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.
Patrick (patrick24601 / http://laptopbatteryfuel.com )
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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