The Volusion ESPN Model

Today, I'm going to rail on Volusion's adaptation of what I call, "The ESPN Model." 

For anyone who is a sports fan in the USA, 1996 was one of the worst years on record.

Why?

Because that was the year that Mickey Mouse bought what was the greatest sports network on the planet, and immediately began to F&#K it up. Now, it's nothing but painful-to-watch, shameless self-promotion. Never mind that the network still chooses to employ Jabba the Hutt:

With the exception of their college football and basketball coverage, most of their programming is more about ESPN than it is about the event that the viewer tuned in to watch. If they would only worry about doing the job at hand (the event being broadcast at that moment) and quit spending so much time trying to sell their personalities, other shows and the brand itself, they would begin to do the job we would expect from a network that bills itself as the worldwide leader in sports.

Unfortunately, Volusion has chosen to take the same self-promotional path, and here is a perfect example. Volusion's SEO module is riddled with so many problems that it is almost impossible to outline all of them here.  However, every time you turn around, Volusion is trying to sell their clientele on the benefits of their extremely pricey SEO service, where they will attempt to optimize your pages for higher visibility in the search engines (which, in an era where fresh content is king after Google's Panda and Penguin updates, is a complete and total waste of money).

When one considers Volusion's incessant self-promotional methodology, is it a coincidence that they offer a paid service that is supposed to improve upon functionality that sucks in their program?

You be the judge.

Search Suckiness

Volusion has a search function where the customer can search for anything they'd like on your store.  For instance, Sun & Ski Sports (a great store, BTW...I bought my first pair of snow ski bindings at one of their stores in SoCal) has the following search function on their Volusion site:

However, like everything Volusion, the implementation makes no sense whatsoever.

One would expect that a search function would catalog all of the text in the product name, product description, product code and vendor ID (for the actual part number) fields, then return search results appropriately, based on the highest number of comparative hits with those fields.

Like I said, that would make sense. But we all know that Volusion doesn't use "sense" as a variable when building a tool.

No, in Volusion, you have to manually enter every possible variation of a search term you can think of into a field called "Additional Product Keywords" for each product. So, if you were searching for a 2011 Marin Portofino Road Bike...

...you'd need to come up with as many variations of the following possible search permutations as you can:

Natural Fit Marin Portofino Road Bike performance riders race bike relaxed riding position less strain fatigue 6061 Aluminum Double Butted Natural Fit Geometry 8 speed Shimano Sora Derailleur Dual Pivot Brakes Shimano Brake Levers integrated shifters Model Category Road Model Series Natural Fit Model Number A11-440-1F Frame 6061 Aluminum, Double Butted with Natural Fit Geometry Front Suspension RFE Carbon Road 1 1/8” Shift Lever Shimano 2300 STI, 8 Speed Derailleur Front Shimano 2300 Derailleur Rear Shimano Sora Brakes Front Dual Pivot with Cartridge Pads Brakes Rear Dual Pivot with Cartridge Pads Brake Levers Shimano with Integrated Shifters Pedals Composite with Alloy Cage Crankset FSA Vero Triple, 52/42/30 Bottom Bracket Sealed Cartridge Chain Shimano HG40 Cassette 12-25, 8 Speed Hub Rear Formula, 32 Hole Hub Front Formula, 28 Hole Rims Alex R450, Double Wall, 28 Hole Front, 32 Hole Rear with CNC Side Walls Spokes Nipples WTB 15 Gauge Stainless Tires Kenda Koncept, 700 x 23c Saddle Marin Plush Road Seatpost Alloy Micro Adjust, 27.2mm x 300mm Stem Alloy Threadless Adjustable with 0° to 60° Rise, 31.8mm Bar Clamp Handlebar FSA Vero Compact, OS-31.8mm, Grips Cork with Plush GelHeadset Ritchey Logic Comp, 1 1/8” Threadless

Once you have modified all of the possible keywords someone might use to search (the word brake vs. break, for instance), you simply enter those keywords into the Additional Keywords Field.

Just one problem.

THE G-D ADDITIONAL KEYWORDS FIELD WILL ONLY ACCEPT 255 CHARACTERS.

So, I guess the mental giants on Volusion's engineering staff have decided that instead of implementing a REAL search function, they'd just rather take the easy way out and let you figure out only the handful or really important search parameters for your customers.

Which means customers will most often see the following search result:

Remind me again why I still am a Volusion user?

Volusion Support Tickets

Today, let's explore reason #847 of why Volusion sucks.

Volusion has a support ticket system that allows the Volusion user to follow along with support issues as they are theoretically addressed.  I say "theoretically" because most of the time the answer is either that they cannot duplicate the issue, or that it needs to be submitted as a request.

However, today's annoyance is a completely different animal, and that is of the functionality of the ticket function itself.  Let me explain by use of an actual example that has happened many times.

I placed a call to Volusion Priority Support to discuss a speed issue specific to product searches. The newbie agent (aren't they all?) was unable to answer my questions, so I was treated to more of the wonderful Volusion on-hold music while they discussed the problem with their most experienced support supervisor (who just was hired last week). When the agent returned, they told me that they would have to fill out a support ticket and have someone in the engineering team take a look at the problem, and ended the call.

Fine.

About 30 minutes later, I went to My Volusion to check on the status of the ticket. I logged in using my credentials, and clicked on the open ticket. Here is what I received back in response:

INVALID TICKET NUMBER?

How the f*#k can I have an invalid ticket number when I just saw the exact ticket that the agent created for me from my phone call.

It turns out that there are four people with administrative access to our Volusion back office and also to the ticketing system, and the agent merely picks one when creating the ticket. In order to view the ticket, only the login assigned to the ticket can access the ticket.

So, I now have to keep track of four different login profiles (for the four administrators) to be able to view any specific ticket, even though EVERY G-D TICKET FOR OUR COMPANY is listed in my profile.

Where does Volusion find these people who design their systems?  Are they deliberately trying to f*#k it up?  There's no way they can be this consistently inept otherwise.

TGIF

Why the 4:30 PM Time Out?

For the nearly four years I've been saddled with, ERRRRRRRR, using Volusion, I've noticed that the system times out every day like clockwork right around 4:30 PM Eastern time. It doesn't seem to matter what time I first logged in, or the last time I logged in, it still times out and I have to re-enter my username/password credentials at that time.

Why does this matter?

Well, assume you're processing a PO over this 4:30 mandatory time out period, or even worse, you're creating a phone order with a customer on the line, and you go to place the order and what happens?

You get an error:

Aah, yes. The Joyous Reference #000000™ error. The beautifully annoying white screen with the red box error where Volusion doesn't give you one shred of feedback as to what the problem is, only that you've done something wrong, and by god, you'll have to figure it out because the system is to G-D f*&#ed up to provide a helpful clue as to what is the problem.

There is a solution to this 4:30 PM timeout issue, one that I implemented during my second year of Volusion incarceration:

The 4:20 coffee (ahem) break.

Taking a Phone Order in Volusion

Volusion has a handy Phone Orders page, one that allows a person with back-office access to take an order over the phone and enter it into the system.

A great idea.

Yet, in true Volusion fashion, it is riddled with problems.

For instance, if you have to manually enter a product into the field, you need the product code, as you can't search by the product name field.

Fine.  That's not too much of a problem.  However, once you find and enter the product code, it does pre-populate the Product Name field, but it doesn't pre-populate the price or shipping weight fields. So, you have to go look up the price and weight for each item. You can uncheck the "Tax" and "Free Shipping" checkboxes should you so desire.

Then, once you enter the quantity and click the "Add" button to add it to the order, the previously un-checked Tax and Free Shipping boxes are checked again, so you have to remember to go back and un-check them once more. Additionally, about 25% of the time (in my experience), the price or quantity will change without notice.

OK, so you get all of that done, and all of the products are entered successfully, with the correct price (which takes time, all of which makes you look unprofessional on the phone to your customer, but that's not important, is it?), so you move on to taking down the customer's billing and shipping info. Pretty hard to screw that up, even for Volusion engineers.

Next, click on the "Apply Tax + Shipping" button, and go back up top to the shipping area where you can choose the shipping option, before going back down to the bottom of the screen and taking the customer's payment info.

Finally, hit the "Place Order" button at the bottom of the screen, and the order should go through, right? 

Well, that all depends on how fast you can count Rosary beads.

I've seen orders crash (with the ubiquitous Reference #000000 error) for a myriad of reasons:

• There was a problem with the email address not matching (or matching) an account (Thankfully, this problem does appear to be improving with time)
• There was some problem with a Product/Product Code in the order
• There was some inexplicable problem with the format of the order comments
• Or my favorite: you started the order, the customer encountered a problem with their credit card so they had to call you back with the correct credit card, so you left the browser window open and the order inexplicably timed out with no warning, and you had to start the whole G-D order over again.

Thanks, Volusion.

More Useless Volusion Reports

Here's another completely useless report in Volusion, followed by Volusion's explanation of why it is so completely useless.

In the Reports section, one can drill down on monthly reports that include some potentially helpful information, such as the number of orders, the amount of the orders, cost of goods sold (COGS), profit, profit margin and so on.

The only problem is, the numbers don't add up.

Let's assume for a moment, to make the numbers easy, that you sold ten orders in a month, each at $100, for a total of $1000 in sales. Lets also assume that your cost for each order was $80, so your total COGS for the month is $800. This should leave you with a profit of $200, and a 20% Profit Margin. Simple, right?

Not in Volusion.

Here's a representative example of what we saw just in one particular month on this screwy report:

Sales: $126,905.35
COGS: $93402.34
Profit Margin: 26.4%
Profit:  $7931.58

Uhh, what???  It doesn't take an MIT-trained rocket scientist to figure out that the profit number is no where close to accurate. According to Bernie Madoff's method of accounting, maybe these are accurate, but not in the real world. I need accurate reports from my eCommerce system.

After two weeks of back and forth conversations with Volusion Tech Support about the wonky results, I was told, "actually, those numbers are accurate."  The support agent tried to BS his way through about why some of the COGS may not have been calculated accurately, but after including the additional modifications he mentioned, the Profit was still off by over $15,000.

When I asked for a document from the LOKB™ (referring to Volusion's Lack-Of-Knowledge-Base), I was told, "At the moment, we do not have documentation that outlines the data displayed in each column in the Reports section, nor do we have documentation on how each value is calculated."

So, Volusion can't tell me what is in each column of the report, nor can they tell me how the data was calculated.

Brilliant. Just frickin' brilliant.

Abandoned Cart Reports

Every eCommerce solution needs to have a means by which the manager can view abandoned shopping carts to try and determine if there are any trends showing why the visitor didn't complete the purchase. Through use of this tool, one can eliminate bottlenecks and streamline the shopping experience, thus generating more sales and more revenue.

True to form, Volusion has an Abandoned/Live Carts report:

Also, true to form, it's practically worthless.

Why?

What information would one need to glean from an abandoned carts report? Maybe the products being purchased, or perhaps the point in the funnel at which each individual cart was abandoned. Could it be that the customer balked at the shipping costs, and left after determining that shipping was too high?

All of these factors should be able to be gleaned from an Abandoned Carts report.  But not Volusion.

Here are the items provided by an export (via CSV to Excel) of Volusion's Abandoned Carts report, with any appropriate comments in parenthesis:

cartid
customerid
phone_number
email_address
ipaddress
notes (which presumably would be any notes the customer entered into the cart before leaving)
lastmodified (date and time)
cartitemcount
recordcount (the number of records in the export)

Could anyone tell me how this information would be useful?  I suppose I could write to each individual customer who happened to log in (which would be the only email addresses captured, about one in twenty in our case) and ask them, "Why didn't you complete your order?"

You know how many would likely respond?  Maybe 2%.  By this definition, I would get back useful information on why the cart was abandoned by one in one thousand abandoned shopping carts.

A handy feature indeed. Let me get right to work on going through these reports, right after I finish doing something useful, such as flogging a dead horse.

The Upcoming Volusion V13

Volusion has posted a sneak peak of their forthcoming V13 onto YouTube:

 

Wow. A really pretty Illustrator mockup of the forthcoming V13, and it's optimized for tablets!

Holy cow!!

Disclaimer:  For those of us who have been through the past three such new versions of Volusion, it is hard to escape the thought that this version will be nothing more than lipstick on a pig.  Or, to quote Urban Dictionary:

Polishing a Turd:

To fix, repair, repaint, shine or do other things to something that isn't worthy - but you have to do it for one reason or another. Because the basic fact is no matter what you do to a turd - polish it, paint it, give it bling - it's still a turd, and there is nothing you can do about that underlying fact.

We Don't Need No Stinking Reports!

One of the advantages to an eCommerce system is the ability to generate reports looking at product trends, seeing what products are hot, what products aren't moving, who bought a specific product, and so on.

Case in point: Let's assume I want to send out an email blast to every customer who has bought a specific product (or category of product) in the past six months. One should easily be able to create a report to generate such output in Volusion, using the Create Reports function, right?

I guess that depends on your definition of the word, "easily."  In Volusion's reports, such common tasks aren't an option. Of course, you can create a report with orders over a specific date period, by drilling down through a series of links, get to a specific order, but that is far more easily done by simply searching in the Process Orders screen (rendering this report useless).

A call to Volusion's crack support team (or support team on crack, depending on your point of view) yielded this nugget:

Of course you can create such a report. Just write a custom SQL query and you'll be able to compile all of the data you need.  FYI, Volusion doesn't provide support for custom SQL queries.

For those uninitiated in the world of Volusion Support-speak who are having trouble seeing through the BS contained in the previous three sentences, let me translate.

Our service is designed and tested only by programmers, and in order to use our software to its fullest capability, you need to be able to think and function like a programmer.

Excuse me, but if I took the time out of my busy schedule to learn how to be a programmer and figure out how to write custom SQL queries to my heart's content, I WOULD JUST DESIGN MY OWN G-D ECOMMERCE SOFTWARE INSTEAD OF USING THIS PIECE OF CRAP.

God, Volusion sucks.

Today's Volusion Annoyance, errrrrr, Workaround

So, we occasionally have products that drop-ship from vendors who aren't very proactive about getting tracking numbers to us to pass along to our customers. As such, sometimes customers send impatient emails asking for a status update. Quite often, they won't include their order number or any really useful info for searching for their order in Volusion.  A typical email goes something like this:

Hey dipshit:

Where's my stuff?  I placed my order 20 min ago & I still dont have tracking #.  You better respond in the next 37 seconds, I'm going 2 dispute the charge w/my bank.

JR

So, when faced with such an eloquent correspondence, the first thing one has to figure out is, who the hell is JR?  The easiest way to track the order would be using JR's email address to search in the Process Orders area in Volusion, right?

Nope.  That would be too logical for Volusion.

You see, there is no field for searching by email in the Process Orders screen, even though the G-D email address is certainly listed on the page.

Instead, you have to go to the Customers>Accounts section and search by email in that page. Then, once you find and click on the customer's listing in the search results, you'll find a very small line near the top of the page that reads:

This customer has placed 1 orders totaling $131.89, with the first order on 4/2/2011 9:27:00 PM.

By clicking on the "1 orders" link, you'll then be taken to the order in question. Just pray that JR doesn't have 27 orders in your system, or you'll be working all night to figure out which order he's asking about.

There.  Makes perfect sense, in Volusion's screwed-up logic, doesn't it?

UPDATE: Someone commented to me that you can go to Orders > Process Orders > Quick Search and search by email there.  Thanks for the tip.  That's a much quicker workaround, albeit still a workaround.

Is There Hope For "Priority Support" After All?

Well, I'll hand it to Volusion. About a week after they announced their "Priority Support" for Gold, Platinum and higher levels of customers, I finally was able to get the special phone number for priority support.

It only took about a week.

Of course, once I got through on the priority support line, the newbie support rep still didn't have a clue as to how to fix my problem, but at least I didn't have to waste 45 minutes of my time to get no help.

What will I ever do now that I won't be waking up in the middle of the night with the same G-D on-hold music going through my head over and over like something from a bad SYFY-channel movie?

What Priority Support?

So, last week I blogged about the new "Priority Support" for Volusion Gold, Platinum and higher customers, of which we are one.

If that is the case, why am I having to wait on hold for over 45 minutes to talk to a support rep? I dutifully entered my Store ID number at the beginning of the call.

I bet the crack Volusion software engineering staff designed this feature of the phone tree, which would explain why it doesn't work.

No More Batch Processing!

So, yes the last post was a bit too effusive in my praise for Volusion. Let's get back to another reason why Volusion sucks:

Batch order processing.  I'm sure some people absolutely love batch order processing.

Me? Because of our method of order processing, I can't use it. Don't want it. Don't want it on my order processing screen. So you know what pisses me off?  I can't turn off the Batch Number column on my order processing screen, even though the column is completely empty. I can see where I can TRY to turn off the column (in the Customize pop-up):

But oh no, you can't really de-select that option.  Then why the f*#k is it an option???

So, now I have a completely useless column of nothing on my screen taking up valuable real estate.

Genius, I tell you.  Pure genius, this bunch.

Why Am I Stuck With Volusion?

I've mentioned on numerous occasions in the past that I'm stuck with Volusion.  Why?
Well, there are a number of reasons that I'm saddled with this burden, but one of the main reasons is that Volusion, to their credit, have some features that are vitally crucial to our business model, and Volusion seems to be the only eCommerce suite that offers these features.

For us, the biggest of these features is the ability to ship a single order from multiple warehouses. We have drop-ship agreements with hundreds of suppliers, and we stock next to nothing. So, each product has to have a warehouse location from which it ships, which Volusion offers:

Let's assume that a customer orders two items, one that ships from this warehouse in Atlanta, and another item that drop-ships from a warehouse in, say, Phoenix, Arizona. Because there will be two separate drop-shipments, there needs to be two separate shipping fees that will be combined into the shipping field.

Sure, customer's will bitch about how high the shipping costs are, but that beats losing $20 because the shipments come from two different locations and my e-commerce application couldn't determine that at the time of the order.

This is one of the few things Volusion does right. 

Don't get me wrong.  Volusion still sucks.  But at least they do this right.

Of course, if someone could develop a quality e-commerce application that did everything we need including shipping from multiple warehouses, I'd switch in a New York minute, but I haven't found that application just yet.

Stuck with Volusion? Here's One Way to Play the Game

If you're stuck with Volusion, as I am, you're very familiar with regular site outages. Volusion promises 99.9% uptime, which all Volusion customers know is a bowlful of Fecal Crunchies.

What can you do about it?  Follow the guidelines in the Volusion Terms & Conditions:

Volusion warrants that the network will be available 99.9% of the time in a given month. This service level warranty shall not apply to performance issues: (1) to the extent caused by factors outside of Volusion's reasonable control; (2) that resulted from any actions or inactions of Customer or any third parties not affiliated with Volusion, for example a DDOS attack on Customer's site or another customer's site hosted on the same server; (3) that resulted from Customer's equipment and/or third party equipment; (4) that resulted from software related issues; or (5) that are scheduled by Volusion for purposes of maintaining or updating the Web Site or the Software. The network availability measurement expressly excludes downtime caused by (1)-(5) above.

Subject to Section 17 of this Agreement, if you experience Network Downtime above and beyond the 99.9% availability, upon request Volusion will refund a customer 5% of the monthly fee for each 30 minutes of Downtime (up to and not to exceed 100% of customer's monthly fee). This is your sole and exclusive remedy for failure to meet the Service Level Warranty. "Network Downtime" exists when a particular customer is unable to transmit and receive data and Volusion records such failure in the Volusion trouble ticket system. Network Downtime is measured from the time the trouble ticket is opened by the customer to the time the server is once again able to transmit and receive data. If Customer fails to comply with this requirement, Customer forfeits its right to a receive service credit. 

In other words, bombard the hell out of Volusion's support ticket system IMMEDIATELY every time you notice a site outage. After doing so, you'll be able to file a refund request for each 30 minutes of downtime.

That's one way to combat Volusion's BOHICA bandwidth overage charges.

Priority Support??

So, for some unknown reason, I had to stop by the Volusion home page this afternoon, and I noticed something interesting in their pricing structure, specifically for Gold ($99/month) and Platinum ($149/month) users:

We've been at a HIGHER level than Platinum (on a semi-dedicated server, starting at $349/month) and do you think we get any G-D priority call routing with shorter wait times?

Uhh, not exactly. We get to wait the 30 minutes just like everyone else.

I hope new users (if anyone is stupid enough to try Volusion) see through this BS.

Purchase Orders in Volusion

If there is one single workflow in Volusion that is more aggravating (at least to me) than any other, it is creating Purchase Orders in Volusion.

Actually, that's not entirely accurate. Creating the POs in Volusion is fairly straight-forward, as long as the items are listed in your Products table, and the prices are correct in the Vendor Rules table (which is an entirely separate section than the vendor price in the Products table, and requires a separate import when importing products, but don't get me started on that).

The problems arise when either the product isn't in your product table, or when you need to modify an item in the PO. Then, the workflow becomes all jumping through hoops.

It's not so much that you can't modify or create a new item for a PO, just the nonsensical way it needs to be done. For instance, in the POs section, if an item doesn't exist in the Products Database, you must click on the link for "Edit Items currently associated with this PO."  Then, you have to enter some basic data, such as price, product code, description and quantity, along with the PO number of the PO that you're attempting to create in the previous screen.

That's right.  You have to remember (or write down) the PO number so you know what it is before you can add an item to that PO. Apparently it is just WAYYY too difficult for Volusion to know that when you want to create an unlisted item on a purchase order that it should remember the PO number of that specific PO that you're editing.

Then, after creating the new item (or modifying an existing item) in the PO, there is no way to get back to the same PO you just modified, so you have to go all the way back to the breadcrumb trail in the top and select the PO from the list.

I ask again.  Does anybody at Volusion actually use (or test) their product?

I'm dumbfounded at the logic.

Backing Up the Database

So, on occasion, I make backups of our Volusion product and orders databases, and store them here. You might ask, with a shared solution like Volusion, is that necessary?

A few years back, we had an import error that took down our entire product catalog. Of course, Volusion has a service that they can restore your site from their most recent backup, for which they charge $199. The bad part is that it took them three days to get our database back up to the previous state, and of course, our store was down during those three days (so no sales of any kind while we waited for Volusion techs to get around to fixing our store).

As you might imagine, I've started keeping my own damn backups, thank you very much.

Which is fine, except that the procedure of backing up the databases simply isn't as cut-and-dried as one would expect. There are about 160 different fields in the Products database, and every time I try to download them all at once, Volusion times out before the procedure is complete.

So, I need to break them into smaller files, and then re-compile the various CSV files in Excel. Not a great solution, but you have to remember to download the product code with each file segment so you have something to match the files back up (I use a great Excel utility called Merge Tables Wizard from AbleBits).

The problems are two-fold.  First of all, some fields have to have their own export, or they simply time out. So, I typically end up doing about ten exports to get my entire database out.  Then, I merge them all together using the Product Code field and the Merge Tables Wizard.

Importing is the bigger problem.  You can only import about 500 items at a time if you have every field in the file. And each import of 500 items can take upwards of 30 minutes.  So, you'd better hope you have a small number of products or you're going to be at it for weeks.

On second thought, a 3-day vacation and $199 fee to Volusion doesn't seem like such a bad deal after all.

OR...if they'd finally fix the G-D import function (which they've been promising to do for three years now), none of this would matter. I suppose that if they fixed the import, there'd be no more $199 import feed anymore. So, I guess the crappy import function is a feature, and not a bug-infested mess.

It's all a matter of perspective.  Or, just another reason why Volusion sucks...

Tick Tock Tick Tock

Joy.  Another Volusion site outage.  Of course, the Volusion Status page says nothing about it, so maybe this one will be shorter than most.

Not the best way to start the day...

Idiotic Product Popularity Field

Today, I thought I'd mention one of the most idiotic, 1990's-style technology "features" in Volusion, the Product Popularity field, found in the Misc screen of the Volusion back office:

You see, Volusion isn't intelligent enough to return search results based on standard criteria, such keyword density, so the brilliant decision-makers in Austin (BTW, I love the city, but hate the fact that Volusion has chosen to darken such a wonderful place with its presence) decided to ask users to assign an arbitrary value to every item. Subsequently, the default return on a product search on a Volusion e-Commerce site would be based, not on the appropriateness of each individual result as it pertains to the word(s) used to search for the product, but on a wild-assed guess by the site's manager at what he THINKS the results will be for every product.

Why is this important?

Well, if a site has ten products, it probably isn't important at all.  However, if a site has 10,000 products, then it's pretty damned important.

For example, let's assume you are a prospective customer who wants to buy an 8-inch Honeywell air circulator fan, so you entered these five words in bold into the search field of a Volusion site that you KNOW sells this fan (I chose this product only partly at random, but partly because I have five of them and they're awesome fans). The search results you get back will include any and all items that have the following words:

8-inch
Honeywell
air
circulator
fan

But, the order of those results will all depend on the arbitrary value that the person maintaining the site decided to place into this stupid Product Popularity field. So, in this case, you might get back 300 results from the search, and if the arbitrary product popularity value is lowest on the item that you want, it will be listed DFL in the search results (that's Dead F-ing Last for those of you in Bakersfield) behind such notable possible items as a Honeywell thermostat, Nike Air Shox or an 8-inch, battery-operated "toy" that is curiously not to be used on unexplained calf pain.

A real e-Commerce application would've looked at the fact that all five of these keywords matched the description of the fan (in bold above) and would've returned the fan first in the list, since it matched the most keywords from the search.

Just another reason why Volusion sucks.

Maybe They Meant "Stevia Awards"

So, apparently Volusion has won something called a Stevie Award for best customer service. I only know this because they make me listen to the G-D announcement about it on the auto-attendant message every time I call Volusion support.

I found this link at http://www.stevieawards.com/pubs/sales/awards/426_2645_21022.cfm.

If Volusion is the winner of the prestigious "Stevie Award", I'd hate to see the competition for this incredible honor. All I can think is that maybe they meant to say "Stevia Award."

(You know what stevia is, right?  Some substance that tastes like sugar but isn't sugar.)

It all makes sense now...

"Volusion Has Limitation"?

It's pretty bad when those trolling for site-design work begin their pitch by telling you that the product you're using is limited.  I received this email message from a design firm this morning (of course, with the "I'm Steve from India and I work in Technical Support"-style of grammar, God only knows what they're trying to say):

If you think Volusion has limitation than you may not be correct, we are specialized in customizing and facelift of volusion store. We have a special offer for volusion users to re-design the volusion store in just $199 which includes below six points.

1>New improved look and feel of the store to make it a professional site

2>Improved Navigation

3>Relocate links to highlight important link

4>Header and Navigation panel re design

5>Apply appropriate color palette

6>Verify various browser compatibility

Please reply back if you’re interested in this offer with below:

Color preferences (if any)?

Anything that is currently there on the site which you want removed?

Anything that is not there on your site and you would like to have?

Any additional information you would like to provide?

Looking forward to hearing back from you.

We accept 50% payment before the work and rest once you approve the layout.

Please let us know if you are looking for SEO.

Why yes, Steve, I am looking for SEO, thank you so much for asking. While we're at it, I'm also looking for a nymphomaniac coke-connection who owns a Ferrari dealership (God, I miss George Carlin).

Left Hand. Meet Right Hand

I recently wrote a post about the idiotic hoops one must jump through to make enhancement requests in Volusion. This story, though, takes the cake, in my opinion.

A couple of weeks ago, Google Shopping announced their Google Trusted Stores program, which will be an integral part of Google Shopping's ad-based model being rolled out in an couple of months. There are specific requirements that Google has listed in order to be part of the Trusted Stores program, one of which is that sale and product information must be submitted as a feed to Google, and each required field must have a specific value in a specific format. If the data isn't in the proper format or if a required field is missing, the feed is rejected, and you can't participate.

In going through the list of required fields from Google, I noticed that there was one field value that wasn't available in Volusion, and that there was no way to jury-rig the available values so that the required field could be included in the feed. Simply put, there was one critical thing missing, and it had to be included from Volusion.

So, not only did I make the enhancement request, but that very same day, the VOLUSION SALES DEPARTMENT sent out an email blast suggesting that their customers prepare for the change from Google Shopping, apparently not knowing that their own product doesn't fully support the change!

The right hand simply doesn't even know what the left hand is doing.

Why am I not surprised?

Another Outage

I understand outages happen, but they seem to be happening more and more lately.  Here's a message from the current Volusion Status page (located at status.volusion.com)

STOREFRONT FUNCTIONALITY INTERRUPTION

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.

Maybe it's time to go home...and kick my dog (http://www.ebaumsworld.com/audio/play/67093/ - NSFW language).

Volusion Feature Requests

When setting up your web presence/e-commerce site in Volusion, you're paying for a tool to help make your business run smoother, right? At least isn't that the idea? To hire a service (Volusion, in this case) to help you and your business run more smoothly, make more money, etc., correct?

In that event, wouldn't it make sense for the service (Volusion, in this case) to be concerned with how you need to run your business? And shouldn't it make sense that the service (Volusion, in this case) should listen to their customers to see how they can make this service (Volusion, in this case) easier and more productive for their users?

In theory, the answer to all of these questions is a resounding Yes.

Unfortunately, Volusion apparently doesn't see it that way.  At least not judging by their actions.

After years of being saddled with, errrrrrrr, having the good fortune to work with Volusion, I've come to the conclusion that Volusion feels that their customers are using their service (Volusion, in this case) to help VOLUSION make money, not the other way around.

Case in point: If you're using the service (Volusion, in this case) and really need a feature to help your business run smoother, one would expect that you could request such a feature, and they would consider the value of such a request as it relates to the the effectiveness of the service (Volusion, in this case) and either recommend a third-party add-on or build it in to the software. Right?

Well, that would just make too much sense.

Sadly, Volusion doesn't accept feature requests directly. Instead, one has to get a username/password to their user forum and submit the request through the forum, after which, other forum readers would read and vote on the validity of the idea as to whether or not it makes sense to their needs, and then, theoretically, based on those votes, Volusion would consider whether to put manpower toward said feature request.

Now, for the moment, let's set aside the fact that, as customers, we're in need of a service (Volusion, in this case) that is supposed to make OUR online business run smoother.  That's not really important to you, the potential user, is it?  So let's just set that aside.

Instead, let us focus on the really important factors of an enhancement request (designed to make our service run smoother and make us more money). That being the FORMAT OF THE WORDING OF THE ENHANCEMENT REQUEST in the forum.

Seriously. 

I've had at least 20 very descriptive enhancement requests deleted because they weren't in the proper contextual format. And that's after trying to follow the format template, which everyone is required to read before submitting a request. 

The only thing I can think of is that the forum administrator (or "Forum Nazi" as I call him), is so hung up on the subjectivity and semantics of the request that if he simply doesn't like you or the request, well then, your request isn't in the proper format buddy.  REQUEST DENIED.  Never mind if the request is the greatest thing since those topless photos of Scarlett Johanssen (allegedly) hit the web, it doesn't matter if the enhancement request isn't in the proper format.

I have one question for any business-person out there: How long would you be in business if you ran your company in this manner?

More Fun with Field Names

I mentioned in a recent post about the inconsistencies in Volusion's nomenclature of field names, particularly as it relates to the field names in the back office not matching the field names on import. Well, as if that wasn't enough, Volusion has a different set of field names for customizing the results on a product search. This is vitally important if you do any importing/exporting in Volusion, as this is the only way you can export specific values based on a specific field search (rather than exporting the values from the entire database). However, the frustrating part is figuring out what each of the field names are in the Customize pop-up.

Some values make sense, or at least can easily be figured out. For instance:

Vendor_PartNo = Vendor Part # 

Others are a little bit trickier:

HideProduct = Hidden

But some require you to hunt throughout the entire list to find:

HowToGetSalePrice = Get Sale Price

When I'm looking for a value, I'm going to search for it alphabetically. Therefore, I search for this value in the H section. Nope.  Not there. Fortunately, G is close to H, so it's not too hard to find.

Others values simply aren't options to be displayed in the output, such as Accessories. Which means if you want to modify what accessories are listed for each product, you have to download THE ENTIRE G-D DATABASE.

I keep asking myself, is there a QA department at Volusion?  Does anybody there actually test this stuff like a user?

I think I already know the answer to that question...

Too pissed to post...

I'm currently trying to upload a number of new products via CSV into Volusion. This is something I've done literally hundreds of times. Most of the time, when I call for support on importing products, I know more than the support agents, and have to educate them. No fault of their own, mind you. I think they just go through support phone agents in Austin like my uncle goes through Coors Light (or Currs Light, as they say in Texas).

However, I'm having so damned much trouble uploading this afternoon, that I think I'm literally too pissed to talk about it. To be blunt about it, I'm having to stay late on a Friday night to get all of these products uploaded that should've been done by noon today if the import tool worked properly. Instead, I get to miss out on the beginning of my weekend because, everyone? Anyone?

That's right:  VOLUSION SUCKS!

Importing Products into Volusion

I'll give credit where credit is due.  Volusion has some good features, such as the ability to import product data from Excel.  Of course, they have to add their own "Volusion Sucks" spin on a great idea, so it doesn't really work like one would hope or need.

For instance, you can export your entire database to CSV for manipulation in Excel all in one fell swoop. Try re-importing the same or modified file, though, and you'll get hung up if you attempt to import more than about 1000 product items with all of the fields in the file. If you're just doing a pricing update, you probably can import about 5000 items at a time.

Of course, if you're trying to import too many items, Volusion won't tell you that there are too many items.  It'll simply time out and you'll be left wondering if the items are importing or not.  After about an hour, you can trash the browser history, close the browser, log in, cut the import file down in size and try again.

Then there's field names for the various fields. In the Products page of the back office, there's a little blue ? image next to each field. Clicking on that ? logo will open up a little pop-up screen that shows you the amount of data that each field can contain, the field type (long, for instance, to denote a long integer, meaning up to 255 characters for those non-programmer types) and a description.  There's even a link on the bottom that you can expand to get the field name in the database, such as:

[Exact Fieldname in Database: Fixed_ShippingCost]

This annotation is really handy when working in Excel to get the exact field names needed for the import. But of course, in fine Volusion form, even the field names are often screwed up. The pop-ups for some fields don't work, for others, there is no field name, and for even more, such as the Categories field, the information is wrong. You have to hunt around a bit to learn that they've changed the field for Categories from "ProductCategory" to "CategoryIDs."

Of course, I don't see anywhere that this change is notated in the LOKB™ (referring to Volusion's Lack-Of-Knowledge-Base).  You just have to know and remember that change is in place when you do an import or you'll get an error on import.

Good luck with all that...

Reference #000000

So, if you've ever visited a Volusion site for very long (or have worked in the back office much), you're quite familiar with the white Volusion error screen. Basically, think of a white screen with info in a box that attempts to tell you the source of the error. Typically, there is also an eight-digit error number associated with the error, so you can call Support, give them the error code and have them provide the solution (which is usually some form of, "Duh, I don't know").

So, earlier today, I was processing an order, which entails changing values in about a dozen fields in the Process Orders page.  After completing the processing, I tried to change the status to "Pending Shipment," and got one of these ubiquitous errors. I went back and tried three times to get past the error, but basically it meant I had to close my browser and start over.

Worse yet, the error code that appeared in the error screen was the ever-present Reference #000000. This is Volusion's way of throwing up it's hands when it encounters an error and "running home to mama."

After a lot of research, I think I can be of some help to other people who are saddled with having to use Volusion.  I believe I've found the source of the problematic Reference #000000. I've narrowed it down to two possible reasons for the error:

1.  I breathed at some point while using Volusion.
2.  I blinked at some point while using Volusion.

I'm finding that if I don't breathe or blink when using Volusion, it seems to work flawlessly.

Glad I could be of help.

Out of this World™ Support?

Volusion claims to have "Out of this World™ Support."  I don't have the heart to tell them that their support might as well be on Mars, because it isn't all that helpful here on Earth.

I get these occasional requests for survey feedback.  I received this one recently (from the VP of Support at Volusion):

One of my primary goals is to ensure we deliver on our promise of Out of this World™ Support every time you reach out to us for assistance. If we were able to do that during your most recent support inquiry, I'm interested to know specifically what worked well for you. By the same token, I'm also interested in your opinion of how we can provide better support in the future.

Below you'll find a link to a brief survey. It should take no more than 3 minutes to complete, and your feedback will be personally reviewed by members of our senior management team. If someone else in your organization contacted us on your behalf, please feel free to forward this email to the appropriate person. Survey invitees are a random sampling of merchants who have recently contacted us for support.

If "DUH, I don't know" is their idea of "Out of this World™ Support," then they're doing a bang-up job.

More fun with support

I have to restrain myself from titling every post on this blog as "Exhibit xxxxx of why Volusion sucks" or else this would be really redundant.  However, this qualifies.

So, after spending nearly 30 minutes waiting on hold to ask about the status of the aforementioned ticket, I was told that the account the ticket was created under was for a user who we deleted over three years ago.

Then I had to jump through a number of "security" hoops on the phone before they would actually try and delete that user again.  After about 15 minutes of dealing with getting rid of the old user account (yet again), we finally were able to work on the reason why I called.  The 300% increase in our bill.  Of course, they didn't have an answer for the discrepancy, only to say that "our server numbers are accurate," which, of course, doesn't explain why every other metric went down, yet bandwidth increased 500%. 

Oh, and let's not forget that our monthly bill TRIPLED as a result.

Something's rotten in Denmark...

The Support Ticket System Headache

A few days ago, I called about a traffic discrepancy that caused our monthly bill to skyrocket (with the overage charges, our bill was three times the normal amount).  When I looked at Google Analytics, traffic actually went DOWN for the month.

So, I started digging into the Volusion Stats page from the server, and found a number of discrepancies.  I called and asked for in investigation, since the trends (lower number of visitors, pageviews, fewer spider hits, etc) didn't substantiate a 500% increase in bandwidth, particularly since I couldn't find any sources for the increased bandwidth.  It just magically appeared on my bill.

When I spoke to the Volusion Support agent, they told me they couldn't see a reason for the discrepancy either, and they'd create a ticket.

Fine.

Three days later, I went to check the status of the ticket, and the ticket isn't visible in my profile.  No problem.  I logged in under the master profile, but lo and behold, I can't view the ticket in that profile either.  So, now I get to wait another 30 minutes on hold with Volusion support.

Does anybody at this company actually TEST any of this stuff?  Or do they just wait until their customers call with a ton of attitude enough times to finally try and address that squeaky wheel?

God, I'm so sick of the same on-hold music with the same "Volusion is the greatest product ever" messages over the music.

Categories...uggh

Of all of the screwed up things in Volusion, working with Categories may be in the top-ten of the worst. Setting up a simple category tree is an exercise in futility, as is creating the category tree in Excel and importing it.

I won't go into a lot of detail, as my blood pressure simply can't handle it on a Monday morning when I'm out of coffee.