guys. They should rethink how the heck this happens, and fix their architecture.
Thanks for the update. I just tried to go to their home page and my store from here in OKC and it came up OK. Maybe it was a short outage.
Volusion does indeed SUCK. There customer service is not helpful, their tech support doesn’t even know anything about their platform. TERRIBLE
One of the most frustrating things about Volusion is that it won’t acknowledge any problems with its in-house hosting (Volusion Data Center). No admission of issues. No willingness to give even vague details about how they will improve upon past failures. No transparency whatsoever. They just simply don’t communicate and instead let store owners struggle without answers. Maddening.
Some Volusion users don’t know/care. But a growing contingent of Volusion store owners is absolutely fed up with substantially more downtime since Volusion made the profit-driven decision to move hosting from Rackspace to its own in-house servers. The company has demonstrated repeatedly and without doubt that it is woefully unprepared to administer the VDC skillfully. This move and the absence of any communication concerning problems associated with the VDC is now thrashing any remaining goodwill from some of the company’s best and most loyal customers who simply can’t believe Volusion is actually trying to hide and avoid addressing hosting failures of such magnitude.
The current major issue going on now is very discouraging. Because of recent DDOS attacks, Volusion has increased traffic filtering to all sites as a prevention technique against other malicious attacks. The problem is that the VDC is toying with appropriate filtering levels and learning on the fly at the expense of store owners. For example, there is a recurring and well-documented effort by store owners to PROVE to Volusion support that site conversions are WAY DOWN and abandoned carts are WAY UP ever since a very specific date in March. The graphs constructed by store owners show a very specific, easily pinpointed and very dramatic increase in abandoned carts beginning across dozens of Volusion stores and beginning all at the same time. Is this related to Volusion’s new security measures? Is it related to some other problem that remains undocumented or undiagnosed? Or does Volusion recognize the problem but just not care so long as most store owners are unaware of the issue and blame their declining conversion rate on the economy or other factors? Store owners ask these questions but get non-answers, secrecy and stonewalling from Volusion support and management.
Because Volusion is a secretive, opaque operator that does not value its customers, many are rethinking their relationship with such a predatory company.
But as the weeks and months roll on, more and more Volusion store owners are cutting the cord and moving to Core Commerce, Big Commerce, 3d Cart, Magento, or any other solution that cares enough to communicate with its user base. Just a few of the current issues:
- Downtime
- Slow response to DDOS
- Aggressive traffic filtering (even good traffic gets blocked)
- No redundancy
- HORRIBLE, ABOMINABLE, OUTRAGEOUS “canned” support responses
- Culture of secrecy with no transparency
- Terrible, untested, buggy release of W09 update (two years in the making)
- No longer a leader in features
- Slow server response times (will hurt the google page rankings of store owners per google’s new policy of factoring in server speed for rankings)
- Unwilling to release any kind of future release roadmap (other carts do so)
- Industry’s highest, most ridiculous bandwidth overage rates
- Force you to include Volusion’s name and a link to them on your homepage and every single page of your site (or pay $20 extra per month to “opt out” — outrageous)
- Executive management that hides in the shadows with no communication to users
If you’re considering Volusion, please be aware of these issues and be prepared to troubleshoot and simply accept many problems without much, if any, help from support.
Volusion store owner, 2007-2010
Wow. You put a lot of time and effort into that. Great information from the voice of experience.
We gave up on Volusion the weekend after Easter.
We went with BigCommerce. It’s not perfect but they at least acknowledge that – and a big selling point to me was the public forums.
There are things I miss about Volusion – we were there for almost two years and I really do love the software. But I love reliability more and spent last Q4 with a backup cart ready to go at 3DCart. I’m not prepared to do that again.
.-= beth´s last blog ..Pardon Our Dust – We’re Moving! =-.
I’ve been a Volusion user for years. The downtime has been increasing and I’ve written to support numerous times. Funny, I didn’t know they changed servers. All I know is more problems with SLOW, DOWN, and no server response.
Tech support has been very responsive over the years, with quick support on phone or online.
here’s what I’ve noticed in 2010:
- more downtime/ slow problems this year than probably last 5 years combined
- more attempted Fraud transactions than ever before- was pretty non-existent and now anti-fraud kicks in all the time. We’ve had to enable Volusion IP blocking (which doesn’t seem to be working correctly yet.)
- traffic is down more than 10% in last 30 days. Is this site access, blocking or another problem? I don’t know.
Here’s what I don’t like:
- gift certificates- can only use the one file they created and cannot change default amounts; cannot change the expiration date. I don’t want gift certificates valid for a year and in my business GC are an important marketing tool.
I’m probably the opposite of anyone here. I’ve found it very easy to reach support consistently over the years. No gripes there at all. The software also has a lot of features that once you get into others, you find they are not so rosy for more complex needs.
Beth- what do you find ‘less than perfect’ about bigcommerce?
I’ve been thinking of moving to Magento, but my designer/developer already said given the pros and cons in both stores ( we’ve developed in both), volusion was better. Every cart has something not quite the way you’d want it.
Hi Christine,
Sadly, it looks like we may have to move on from BigCommerce as well. There is a mini meltdown going on with some of their more vocal (that would include me) customers – and some of their more long term customers. Unlike Volusion, you can actually read about it:
http://community.bigcommerce.com/bigcommerce
My server stats have been phenomenal since the move so I have no complaints there. But some very basic features are lacking and others don’t work as advertised. (For example, by basic I mean the Google Base feed.) And BC seems to have been caught up in the contest with Volusion and 3D Cart and others to throw out as many shiny things as possible to attract new users, while skipping some of the basics. And bug fixes.
We are actually looking at Magento, as well. We have not self hosted since the online biz became a full time biz but it seems like it may be the only way to avoid this sort of frenzied rush to release new features in which the SaaS guys all seem to have found themselves.
Beth
.-= beth´s last blog ..Pardon Our Dust – We’re Moving! =-.
Thanks for the update. If you are going to self-host take a look at nopcommerce. Open Source .NET shopping cart.
http://www.nopcommerce.com/
I’ve downloaded it and been very impressed so far. It even has built in forums and blogging. The community on it is very active. I’ve used some of the PHP open source carts before and I’ve always been disappointed as to how much I’ve had to dig into the code from day one to get some of the fancy stuff done. NopCommerce looks much better from that perspective. Pretty robust.
All of these issues with Volusion have affected our bottom line as well. BigCommerce was looking like a good alternative but now we’re not so sure. Has anyone completely transitioned to BigCommerce from Volusion? If so, how was the move? We did sign up for the trial and so far the admin portion looks a lot less feature packed as Volusion.
We made the switch from Volusion to BC – we’ve been live on the BC site for about 6 weeks now.
And are now planning our next move.
Many of the broken parts of BC aren’t obvious until you go live.
The API has been broken since the last update. The Google Base feed does not meet Google requirements. Google Checkout is broken. The Alt Image tags are broken. There is no custom url function so every time you edit a product or category name, you have to put in a 301 redirect.
The list goes on . . . .
.-= beth´s last blog ..Pardon Our Dust – We’re Moving! =-.
Oh man Beth that sucks. One of the main thing I look at for each cart is the API.
What shopping cart are you shooting for next? I’ve been looking at nopCommerce. Open-source self-hosted .NET cart. If I don’t go this route then 3dcart is looking pretty good. The 3dcart API is just now maturing so it will not do everything.
I am pretty sure we are going with Magento. I am not at all thrilled with the idea of self hosting, but the SaaS guys all seem to be in a race with each other with whistles, bells, and advertising . . . at the expense of function . . . so it seems to be time to get off that bus.
.-= beth´s last blog ..Pardon Our Dust – We’re Moving! =-.
Just a quick update for this thread. Right now this thread is run on one of our many domains – GetYourWebsiteToday.com. Pretty soon we will be merging this with one of our other domains – BeAmazingOnline.com. We are planning on exporting all of the blog posts here and importing them over there. Please keep us up to date on your experience with Volusion and the other eCommerve platforms.
[...] account. Stay tuned boys and girls.Follow up: Don’t forget to also read our follow up story: The PR hell that is VolusionTags: coreCommerce, shopping cart, Volusion//LinkWithinCodeStart var linkwithin_site_id = 224138; [...]
That was great information. You have done wonderful work communicating your message. Keep up the good work.
hi Patrick
hi
What can I do for you ?