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.