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.