Normally I don’t indulge in venting my angst via blogging, but this one is making me CRAZY right now… absolutely crazy.
Quick background: two years ago I started an online store, CreatedByMom.com, to create a one-stop-shop for all products that are created by moms. I loved the idea and found incredible vendors to fill the store with their fantastic products. I did as much research as I felt was possible before embarking on this journey. I came to the conclusion that Volusion.com was the best deal for the money to use as my ecommerce host.* I signed up for their two-week trial and then signed up for a plan. I liked how there were no contracts and it’s on a month-to-month basis.
However, Volusion’s monthly fee and merchant account fees were costing me about $300 a month. At one point I voiced my concerns with Volusion and said that I was having a hard time staying afloat. They were very kind at that point and even posted about my store on their blog. It was really kind and I stayed with them because of their great customer service.
Then about 8 months and $2400 later, I’m in no better position to stay open. I emailed and asked if there was any sort of assistance they could offer me to stay in business even a month later. Nothing came of it. Finally it came to the point where I had to just shut the store down and formulate a new plan.
The first time I called I waited on hold for 20+ minutes before talking to anyone. Then the customer service rep said everything was cancelled and that my store would go down in about 3 days time (giving me adequate time to retrieve all the back-end information like product, customer and order lists). The site was down in 3 hours, leaving me no time to retrieve everything. This led me to having to call customer service again to try to get the site temporarily restored (20+ minutes of wait time again) to which the customer service rep said the department I needed to speak to was out for the day and would be back tomorrow. Excellent.
I called back the next day (20 minutes + wait time again) and the customer service rep made the arrangements for my site to be temporarily restored but due to technical difficulties he would call me back and let me know when it had been restored. Then I got a voicemail from him about 5-15 minutes later saying the site would be temporarily restored for 24 hours and then it would be down permanently. Let’s just say this put me in a major panic to retrieve everything quickly amidst plans I already had for the evening. What a joke. Luckily I got most of what I needed before the site went down.
Now, I want to put the whole Volusion experience behind me and forget about them, but THEIR ADS ARE EVERYWHERE!!!! Because of this, I felt writing this post would hopefully help someone out there not make the same mistake I made by buying into their promotion and hype.
And I can’t help but feel like I paid for all those stupid ads. So instead of starting an online store that could help my family through a difficult financial time for us, I paid for Volusion’s current MASSIVE ad campaign. Glad it helped someone (*sarcasm*). Too bad it didn’t help me at all to have used them for the past two years, except learning to know better than to use them again, let alone recommend them to anyone (especially small businesses and startups).
Now I’m rebuilding the store from the ground up using my own self-host (bluehost.com – love them) with WordPress as my platform. My broker was the one who introduced me to this option and I’ll be forever grateful. Our first month back up we’ll be able to turn a small profit and even start parceling out money for advertising purposes to really get the store to get the exposure it deserves.
My only regret is that I didn’t stop using Volusion sooner. Guess I’ll chalk this all up to a learning experience, right?
p.s. I do not claim to be an expert in ecommerce – far from it – but the past two years have been a big education in the school of hard-knocks. I did everything I felt was humanly/affordably possibly to help the store succeed with Volusion, including hiring an SEO company for a few months, attending SEO classes and training, working tirelessly on social networking advertising campaigns, paying for advertising on large blogs and much, much more. However, because of Volusion’s large monthly fee and merchant account fee, even these efforts couldn’t help me turn any sort of profit.
*There are definitely worse deals than Volusion… so many horrible ones, actually… not to say that Volusion is a good choice, but they are definitely not the worst.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Ugh! What an awful experience! As one who is just starting to get her entrepreneur feet wet, I appreciate your sharing what you learned. I am rooting for you and createdbymom.com! Good luck.
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Quinn,
I’m terribly sorry to hear that things did not go well for you in your online endeavor, the web is a VERY tough place to get your feet wet. I’ve been personally involved with a number of ecommerce and web related startup’s that didn’t fare so well. But at the same time, your position as to why your site / business failed troubles me.
Frankly, I have to question why the blame is on Volusion and solely them? We’re all in business to make money, and while leaning on service providers is a way to expand margin, it should not be a means to saving a business.
Now, before anyone thinks that I’m a plant by Volusion, I need to disclose that I do use their services, and I also develop client websites for whom we’ve chosen Volusion AND other services as well, and AGAIN I am in no way employed by them.
Getting back to the point. What other areas were causing you pain as it pertains to generating revenue? If you were having a hard time generating a profit, were you getting good margins from your vendors, or were you getting pinched out by other resellers? If that was the case, the business model may not have been viable. There is a saying that I’ve heard and regretfully had to mention a few times over… and that is “Sales can solve most problems”, but sales with no margin, that’s a killer. Without seeing the full picture, one can only make assumptions based on your remarks, but it sounds like revenue was the real killer?
Volusion has essentially become a utility, and by comparison… if you cant pay your electricity bill, your power gets shut off. Also, many of the automated systems that are in Volusion’s programmed code, and inaccessible by human users, control when a card gets billed and when a site gets shut down. While I will agree that Volusion’s phone based customer service seriously could use some work, there is also a bit of diligence that should implemented by any ecommerce merchant by ALWAYS having your customers, orders, products, categories, website template, etc. backed up offline. Whether you’re on Volusion or have a custom coded website, back-up is mission critical.
With regard to Credit Card processing and Merchant Services, service providers are all over… and a merchant should be researching their rates as much as possible. The Credit Card industry is essentially a cartel, and the only way to win the war against them is to be diligent about what you are getting charged and to make for certain that you cant get a better deal elsewhere.
Again, I’m sorry that your experience was less than stellar, and its apparent to many that Volusion needs to work on the Customer Service side of their business- especially in your case as the ball kept on dropping. But when you consider that their technology is orders of magnitude ahead of most other service providers, and that when matched with a viable business model, research shows that they are actually on the lower side when it comes to cost of ownership.
Please dont take any of my remarks as being directed at you, as I merely want to point out a few things that seem to be evident in your post. Also, dont give up- we need good hard workers like you on the web. Your next project will go much better given the knowledge that you’ve gained.
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What a crazy, crazy nightmare! And what a large wad of cash to be throwing out every month. We’ve loved Yahoo! Business for our online site. Their basic plan, which was more than enough for us, is about $40 a month. Our merchant account, though maybe not the “cheapest,” works well with Yahoo! and is about $25 a month. That’s it for our monthly fees. We do pay Yahoo! a very small commission on sales, and I mean very small. I’m a big fan of Yahoo! Business, plus their SiteBuilder tool is really great for newbies!
Glad you’ve moved to a better solution. Yay for WordPress!
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The one thing Volusion has going for them is PCI compliance.
I would never sell or recommend Volusion to any small business. They aren’t designed to work well with small businesses.
WordPress and other open source software is going to leave you with a major problem. You will need to become PCI-DSS compliant. Check with your merchant account provider (hopefully no longer Volusion). You can also check with http://www.pcisecuritystandards.org and learn the requirements.
I have an associate who owns a company that performs the certifications. According to him even large businesses are finding the cost unbearable.
For small businesses being on a shared server PCI compliance is almost impossible. The hosting company has to become PCI compliant as well as the business. Unfortunately, open source software, like WordPress and osCommerce, leaves the uneducated wide open for trouble.
If you’re going to use WordPress as your ecommerce solution, make sure you have it programmed so payments are not taken on your site. Unfortunately, using PayPal or Google Checkout does not provide you with a virtual terminal to take credit cards over the phone or at a tradeshow or at a flea market. Entering someone else’s credit card information through those services is against their policies.
I suggest looking for a shopping cart solution that is more friendly to the small merchant and let them worry about the PCI issues.
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lee roberts is wrong, paypal has virtual terminal.. just google paypal virtual terminal.. been around for a WHILE too.. says right on their website ‘take phone, fax and email orders… they have an optional card swiper as well.. Wish they’d get an iphone card swiper–it could be my one solution to all sales.
Say what you will about paypal.. we’ve had our rough spots.. but.. it’s better than almost anything out there, and 100% easiest.. love racking up those paypal debit card kickbacks too.. that % adds up in a year.. I love that I can take a payment from someone, and it’s available to spendon my debit card instantly..
anyhoo–not a paypal shill, just pleased (enough ) with their service to note that the above person is wrong.
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Hi, Quinn. Sorry to hear about your unfortunate experience. I hope everything’s back to track with you now. I’m currently using BigCommerce and I can tell you that I was reluctant to use it at first. But my friend raved about it so I tried it out and here I am highly recommending it. You might want to check it out. I would have to agree with Joe. “…Don’t give up, the web needs hard workers like you…”
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Volusion is down again, all morning now for about the dozenth time this year. Can’t get any response from telephone support or “live” chat.
This is all they say on their “status” page.
“We are aware that some customers are experiencing interruptions with storefront functionality. We recognize the urgency of this issue and are dedicated to delivering a fast resolution. Engineers have been notified and are working to resolve. We will update this page as we learn more details.”
Their twitter feed is silent on the issue. They just keep tweeting feel good warm and fuzzy mumbo jumbo while our sites are down. I had to hear about my site outage from one of my customers.
They need to move everything back to rackspace. Enough is enough. Time to find a more reliable service.
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