When creating a blog post, it asks if you want to create a link to a web site. For instance, I am Venting/Blogging about Volusion, so I would usually post a link to their site... UNFORTUNATELY none of their links work. They went down hardcore today! Not just their store backend access for merchants, but anyone who created a store through them has lost their shopping cart interface. Their community access to stats and tech support is down as well. Furthermore, they didn't even put up a splash page alerting clients, members and users that they were down and working on a solution. Instead, it just reads as though it never existed, "This web page cannot be found". The store I built over a year ago for our group of #1 radio stations in East Idaho has thrived and has become a popular feature across all of our formats. The Deal of the Week. We direct traffic to this Volusion store on a daily basis. Now our link is dead... completely down and I am unable to access it to even leave our users a message to alert them to the problem. It is so frustrating. Surely Volusion has access to their database of customer emails... surely they could alert their clients about the mishap, and let them know what is happening... surely they have back up plans and mirrored technology.... surely? Doesn't seem to be the case.*shakes head in disbelief*
Thanks Volusion.... I'm glad to know you are crisis ready. NOT!
~This concludes today's vent~ BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP
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UPDATE:
My tech support conversation after being 94th in the queue:
Joe S.: Hi Zoey
Joe S.: Unfortunately we are currently experiencing an issue that is causing this. Our IT Department is working on this problem now for a resolution ASAP, however I have not been given an ETA at this time. I am very sorry for this inconvenience.
Zoey: I need to access the back-end. Is there NO way to go in and create a splash page alerting our users that we are aware it is down and are fixing the problem, instead of looking like a dead link????
Joe S.: Sorry, if your store is currently inaccessible you'd need to wait until it is accessible again to make changes to it.
Zoey: a heads-up or email alert would have been appropriate for something this big! Can you tell me ANYTHING about what has happened?
Joe S.: Unfortunately that is not available at this time.
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after long back and forth of trying to figure out why other stores are up and mine is not and asking him to check specific things
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Zoey: You covered your butts and got your sites up ASAP. I want to see that my money is going to a reliable shopping cart interface. Now cover my butt... get my store up... and communicate with your clients., or we will pull out of this business deal.
Joe S.: I am sorry you feel that way
Joe S.: Does that answer all your questions for me?
Zoey: No, not at all, you haven't been able to answer anything for me, except your 'copied and pasted' standardized text that was given to you. No, this hasn't helped. Everything I requested is null. I have no idea what HAS been done or WILL be done... I'll check back in an hour since you guys wont contact me via email... and then I'll know which route we will take for the future if I get anymore of this "generic apology" crap from another tech support chat. I don't like waiting in queue to find out you have nothing to tell anyone.
75 comments:
We have a Volusion site also and have been down over 2 hours. Where are the back-up systems? We are out of business. Had to pause google ads as to not waste money, but wonder how many site owners are not even aware they are down? No notice, no ETA. I was able to get through to chat off the volusion blog site, the only one I could find that works. All they can say is they are working on it and they are sorry.
I know... I had a little heated chat with one of the live chat peeps. It is a waste of your finger muscles. I updated my post with my tech support woes. It is crazy!!!! Let me know if yours pops back up. I'll be updating as well. All I would have liked... at the ERY least... was an email. Poor, poor customer service
Well, we are back up. Looks like we were down over 3-1/2 hours total.
Several people are feeling your pain. Feel free to join us in the live Volusion chat at http://tinychat.com/volusiondown
So frustrating. Our site is down too. Hopefully more bloggers will post about this. I'm sure their prospective customers would like to know it's just not a reliable platform to base your business on.
Erin you will be hard pressed to find a hosted cart with the flexibility and API support. Trust me - I've been looking for awhile. Not perfect buy definitely a good cart. The downtime sucks though.
Thanks for making this post. It's good to see someone taking this to the public, since Volusion's forums are made private so that potential customers can't see the problems everyone is having.
We have 2 Volusion sites - one on a semi-dedicated server which is up and running after being down for a while, and another site which has been down for about 5 hours. No front end, no back end. I wonder how this will play out. Not a warm and fuzzy feeling going into the holiday shopping season. I thought about moving off their platform - i guess this is a the catalyst that may drive my decision.
We have been with Volusion since 2007 and no problems with service until the last five months have come into play. Our site has been down numerous times and as a eCommerce company this impacts us greatly as I am sure you already know. The last outage was about 1 month ago and site was down for over 7 hours and today site has been up and down for the last 5 hours, we can understand thing happen but getting more and more.
I have other companies that I referred to Volusion and there sites have been running fine during all outages kind of strange right. So we figured that maybe it is the server we are on am sure you would think the same thing. Went on live chat with Volusion and did not request to be moved to a new server we demanded to be moved because as a small company the constant outages hurt us. Volusion stated that they do not move customer’s stores to a new server, so being a customer obviously the customer service is not that great, gathering we have to either deal with it or move to a new eCommerce store.
I feel paying $197.00 to them which is the highest package before a dedicated server and they know there is a problem they should do as we asked.
Any input from Any one would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your time
1-631-326-6034
TTI-PLUS Inc.
http://www.tti-plus.com/ you can try the link but never know when it will be down
Well...I have a Volusion site and was down for at least 5 hours today. That was ONLY because a customer who was trying to place an order called me and placed it by phone. I had no idea what he was talking about. Checked Google (my site ranks #1) and got an error message upon clicking. Immediately shut down my PPC campaigns (thanks Volusion you owe me $80.00 for the down time). Really not happy as I know I have at least lost $1000 today. Not happy at all...
We have a Volusion store. Almost 5 hours down. Customers calling, irritated that they can't place orders and worse yet, can't check the status of prior orders so it's looks like we just closed and took thier money. I've lost money and now will probably lose some customers over this. Thanks Volusion for standing behind your product and providing great customer service. [insert sarcastic tone]
We have been a Volusion customer for quite a while and are moving elsewhere (3D Cart - no I do not work for them). Volusion has really gone downhill in the last few months & we have had enough.
We are currently deploying a fix. Functionality has already been restored to some sites, we expect the remainder to be up again shortly.about 4 hours ago from TweetDeck
This has been going on for a while no wonder there is a blog. Instead of deploying "Fix" maybe we should do some upgrading bubble gum never last that long
I'm a developer who inherited a Volusion site. The client was already very unhappy because every time they ask for some feature, I have to tell them it's a "software limitation" of Volusion. Being down for 5 hours today won't help, but they *just* launched, so we probably won't change. I see a huge shift to other solutions coming...PinnacleCart and Magento will THRIVE from this.
The problems started when Volusion left Rackspace to move their servers in house. Undoubtedly this saved a few bucks, but maybe, just maybe there is a reason why a software company might want to think about outsourcing server management to a third party.
If we have to wait for 2 years for new features (only to find out that the upcoming version is a meager improvement), the least Volusion could do is keep the sites up and make a legitimate attempt at hitting their "guaranteed 99.99% Uptime SLA."
The field is wide open for a competitor to swoop in with Web 2.0 technology, multi-store support and decent hosting. The market is waiting!
Great post, we also had two stores down first thing today (till 2:30am) and then again most of the morning through till early afternoon. We have gone from being an avid supporter of Volusion, to being someone in the market for other solutions. One competitor has already stepped forward and offers some features we were hoping to see in v6 but it appears like won't happen.
Which competitor is it? You can post whatever you want on here without worrying about Volusion deleting your comment.
THANK YOU to everyone who has vented, commented and voiced some solutions. I honestly posted this after my frustration in trying to find answers this morning with no results. I even tried to get Tech Crunch (Crunch Gear) in on it and do some digging so we could get answers. Volusion is trying to cover a lot of tracks, and it just makes me leery of their business ethics. I would love to hear of other positive experiences anyone has had with other shopping cart software. Let me know what you might switch to, have switched to... or are looking into. I would love to delve deeper into this... and even find a solution for my company! Viva la Geeks!
There are other stores to look at that use Rackspace. IE CoreCommerce. I use them now after being with Volusion previously. Saved on bandwidth costs.
I'm currently with Volusion...switching to 3D Cart.
Fortunately the business I am in is not tied to the year end Holiday season. If Volusion is having this trouble now...imagine what it will be like in a month or two.
We did a lot of research & 3D looks pretty good & have been a DELIGHT to deal with.
we are looking at BigCommerce, we too think this will only get worse. Volusion is down again tonight
Our sites just went down again... :( Been looking at BigCommerce as it has some features we don't currently have but are unsure whether we'll face the same track record for performance. Just checking out 3D Cart.
We have a Volusion Store that replaced our old Yahoo Store.
Volusion have been great!
However, today was a HUGE mess. Our store was down all day. From at least 10am until 3:39pm.
Once the website was back up and running, it went down again around 11:40pm.
While I am VERY upset at Volusion for not using REDUNDANCY systems, I am most upset that our website has not "Temporarily Out of Service, Please Check Back Soon" ... which is what Apple did today prior to announcing new iMac's.
They still have nothing to say. I just talked to a person at Volusion, my second time today. They said that there was an issue with their Live Chat server.
Really? Live Chat pulled down our website for 6 hours during the day, and now AGAIN?
When Yahoo! Store died on "Cyber Monday" a few years ago, Yahoo said they did not have the capacity to scale the store to meet demand. Well, I'm sure all the people playing online games on Yahoo and chatting did not see any problems that day, just foolish Yahoo! Store owners.
Today's Blackout is a HUGE black eye for Volusion.
Once more: redundancy is key to any IT company. Get your power form the grid and have generators if the grid goes down. Have 2 vendors for T3 lines, etc. Volusion is hosted on Rackspace, so its most likely an in-house issue with Volusion and not Rackspace. Perhaps they "upgraded" to Windows 7 today?
3 stores with Volusion. loved them. Very disappointed today. Moving site is painful but looks inevitable. I'm sure they have a lot of MBA working there. Stick to your "core competency" and don't get cute. Trying to save a few bucks while losing the whole company is not smart. I was truely disappointed today. I hate canned answers. what's up with this we can't give you an ETA stuff? I'm sure the CEO is not sleeping these days. Great brilliant move away from Rackspace and host the servers in the garage. Don't look to them to offer some good gestures by giving some discount or refund. I can't depend on these crisis management skills. This is the time true characters show and I don't like what I see. 3D carts should have good earning in the next few months i'm going there too.
We too have a Volusion site are frankly scared to death. I fear something bigger is going on beyond just the change in hosting. I have actually been concerned since the V5 release because it was not customer focused. It was all about protecting Volusion code. Then after a two year wait, they were hyping V6 like it was a big deal. When it was finally released there was nothing in terms of new features. At the same time they moved hosting from Rack Space to their internal servers without making certain they had procedures for how to handle problems in place. All of that said, I do realize there are always going to be problems. My issue with Volusion is the "take it" or "leave it" the "customer is always wrong attitude" they have. There is no communication or desire to go the extra mile for a customer. We have been with Volusion since 2005 and our experience is that their focus is on top line NEW customers, not current customers. I am guessing they need to keep the new customers coming in to support the numbers needed to keep raising venture capital and win awards. They know that once you have invested the time and money to build a site on their platform you are trapped not because of the expense it takes to move but the SEO issues you will face
Well, frustration mounting! We were down yesterday- had a little access to the back end yesterday afternoon- couldn't sleep so was going to work on the site- now down again!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Opened a ticket yesterday with NO RESPONSE! What is up? I rely heavily upon my income from this site! Are we going to be credited for all the money and time lost on this and when will there be resolution?
When I initially got into e-commerce 3 years ago, it was with Volusion and it was great! No problems, everything was smooth, the cart's features were competitive with the competition. I myself could set everything up, create product pages, develop categories and process orders. Business grew and I enjoyed running the company.
Then came..
Google says it can't read my sitemaps, failure to reach it.
Volusion Tech Support: "Not us!". No one knew anything about that, but fortunately, the problem corrected itself.
Customers start calling in, saying they can't add product to cart. I personally duplicate issue on my machine.
Volusion Tech Support: "Not us, you should delete your cookies and try again". Problem magically went away the next day.
Two months later, Customers call in saying slow cart. Sales show huge decrease for the time period. See slowness in cart for myself.
Volusion Tech Support: "We'll recycle the app pool and let's check then". Sure enough, it's the app pool. Unfortunately, this problem persists and we have to contact Volusion to periodically "recycle the app pool". This creates fears and doubts that whenever anything is wrong saleswise, it's Volusion's app pool not doing it's job.
Then, a breakdown in emails hosted by Volusion's servers. Volusion initially tells us to switch to gmail. What? Switch to gmail is your answer? A couple of weeks later, they decide to migrate to another company's solution to host emails. Everything is smooth emailwise.
Meanwhile, time is passing and years go by without any substantial updates to the cart. Sure, Brandlabs and other companies offer great third party solutions, by where is an updated rating system, Amazon payment integration, Auto emails for feedback and the list goes on. Wait, hold on, we've got plans that will "shock and awe" you, hold on, hold on.
Surprise, we've updated our forum software! Why, thank you, that's very nice for you.
Plan released: Shocked is right. No real new features, nothing to write home about.
So yesterday and this morning the site is down for a lot of Volusion members, myself included. Not a word from Volusion. Tech support? No clue on what happened, why, when it's going to be fixed, etc. This morning I log in, hoping to find a note with the message system that Volusion uses to touch base with us about things (Hi! Remember to vote for Volusion for the whatever award), but no, nothing.
So, while on a whole the cart is decent, has some good features, We're leaving because of failure of management to communicate with us. These issues are real. It's good that you have Ryan talk to us on the forums, but we need a real dialogue from the top sometimes. It feels like these serious issues are being swept under the rug. With no response on what happened yesterday, we can't trust that it won't happen again. We can't plan for a future with you. If you were just truthful and said "Hey, we really let you down, sorry - Here's what happened", most users would probably stay. But either you don't know what happened or don't want to admit that it happened. Either way, it's more than we're prepared to bear.
Just to let you all know, Other than the post-mortem, which is accessible to Volusion Store owners via the community forum, further information will be made available later today.
My frustrations are just beginning with Volusion! If anyone gets Joe S. in the LIVE Tech Support chats... disconnect and save yourself the headache. The guy's an idiot. Transcripts coming soon!!!!!
I stumbled upon the thread and read all of your responses, As I can understand your frustration with your entire businesses being down, It seems like most of you guys were venting your frustration with the technical support and customer service reps you came in contact with. I wonder if any of you realize it is NOT their fault your site went down. Most of them are probably at the bottom of the food chain and are as confused as all of you. Just like you don't know what was happening and your customers are yelling at you, you're all upset and taking your frustration out on the reps. Like you said, #94 in queue... They had to take those 94 chats in queue and i'm sure there were an equal amount of phone calls they had to answer. Their technical support reps are fantastic. If you need their help, they are always willing to assist and walk you through even the dumbest of questions. How about instead of taking your frustration out on the stressed out reps working hard through an outage, try and understand where they are coming from. They don't have any control over which store comes up first. I hope you don't think they just flip a switch and the server is back on and all stores are up. If that's what you think, you shouldn't really have an online store. And I'm sure they're sites being back up (like my.volusion.com so you can use your control panel, make tickets etc. and access their chat system which clearly you used) benefited you as well. Lets try to be at least a LITTLE understanding to their side.
The previous post is by a Volusion tech support I assume, since I JUST gave one of them the link to this blog so they could see the frustrations we are all experiencing.
"I stumbled upon the thread"
Theres a magnificent tool called google. I actually just camp upon the thread tryin to do some searches ON Volusion. You should not make assumptions
That's why I said "Assume". It was the
"And I'm sure they're sites being back up (like my.volusion.com so you can use your control panel, make tickets etc. and access their chat system which clearly you used)"
That led me to my assumption. Either way, I opened this blog up for discussion... since no one else could at Volusion. So, regardless of your POV, anyone is welcome to post. Even disgruntled tech support reps from Volusion =-)
Hi DJZoey -- I was reading through the thread and saw a post by one anonymous contributer who wrote "If you(Volusion) were just truthful and said "Hey, we really let you down, sorry - Here's what happened", most users would probably stay. But either you don't know what happened or don't want to admit that it happened." -- I was wondering if you (DJZoey) received/read the email sent out by Volusion's COO today and if you care to comment on that or if it made any difference to you. Although it came a bit late, I was at least happy to receive some form of a sincere apology and explanation about what happened to my site... Thanks!
I think the person above is referring to this message from the COO:
http://www.seony.com/20091021-volusion-website-service-outages/
I agree that it was a good gesture by the COO and company as a whole. My site is now functioning fine, and actually, I experienced some downtime last year with Volusion when they were still hosted through Rack Space, so I guess this sort of thing happens even with the very best of hosting providers.
I read the story on Seony and am not impressed.
This part is a lie: "our mission is to help you succeed online".
Their mission is to bring in more merchants and make a larger profit than last quarter. If they wanted us to succeed online, they would move us back to Rackspace because their hosting in-house is a failure.
I am predicting another major outage before the end of the month.
Hey all, I just wanted to make sure that if you hadn't read or seen it yet, the e-mail we sent to our customers from our CTO, Clay Olivier, has been posted online. I'm including the link at the bottom of this post.
http://ow.ly/vM9K
Thanks!
I too have been very disappointed with Volusion the last few months. I was in the middle of a huge marketing campaign and was seeing huge increase in traffic and sales. We are definitely switching. This is ridiculous. There are other shopping carts that are the same price and have MORE features. We are looking at Big Commerce, love the design aspect and I'll be taking a look at 3D cart as well.
Just need to do some research again!
How absolutely disappointing!
just so you know right away, i am not a volusion rep, i am an active poster on the volusion forums under the name jeo....
Anyway, there is definitely a lot of frustration and venting going on in this thread. And understandably so. Its maddening to be completely out of control of the situation and simply waiting for a fix to appear. I get it, trust me, i do.
But, i have to agree with a previous post, please don't take out your frustration on the tech or cust serv reps. They ARE at the bottom of the "food chain" and you yelling at them will do no good. If you're truly upset, write a letter, address it to the CEO/President, and mail it out. They may not see it directly, but every letter to a CEO/President IS read by someone who has a direct line to their ear (i.e. probably their secretary).
I own my business yet still take customer phone calls every day to stay in touch with the important drivers of our business. When someone gets on the phone and is yelling and screaming, basically throwing a tantrum like a 2 year old, it tells us a lot about this person. Mostly it tells us that they have no brand loyalty and are not worth the time to save. We simply appease them and move on quickly to customers who will be loyal if we treat them right.
Show a business that you can handle issues calmly and reasonably, and that you will be brand loyal if treated fairly, and they will bend over backwards to keep you.
I happen to have a fairly close tie with some of the team and always enjoy the stories I am told. They are GREAT at covering their tracks...what a mess. If you were a fly on the wall when this type of stuff happens, you would be AMAZED. The post earlier was correct that the issues began largely when they started hosting their own servers. No one has a clue how to do it! They hired and fired a number of folks they thought could help. The communication has always been terrible. The processes whereby they release updates are nowhere close to best practice, you have the CEO off driving his lambo half the time - and he really has no clue from a true CEO perspective. His ability to lead the company fell away a couple of years ago but foolish pride keeps him in role rather than as an adviser to development where he belongs. Someone should ask about their premium hosting? There is supposed to be a whole set of servers somewhere else as well right? What about the emergency fail over? Is this all really hosted in ONE location? What about the 99.99% up time guarantee and getting paid back? Open API's are nice and the flexibility is cool, but if they are not prepared to host a "nothing special Tuesday" what will happen on "Cyber Monday"???
Some said we have no "no brand loyalty" if we complain???? How dare you gripe about us not being loyal to Volusion!
Where is Volusions loyalty to the long time paying customers? Those that chose Volusion because the sites were hosted at Rackspace? Kind of unfair that Volusion used bait and switch tactics on their loyal customers.
There are many less expensive carts out there with more features, who host the sites with Rackspace.
Volusion is no longer #1.
Loyalty? Hell no there is no loyalty when you screw with our businesses for your own profits.
You did what was best for your company. Now we must do what is best for ours.
Volusion, you owe us all an apology for switching us from rackspace to your own pathetic servers and destroying our businesses.
My company was with Volusion for two years before we decided to get out of the public retail market--no need for ecommerce anymore. We were with Volusion at the time Rackspace was hosting our site. During these two years we still incurred downtime. The service was always excellent and the software was always above par what the competition provided. I thought it would be interesting to google "rackspace downtime" and quite a few hits come up, such as this one: http://webdevnews.net/2009/07/power-outage-cost-rackspace-35-million-refunds/ . I know when I dealt with Volusion that it was kind of pricey and I was told that it was for premium hosting through Rackspace. I just checked their site out and all of their pricing is less than what is was when I was a customer, and they now offer more bandwidth. It appears that while many customers are upset at what happened recently, they do not realize that Volusion moved to their own datacenter to reduce cost and offer more bandwidth--it's obvious. I liked Volusion, so I can comment positively, but I feel that since I am no longer a customer I can hold an unbiased opinion. No matter who you go with to host your website, downtime will always happen. No business is 24/7, not even the local wal-mart that shuts down during a local thunderstorm. It happens, and customers should understand the risk of owning an online store...just my .02 cents.
No surprise here, Oct 24 at approximately 12:00 pm EST, Volusion.com, along with my website is down. I just stated yesterday that this would happen again within 2 weeks. They didnt even make it 2 days. Called support, I am #17 in line.
Leaving for 3D Cart after the holidays.
To Anonymous, October 23, 2009 8:40 PM:
We understand things happen and our sites will experience downtime on occasion, but this is happening on an almost daily basis now. For hours on end, with no resolution is sight.
My site is down again right now. I guarantee it will down for hours. I guarantee it will go down again this next week, and the week after that and the week after that.
Volusion will never charge me for hosting again because I each and every time my site is down I will create a downtime credit ticket on BOTH my websites.
Volusion is incapable of providing the service of hosting our websites. If they place us back on Rackspace and go back to giving us 15 gb and $10 overage, so be it. At least with Rackspace I know my site will be up and running.
I can promise you I will not be voting for Volusion for any awards this year.
Well, all of our sites are down again this morning. The Volusion forum is down so there is no way to make conact. The Volusion ticketing system is down, so there is no way to file a ticket. The phone number registers a busy signal, so there is no way to get somebody to talk to.
The post-mortom on the last failure said that it was such an unbelievably unlikely coincidence to have failures in the areas of the servers that were failing the redundancy would be basically overkill.
Well... the unbelievably unlikely coincidences seem to keep on rolling. In fact, I am quickly running out of belief myself!
BRING BACK RACKSPACE NOW! THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS!
I think a Class Action Lawsuit is in order.
Look:
http://www.ehow.com/how_4423105_file-class-action-lawsuit.html
"Although it usually seeks monetary damages, a class action can also be brought to enjoin the actions of another party or seeking specific performance of a contract"
When we signed up with Volusion, the agreement stated our websites would be hosted at Rackspace. They have, without our consent, broken the agreement by removing us from Rackspace.
If we file a class action lawsuit, we can demand monetary damages PLUS demand they place us back on Rackspace.
I just saw on the Private Volusion Fourm that they are still moving customers to the in house servers even after all of the problems. That's nuts! You would think they would suspend the move to work on the failures.
Yep, I was down again for 14 minutes today (10/24). There is no doubt that I need to switch.
DJzoey: compare Big Commerce and 3D Cart for me....
Please. With all the issues I have with Volusion and customers now...I just don't have the time to do it myself :|
The level of childishness and gross exaggeration in here has reached a tipping point IMO.
"our business is destroyed" - really? a few hours of downtime and your biz is destroyed? You might want to think about going back to the corporate world. Because you have no clue if your business was destroyed by a few hours of down time
"bait and switch" - there was no bait and switch. they were with rackspace for years and decided to bring it in house. Awful decision, and they paying for it. But certainly not bait and switch.
"Class action lawsuit" - this is my favorite one, when know-nothings start throwing around terms and threats they have no clue about. StoresOnline...now there was a class action suit that was deserved. A suit for a few hours of downtime and some ####ty customer service? C'mon, why dont you put the knife down, take a nap, wake up and have some cheerios and you'll fee much better. Look, we'll even put on that Wiggles song you like so much
Guess what - Volusion is down again. AGAIN.
Down for over 2hrs this morning with no ETA..
I own a large internet business hosted by volusion. I've always been very happy with volusion until just recently. We are on a semi dedicated server and for the past few months, I have been inquiring periodically why my cart has been so slow and why is the cart down for extensive periods of time. Mondays are our largest revenue days; we were down for many hours just recently on a Monday! We estimated losing a minimum of $6000.00 on just that one day!
Of course, slow cart = thousands of dollars a day of loss revenue. When I call, volusion tells me they've run some type of maintenance on my cart by having me select an option in the cart, and then they do their magic on their end. Then bamm! We’re trucking again. The problem appears to be sporadic. Well that is only short lived. A few days later, we're slow again.
My webmaster is awakened almost every night from our site monitoring service alerting him that the cart is down. On many occasions, volusions site is down too and the reps say they are unaware. In fact this happened just last night!
Because our cart affects our in-house Call Center, Customer Service Department, Accounting Department and Shipping Department, my "Cart Kickoff Team" is again at the table evaluating their specific department needs ON OTHER CARTS in an effort to potentially replace volusion. We can no longer absorb the loss of revenues on an ongoing basis.
Because my business also offers customer support, I know how hard it is to keep trained employees to help customers; especially if the business is growing. My in-house cart design & development team is pretty knowledgeable about the cart; therefore when we actually have to phone volusion for support, it is never for level one support. It’s very interesting how level one support tries to answer the questions with absolutely no knowledge of the problem instead of escalating the problem. This wastes a lot of time; time is money for me. Many times even after we ask for level two support, they can't help us either! This is alarming. We've had to figure it out ourselves and many times we have. We actually can live with this complaint, but only because my staff is skilled enough to ask the questions several different ways or because they can figure it out themselves if level two can't help.
Switching carts is a huge issue for my company because it affects 2 third party software and most all departments within my company. Perhaps volusion is banking on this very problem in an effort to keep their customers; but I am out of options at this point.
I have no problem with the functionality of the cart itself and it really serves our needs quite well. We are using most of volusions advanced features and several other carts at the time we got on this cart last year did not have these features. We really appreciate the features in this cart.
Therefore to move carts is a huge issue, but we feel we have no choice but to look at what’s out there at this point.
Sandra
You are in the same boat as many of us, looking for a new shopping cart system. I have looked at a few but have not made a decision yet.
My business is more important to me than Volusion saving money by hosting the sites themselves, so I must leave after the holidays if we are going to stay on Volusion servers.
Maybe the creator of this blog can create a new blog where we can discuss alternative systems.
I'd mentioned earlier in this thread that we are leaving Volusion for 3D (still entering our products). We just received our first draft of the custom design & are very impressed...at half the price of Volusion.
I guess it all comes down to trust.
Do you feel you can trust Volusion to keep your site online according to industry standards. We don't.
Do you trust what they are telling you about there sorta redundant redundancy? We don't.
Do you trust that 3D Cart will be able to suppport your site's success during a busy season, seeing as they currently only serve roughly 2,800 live sites and offer phone support M-F 9-6 eastern(fact, despite what they might try to tell you), or that Big Commerce will be a good solution with their roughly 300 live hosted sites and no phone support (fact - plus, have you seen their pricing page and packages? I would rather go with the original leader, not the guy trying to be just like Volusion)? I get that Volusion has some issues that they need to work out, but I am willing to put up with them. In the past, I used 3dcart for my business, and when my site did go down (and it did, a few times), it took their team nearly two hours just to find out which server my store was on, since they use 5 different hosting providers for their sites - they had no idea where my site was! I would rather be 20th in the queue for support with a tested solution than sending in email tickets when my site is down over the weekend because I chose to use a much smaller, untested software provider.
3D Cart appears to be a solid solution, although I'd far prefer the Volusion setup and storefront. Just wish it worked, ya know?
Big Commerce's own website looks pretty gay. If a company doesn't have the money and resources to develop a good looking page for their own business, I wouldn't trust them to come through with a reliable solution. Wouldn't be surprised if it was their own employees making all of these posts on random forums suggesting how awesome their service looks.
For any business that is large enough to be run as a sole means of income and even have multiple employees, there are really very few A to Z solutions out there. I would not recommend 3dCart or Big Commerce, or just about any other one that has been mentioned here. You will be sorely disappointed in their product AND their service.
The sad truth, as it stands now that Volusion has ##it the bed, is that once your business reaches a certain critical mass, A to Z solutions are no longer the best choice.
The only true option, and an expensive one for sure, is to use one of the licensed solutions and put together a host/processor/gateway on your own or through their prof services dept.
Its a sad day as we had hoped that Volusion would grow with us and continue to offer solutions for larger and more sophisticated businesses. It seems they may not have this goal in mind and may be targeting the smaller, simpler start ups and mom n pops.
Any licensed carts you'd recommend? I spend about 6k a year hosting all of my volusion sites so I wouldn't be opposed to dropping a few grand on a one-time licensing fee. Might even save me money.
Sorry Anonymous, but I have spent 3 days talking to sales and support at 3D Cart, plus 4 days reading their PUBLIC forums (nothing to hide there) and am extremely happy with what I see so far. They do host their own sites and the fees are $129/30gb, $5 overage fees. I see zero negative comments from current 3d cart members in those forums, (although it is possible any comments have been removed). Nothing but happy customers there, something Volusion cant say about there forums.
I have signed up for a trial and will see how it goes. I built a 3rd site with Core Commerce but am not happy. This 3rd site at 3D Cart will be a trial to see how it goes and if it works, I will leave Volusion after the holidays (provided we make it through the holidays on Volusion servers).
BTW, why dont you post using your real name? It is obvious you work for Volusion. I am not afraid to use my real name here.
We have been with Volusion since 2006. Over the years they have proven time and again that they do NOT listen to their customers; new business is always more important than servicing their existing customers; they continue to put out releases that totally under-deliver; and their move to their own datacenter is a disaster.
No sooner do they apologize for the last problem and a lack of communication, they do it again; and again. No one can run a business with this level of service.
I always maintain that people will reap what they sew. We will be taking all of our stores off Volusion and I believe you will see many more do so in the near future. No one should treat their customers the way Volusion does.
Ron - I did put up my name if you look back a few posts of mine. You can easily cross reference it against the volusion forum to see that we are a legitimate V customer and not an employee.
I'm certainly not going to tell you how to operate your business. And your business may be the right size for 3D cart at the moment. I am just telling you from personal experience that if your biz reaches a certain level of traffic and sales volume, 3d cart will not handle it the way you are imagining right now.
and finally, you say you cannot find 1 unhappy customer. that to me is a red flag that they are effectively hiding the issues that will arise in the course of operating ANY business. There is no such thing as 100% customer satisfaction and any business that chooses to hide any and all customer issues must have a lot to hide.
I am sorry that you are being so defensive about 3d cart, so we'll just wish you the best of luck
#1, Volusion is not handling things well either. Constant downtime, constant slowness especially within the backend.
#2, Volusion is hiding their issues by making the forums private.
Anonymous.
I find this quote rather amusing;
>>I am just telling you from personal experience that if your biz reaches a certain level of traffic and sales volume, 3d cart will not handle it the way you are imagining right now.<<
As opposed to Volusion which will screw up your site's speed, uptime and email no matter what your volume.
However, this isn't the sole reason we are leaving Volusion. There much anticipated new release was/is a disaster in our view & we further feel that their cart's overall features have fallen drastically behind the times.
We don't want to stick around & see if they catch up.
Nothing says we are financially freaked out like a shopping cart that continues to shove advertising for their payment system down the throats of its customers IN THE ADMIN section, DISRUPTING regular business they may be conducting, DUMPING any data previously typed into the phone order page, IN ORDER TO SPAM YOU, in your private, secure admin section.
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Well well...looks like we are down again this morning!!!!
Volusion with heavy downtime in past 7-10 days (early March, 2010). Also down this past Friday, again early this morning for 20 minutes and then once again a bad down period of nearly an hour this afternoon. All before scheduled downtime for maintenance this evening.
Downtime has become an unhappy but familiar expectation with Volusion.
Their new release, W09, has had a very large number of serious bugs that have directly negatively impacted a shop's bottom line. Some merchants have lost orders, product settings and other critical data. And to top it all off, customer support truly doesn't appear sympathetic and the company appears unable to make things better over these past six months.
This rant is so negative that it might seem like I'm with a competing cart. But the sad truth is that I'm a disillusioned but current V customer (for now).
Volusion is down yet AGAIN this morning, 3/8/10. Four outages in past three days. Store owners furious. Nightmare.
the worst part about v is they never admit a prob - is always somebody elses fault. grrr.
Two more Volusion downtimes this morning. That's six times down in less than a week.
Joke.
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We loved Volusion up until the new version of their software came out at the beginning of the year and ever since it's been one problem after another. It appears to us they have dumbed down their software and advanced e-commerce sites just have to take it or leave it. Stupid things like the length of e-mail entry fields are now tiny, why? So when you enter an e-mail address you can't see the entire address. When you're taking an order that comes in over the phone you have to constantly scroll up and down....why not show all the data on one screen so you don't have to scroll (this is not dependent on screen resolution -- it worked much better before.
More importantly the Affiliate reporting has never worked right since the upgrade. Responses to problems are incredibly slow or non-existent. We seem to be having bandwidth and other issues.
If I had read your site back in October I would have been surprised as I was a Volusion stalwart and champion up until the new version. Now I'm about fed up and ready to leave. Anyone have any alternate e-commerce recommendations?
hi DJzoey,
I can sense how painful it is to see your business suffering because of lack of support from Volusion. We have seen that there is a big service gap between the e-commerce solution providers and store owners. To bridge this gap, we have recently launched a brand new e-commerce platform '39shops'. Though you will not find too many fancy features in our system, we take things like, usability, up time and reliability very seriously. Here is the link to our website > www.39shops.com . Let me know how do you feel about our product and how can we improve it!
Thanks,
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