Not to quote the opening of “Friends” but man it has been a rough time for them.
They had some more downtime yesterday morning, and possibly some more early Sunday morning.
Here is the explanation for yesterday morning: http://forums.volusion.com/t5/Status-Blog/bg-p/Status
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.
Here are a few tidbits from our past couple of days for Volusion Shopping Cart work for a client:
- We imported 20 files each being just under 10M (Volusion) limit, and each containing 2500 products. We are very happy with the results. The products came in just fine and reindexing them all afterwards went pretty fast. Each file only took anywhere from 2m37s to 3m2s to upload. And the upload time did NOT increase with the number of products. Volusion handled our clients CSV imports like a champ. There are now 40K products in the store.
- From reason the related products show up on a product page with the productshortname (SEOd with dashes) than just the product name. Need to get that one figured out.
- We still have not found to content area for where product details are displayed. 
- If you fill in all of your supplier information the reports do indeed show profit $ and profit %. As Bill & Ted would say “Excellent!”
- We did our first mass update via the web interface. Since they have a SQL Server (or something like it) back end they give you an SQL type interface to make updates. So if you are a developer or DBA type you can use “UPDATE table SET field=value WHERE conditionclause”. We used it to put all of the products in warehouse 1. That “should” allow the shipping calculations at checkout to take place from shipping location (not the business location) to receiving location. The mass update for 40000 products did not take long and the results were good.
- With no extra work from us our SSL was installed during our order. Kudos.
- A big difference from a Yahoo cart – your customer stays at your domain for the entire experience. In a Yahoo cart you will notice that once you get into the checkout phase you actually switch domains to yahoo.com or yahoo.net domain. I never liked that.
More to come.
Well we’ve had the Volusion Shopping Cart for a client up and running for customization for just under a day and here are the thoughts so far:
Things that are easy to work with:
1. Uploading CSV files is going a lot faster in Volusion than in a Yahoo! store. I am keeping track of upload timings and so far the upload time is not decreasing proportionally with the number of products that we are having in our store. We will be eventually writing a full .NET class library to manage the Volusion store (let me know if you are interested in this) but for ease we are going with the CSV route for the initial upload.
2. Our client loves the fact that you can designate products in different warehouses across the country, and the shipping is calculated from the correct warehouses zip code. This is the bomb yo!
3. We see some promising thing with the fact that you can track your distributors part numbers and your cost from your distributors in the product. Hopefully there are some ROI reports in there for each order, month, etc.
4. You get full blown FTP access to your site. This is awesome. Any developer or designer knows that once you have raw file access there is not too much that you cannot do. This remains to be seen, but so far this is very nice.
5. We accidentally dove into some of the site stats. These look quite extensive.
6. It looks like there are some great options for the store manager after an order has been submitted – like being able to send the SAME order back to the customer for a different payment type.
Things that are a challenge so far (Disclaimer: Some of these may be a result of ignorance on our part) :
1. It took forever to figure out why a file we were uploading was not working. It says that there was no data in the file or that the file had no CSV data. This was clearly not the case, and even their support acknowledge the file looked good. This is a definite area of improvement – the diagnostic error messages that come out parsing file uploads. In the end it turned out being an issue on my end. But it just took too long to figure out. To make matters worse I gave the file to them and they uploaded it into my store OK. The end result: The file I was using did not have CRLF on the end (Carriage Return Line Feed). It only had LF. You could not tell this by opening the file in Notepad or Excel as both of them opened OK. I only saw it when I opened the file with Notepad++ and turned on the option to see hidden characters. Phew – that took all day to figure out.
2. Finding the encrypted password you need for API customization was a bear. Thank god for their forums. That should be there back in the admin interface someplace.
3. Your PRODUCTCODE (the unique key for every product) is limited in length. This is more of an adjustment than a gripe. In the current version of the store we are migrating you have 2-3 times the length. We had to move from an SEO optimized code to shorter numeric one. We will get over it.
4. I was not happy with their SEO options. You are limited on length and what control you have over your custom URL. They give you a field PRODUCTSHORTNAME where you put in your SEO optimized page name, but it is limited in length. So you page names come out to be www.sitename.com/productshortname/productcode.htm and not www.sitename.com/productshortname.htm (What I would have expected). Probably more of a mindset change on our part.
5. We were reading up on the Google Analytics tracking in the forum. We are going to want to implement full shopping cart/ecommerce tracking. This looks like it is going to be challenge once we get to it.
6. Even though you have full control over the page templates, there is a middle section called page_content. We are still hunting as to where this is created.
More to come as we get deeper in.
