Volusion is literally ruining our company. We have, on many many occasions, had long downtime on our website that they are managing with shopping cart software. We rely on Pay per click advertising and if our site isn't working and we are advertising heavily for customers to go to that site, we are wasting money when its down. And they are down all of the time. They lie about the downtime, and if they tell you that they actually believe they did have downtime, they will give you a small portion of your monthly services back.
So we spend $1000 in advertising a day, which can get us up to $7000 in sales a day. But they will have 2-10 hours of down time, which they have in the past, and they will credit us back $7.00 because we pay them a base fee of $49.99. But we have Bandwidth charges and total fees just for their service that tops $400 each month. So we don't get any of that back, just a small percentage of the base fee.
A while back, they also had a huge issue in which they told us “all new visitors were being treated as attackers to their system”. So all of our new IP addresses or potential customers were being denied access to our site on that particular day. And that was another loss of thousands in advertising and sales. And how fast can you react to bad sales? The first hour or so, you think oh well, it's just a bad day, and then after a few hours you really start to wonder before you know it, the whole day is shot and you have lost thousands. It's recommended to hire a site to check independently the uptime, as we now have with them and our new software.in addition, they will blame any and all issues on other things. They have told us that our merchant processor was down and that isn't their issue. They just resell their services.
So let me lay it out for you. They sell you merchant account services that are basically 3.9% or so effectively which we have found out is over 1% higher than most other companies. But not only do they rip you off there, but they then push off the issues to the company they are piggy backing. So skipjack.com is our authorizing company. If they have an issue, our site goes down. If volusion.com's admin area goes down, we go down. If our site independently goes down, out of our hands, they don't have any indicators. We literally have to watch our site 24/7 and make sure it's working and even worse, we can't monitor if customers are being declined or not due to their crappy website.
So what do they say? They tell us that if we think our site is down, we should check all the pages ourselves. If we have customers telling us they are getting error codes, They TELL US that the software they have is better with FIREFOX so we should use firefox instead of Internet Explorer. That is right, they are telling the world that their software is the best in the world but it's best and only really truly compatible with Firefox as it was built with firefox. And again this is all info given as excuses directly from their customer service.
Also, if customers are getting declines, the tell us to use our own credit cards to test if it truly is working or not. So for our own site, i've had to run my credit card may 50 times in the past few years. Many times it doesn't work and then i have to get to skipjack.com but they aren't around on the weekends and volusion can't help so they tell you tough break. We have lost tens of thousands of dollars. We are looking for someone to help us investigate and prove a lot of this.
We have stats for the days of downtime and have more recently been looking at it when it happens in as many ways we can to prove it and we had absolutely no traffic for 9 hours says "Volusion" but google has history and proof we paid for 500-700 customer clicks to our site. So we lose $1000 when volusion says no one even visited our site. You tell us what you think about that.? It's them caught in a straight up lie. And this happens once a month or so.
Bottom line is there are better shopping cart software companies out there. And they are much more feature rich and compatible with other companies, payment methods, programs etc. It's a trap to get started with them and have all of your company's faith in them, to have them breakdown, deny it, blame shift, and not take responsibility financially or just in general. We are have moved and will never look back. Our site is now up all of the time, and it's unbelievable to think how much money we probably have lost by them. We estimate It's over $50,000. And we've contemplated if our site is just not as popular as we thought, but it's not the case.
On all the days we have certain amount of traffic, we hit minimal sales numbers, but the days in question, it's not even close. And they've admitted the problems on many days. We have caught them before, during and after downtime and just a huge host of issues. And if it's happening to one of their sites, why wouldn't it be happening to all of them? It's just a terrible deal to start with them. Anyone that knows how to do their own software is lucky they don't have to rely on one company like Volusion to hold all the responsibility to their livelihood. It's the case though and we highly advise you do look elsewhere. They are terrible.
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