Visualsoft

The following review catalogs the issues we've had with Visualsoft since signing up with them in 2020.

We originally met with one of the sales team, who promised a number of things on their 'Shared Success' plan. We were told Visualsoft will actively work to ensure the site was bringing in £20,000 revenue per month, because they would then be eligible for commissions on any sums over this. We were told if we renewed the contact after the initial two years, we would get a marketing day per month and as they were an eBay partner, they would ensure we would be able to sell our products on eBay (as our goods are a restricted category). All these claims turned out to be false and the product was mis-sold.

The original proposal advised we would receive:

Training - this never happened.
Regular site health check reviews - these have happened twice in 3.5 years, but only because we requested them.
Dedicated Relationship Manager - our account manager has changed six times and we currently have no account manager. So we've never had anyone long enough to build a relationship with.

When the site went live, we had functionality that didn't work. One issue was incompatibility on the payment gateway, another was to do with stock and warehouse. The latter took 875 days to be fixed and implemented. However it had to be removed on the day of implementation because it created critical issues with the website, so we abandoned the hope of using this function.

Further, major issues developed on the website. Many of which were compliance issues and some still not fixed after multiple years since reporting.

These issues are not just here and there, they are critical errors that happen regularly or completely at random. Issues such as:

92% duplicate content on the website. This was found by us, and took Visualsoft over a year to address it (long to fix it). Then a change was scheduled to be made system wide by Visualsoft, we asked if this would undo our fixes and we were told it shouldn't. Of course it did, resulting in thousands of pages of duplicate content again and months more to re-fix.
SSL certificate expired and no one did anything about it until we told them it had expired. This should never have expired, someone should know what dates certificates need renewing for their sites.
Google Core Web Vitals failing and being constantly told they've done everything they can. I can see many simple things that could be implemented to cut CLS and FCP scores.
Rich data / schema markup suddenly stopped working.
Product tags for all of our products had disappeared, harming the UX.
We had successful payments, but orders not marked as paid, so we never knew the order had come in.
A customer's order needed to be partially refunded which was done through the Visualsoft platform. The partial refund showed successful for £26.99 however upon receiving the confirmation from Pay360 we found the full order value of over £350 was returned to them.
We had issues for months with the site going down multiple times a day and not being accessible, harming our conversion rates. We actually had to set up our own monitoring system to prove it was happening. It caused issues with our product feeds and all products disappeared from our affiliates, losing us £100's in revenue.
The currency switch was creating 404 pages all over the place.
There's a number of bad practices in place in relation to SEO. We've questioned these multiple times and the SEO team believe they have no effect on SEO. Pretty much any other authority has an opposite opinion.
There's an issue where data gets overwritten, simply by using 2 tabs. Apparently you can't use multiple browser tabs, but there was nowhere in the knowledge base to advise that… until we found this issue.
Image alt text doesn't work half the time.
Archived products still can be seen by customers.
Overcharging customers. For instance a £30 order was charged over £1150. The bug randomly happened at checkout and it was for hundreds of out of stock products.
All our product urls just randomly changed one day.

And to top everything off, we get told off for doing audits on the website, when it was to fix all the issues they caused. There's many more critical issues with the platform, it is ultimately not fit for purpose in our opinion. Support staff tend to jump the gun and implement a fix without asking first, resulting in worse issues that a ticket was originally logged for. Sometimes we are told something can't be done, but then once telling them it can, and how to do it the magically are able to complete it.

We feel like Visualsoft does not deliver, the product is mis-sold and they can't correctly support the platform.

We have asked to exit the contract 5 months early, because we feel that the platform is impeding our growth. Unfortunately Visualsoft have offered us a 2 year extension for half the price per month. This is not something we are prepared to do when the platform is so flawed. We are really, truly let down by the product and we would not recommend it to any small business looking to grow.

Regrettably even though we are still with Visualsoft and reading the awful reviews that have been published on here, I can sympathise with most businesses that have had a negative experience and would also advise every new business to think twice before signing on a contract with VS.

Work is incredibly slow, plenty of false promises prior to signing contract, refusing to take responsibility, poor complaint resolution procedure, low employee retention rate indicating a poor/toxic working environment and very very expensive for the overall product/service is received in return.

I have made several complaints and our voice has not been heard and this is us paying over £3000 a month.

Save yourselves the hassle and painstaking conversations of never ending problems and poor value for money.

AVOID AT ALL COSTS

I don't know where to start.

The horrible and super expensive customer service?
The terrible arrogance of the directors?
The revolting website they built us?
The time it took (3 times as much as quoted)
The fact they want a bucket of money to fix things they themselves got wrong?
The abhorrent lock in contract?
The sleazy sales tactics (the SEO one is the best. You get zero for your money)?

Also, take a good look at the latest reviews and how a lot of them are on the same day. Why? Visualsoft writes them or rewards their small circle of customer friends to write them. This was confirmed to me by an ex employee there.

The list goes on but I will leave you with final thoughts:

DO. NOT. TOUCH.

Once they get your money, don't expect any level of service or sensible response from anyone that works at this company. A complete shambles from top to bottom. They are far from experts on anything e-commerce, they literally don't have a clue. The system they provide is great in theory, but if anything goes wrong with it don't expect it to be fixed any time soon. Money will be lost and endless time wasted if you sign up to their platform

I inherited this awful platform in my current role as ecommerce manager. Having been a web designer with extensive experience using a variety of different ecommerce platforms I can categorically state that this is the worst platform I have ever encountered. It appears to be based on OSCommerce which is very old code and they cannot keep up with superior open source developments like Shopify and Magento.

They charge for things that you should be able to do yourself, you have little control over the website and if you have an issue you have to create tickets, they are very slow to respond to these, ecommerce thrives on being able to make changes quickly, forget that with VS.

One of the major issues with the platform is the speed, ecommerce lives and breaths on how fast you can display your website, VS is by far the worst performing platform for speed. This is killing conversions and Google rankings.

Using the back end is the slowest performing page load I have ever experienced, you have to literally wait over 30 seconds for pages to update which when you have a few people working on the back end at the same time makes this even worse. Getting anything done is a process of extreme tedium and frustration.

Random breakages are a regular occurrence, when they make changes to the core code they cannot test and this results in breaking or having detrimental effects to other websites and templates on their platform, they seem to be constantly firefighting and correcting breakages.

My advice to senior management is to move away from this platform.

If you are an SME and want to take a business online and sell do not use this company. They will steadily be losing business and eventually this company will cease trading as they cannot compete with superior platforms currently available.

If you want an angle from the people who work in IT on this platform look no further than previous employee reviews on glassdoor and see how the devs regard the working practices, infrastructure and quality of this platform and organisation.

I started with Visualsoft in November 2015 using their adwords marketing management, it took a month to set the account up which I was charged a £500 sign up fee and £500 for the first month, 6 months later I had spent over £7000 with no sales. I was told by visualsoft they where brand building the website and to keep going and eventually it would lead to sales, it never did. I constantly communicated and asked why it was not selling and was told this each time. They even provided a website review (which was very unprofessional).
After leaving a complaint online I was offered an additional 3 months of adwords account management and social media management for free, which turned out to be useless. Again when the website didn't sell I was told it was brand building and to carry on.
It is now July the 21st 2016, after becoming frustrated with only 3 sales on the website (my products where being sold elsewhere). I contacted a few other honest marketing companies, who told me the reason it was not selling was because of the website, not the advertising, they also said they would not accept me as a client because of this fact, Visualsoft happily charged £500 a month + vat and carried on regardless (they also locked me into a 6 month contract, which was initially supposed to be 12 months). Even after hours of calls they did not think to mention it was because of the site and let our company spend thousands on advertising.
They do not pay any attention to your specific business and just have standard packages they implement no matter what industry you are in (our business is luxury leather handbags and accessories).
Our marketing budget is now nearly non-existent, it started at £10,000, we had realistic expectations to break even in the first year, but have now been nearly bankrupted due to using Visualsoft and their services.

Saying that our experience has been a complete disappointment so far would be an understatement. Continually let down at every hurdle! We were sold what we believed to be a great package and an upgrade from Shopify. We couldn't have been more wrong!

As soon as the sales pitch ended and the contract began, the issues started to occur. It quickly turned into a nightmare, with slow response times and a lack of communication. Now almost 12 months down the line, this is hands down the worst experience with a platform we have ever had. Avoid at all costs!

The issues still remain, and even the simplest tasks take weeks to resolve. Any problem that arises are passed from team to team without any sign of a solution in the hope that we'll eventually move on from the problem or solve it ourselves.

Literally any other service to visualsoft is superior, and we've now spoken to dozens of our other companies on the platform and they've all had the same experience, many of whom have now been lucky enough to switch back to Shopify. Seriously avoid at all costs.

Built a site with visualsoft in 2015, design/layout and function were all good. However they signed us in for a 12 month scoial media and PPC contract we knew nothing about. When we ask for this to be removed the problems started!
I was sold the site on quote "we are not one of the website builders that is out to take all the clients monies" however this is exactly what they are and possible the best in the market at it!
Even though they had been paid with no issue for site build and we were paying, monthly service charges, they insisted we keep paying the SEO and PPC fees after we requested in no less than 20 occasions they be stopped. Once we stopped paying these SEO and PPC fee they blocked the back end of our site.
Complete bullys and anyone thiink of using them should look up many other people similar stories

Like the title says, RUN! Cut your losses now or keep paying and throw good money after bad money. Hopefully you have found these reviews before you have spent a penny with these con artists. All the negative reviews are true, and then some. We got fleeced for £15,000+. Again, RUN!

Overpriced junk! They built us a site that cost a lot of money. Could have had better results with Magento. Very bad service and will not even fix their own mistakes at their own cost! Save your money, time and effort and go with another reputable company.

Also someone mentioned that they fake their own reviews. After looking closer, I believe this now to be true as well.

At the time of writing this review Visualsoft have restricted the access to our website for 6 days. They have demanded the immediate payment of outstanding fees or they will be pulling the plug.
Suffice to say that the reason we have unpaid fees on our account is a combination of ineffective marketing + website abundant with problems + extortionate hosting fees.
The fact that they retain the power to restrict your access and use it as their biggest threat when it comes to demanding money from you speaks volumes for the mindset of the company.
When things go wrong just bear in mind the leverage that Visualsoft have over you.If they are capable of doing this to a client that has been with them for the best part of ten years and collectively spent over 100k, then all i can say is you have been warned.

I think they are a very good company-ONLY IF you have lots of money available. Been with them for over 2 years now, and pretty desperate to get rid of their tight control. I am paying tons for things that really shouldn't be charged. After lots of complaining they made everything that takes under 30 min free, but anything slightly longer than that costs you a lot.
So if you are a very successful, rich company, they can definitely do a great job for you, otherwise steer clear because you literally get stuck in their web of paying for every minor change.

It all started so well at the back end of 2015. Site designed and approved, everything looked good, had one point of contact, made it very easy.

Unfortunately the day after agreeing everything the gentlemen left and that's were the trouble started.

We were asked to send over information we had received as this was stored on the gentlemens laptop which they didn't have access too. Very good of Visualsoft management to let information be stored locally rather than on a central server.

After this staff started rotating like you wouldn't believe. I can't count how many members of staff we have been through over just a period of 6-9 months. However this was the least of our issues.

We decided we would take out a social management and SEO service all be it quite expensive. We asked if we could start the services once we had gone live (This ended up being in May this year) but lone behold they started straight away. We were at this point promised a Q1 plan... to this day we have never received this.

Problems then further escalated as work was 2 to 3 months behind and yet we were being charged the full £1800. Once we complained they seemed to sort out the issue after blaming Christmas for the delay, of course we expect a week or 2 but 3 months! After a while work was being delayed again and not passed over to be signed off, it was at this point we asked to cancel all services immediately after our 6 month contract. It was at this point we made it really clear that we were extremely unhappy as work was constantly delayed and wasn't completed.

After several calls and asking them to cancel it was agreed with Ed that we could have our last month free for all the inconvenience we had. At this point it wasn't to bad as we knew we'd get our last month free and then the service would stop... but ow no, this is were the fun really started.

After 12 or so phone calls we were told that it needed to be in writing, this to our amazement was beyond a joke, after many phone calls and telling many members of staff that we wished to cancel, we were never told it had to be in writing. Taking the biscuit even further, the service continued through until June which we are currently being charged for along with May which was meant to be free, we're now £2700 out of pocket, the worst thing is that we have not even signed off any work from May onward.

To finally put the nail in the coffin, the invoices were taken out of dispute cause no one had any idea what they had agreed to... as James has kindly put it below, the lie and go back on their word. We have now been put on hold so can't access the admin panel after the invoices have come out of dispute just over a week ago, no curtsy call to let us know, nothing!

I could go on and on about many other issues but theirs so many, including being quoted £99 to do 5 minutes work which I had done on our sister site with in 5/10 minutes.

Please don't use this company, please find a company that provide good customer service, it's priceless at the end of the day.

Just maybe... just maybe I might get a call after this but I won't hold my breath.

Visualsoft are great at sales talk and showing you nice website examples. However once you sign up you are stuck with a website that ranks very poorly on Google and other search engine. This leave you have to spend enormous amounts of money on Pay Per Click adverts just to get in any sales at all. After 10 plus years trading we lost 80% of our online traffic since moving to VisualSoft. The company does not care about this and see greater reward in new sales. Beware of false 5 star review. If in doubt find your own current VisualSoft user and ask them of their own experiences.

Below is a copy of my review from another site.

I was a customer of Visualsoft from March 2010 to 2015 and I spent £7K on my website. I can say hand on heart that they ripped me off.

Not only did they charge £60+ VAT for everything, even installing Google analysis! They built my website incorrectly, which they admitted to on a support ticket! Even then they did not apologise. At this point I wanted to leave and they told me I could take a downloaded version of my website and I would never been able to change or amend the original site because they encrypted the code!

This was not in my contract and if I had known I would have been able to ask what this meant. Visualsoft are an arrogant company with fats heads fr their own success of exhorting money from the unsuspecting puplic.

Oh and try and leave an honest review on trust pilot... You can't without Visualsoft allowing you to, hence why they ha e such a high customer satisfaction score.

Would you trust a company who can't accept constructive criticism?

If you have a ton of money to waste then spend it with Visualsoft. If you are a start up/SME then run for the hills.

I've now learnt that if you are going to go with a company to host and do your monthly management of your site, find out the following things first:

1) Can I access the Ftp of my site?
2) How much do you charge to amend/fix things per hour?
3) if work isn't completed as promised when recourse do I have? - They should be happy to send this to you in writing. If not then run for the hills!
4) Ask how the site is built - use this information to compare to other companies. Try and do as much research as possible in this topic
5) Who owns the site I. E. if I leave can I take it with me as it is and be able to change it?
6) I want the domain name in my name - If you don't do this the web design company could put it in their name and you lose your domain name.

I would highly recommend Andrew Brown at Dual Media who tried to help me with my situation with VS. Unfortunately due to the poor build of my website, it had 100's of errors in Google analytics that VS wouldn't or couldn't fix, Andrew couldn't fully implemented the seo plan he had.

I have setup a cloud storage that contains ALL of the tickets that I've ever raised with Visualsoft when I was with them from 2010-2014 - Please email me *******@gmail.com and I will add you to that cloud storage so that you can make an informed decision BEFORE you spend thousands and thousands of pounds for a website that you don't own and for the ongoing support of said website that you will NEVER own. Yep, I'm still bitter that I lost £7k of my families investment with these cowboys.

Good luck

PS: I was a fully paid customer and always was. I was never late in paying and would have spent more if they had been a supportive company...

Like many others, I am really disappointed by this company, I live locally to them and from the outside they look like a professional, honest company, however this is not the case, was told my hosting would cost be less than we where paying before which has infact ended up costing us 4x as much each month, adding a free wordpress blog cost us £500! The backend is very basic, you are unable to change basic aspects of the website such as adding an image to your homepage! By far the worst thing is their support system which is basically a way for them to make money, I wanted an image removing which to be completed required them to remove one line of CSS code (takes maybe 40 seconds to do) and they wanted to charge me £40+VAT. Everytime I have asked for something to be fixed or changed I receive a quote! The only way you can leave a review on their trustpilot page is by asking them for a code which is how they control that profile to only have positive reviews, all in all I feel like my website has gone back 10 years, stay away from this company!

They have quite an attractive back office system but could do with it being more functional and accessible. Apart from product addition and sales processing there is very little can be done to the site. Anything more in depth, like SEO actions or error solving has to be put on a "ticket" which can take up to 2 months to be resolved; if ever.

Would definitely not recommend them, they seem to be all talk, far better to get a Magento based site, at least you can go straight to a developer for any work you need done rather than going through 10 layers of bureaucracy to get to an answering machine!

Really not happy!
Had a site built and was misled and misinformed from the beginning. Ended up costing a lot more than was originally told had a lot of problems since and regret having it built. It works pretty decent but not amazing cost an absolute arm and leg for anything you want done to the site as you have basic control over your site because theyve restricted how much you can actually do. All the internal stuff they will overcharge you for when you need anything doing at all. If they gave you 90% control and not 10% of your site you would be able to do a lot of the work in 2mins for nothing. Had many problems and they always have excuses and blame it on other things as opposed to taking responsibility. My site has been down several times now. No apology, no money knocked off the extremely high hosting costs. Nothing! Ive been quoted a fraction of the price everywhere else and guaranteed better quality too. Also I said that I might find somewhere else to host my site and was met with if you leave us we put your site on a disk. Then they basically dont care. They offer you no help thereafter. Absolutely disgusted. AVOID!

Very substandard service from a very substandard company. Big delays in project delivery with loads of excuses.

Whats worse is that they do not show remorse or interest in customer satisfaction. I would strongly recommend you do not use their services.

They are over-priced and not nice to deal with at all.

They fabricate their own reviews. How can you trust a company that does that? Save your money and go with someone else. All visualsoft are good at is pretty banners and design. Catherine B and any other positive review of them is written by them. They have already been caught by a well-knows site doing this.

Terrible Company with no interest in resolving serious issues for a client that has spent tens of thousands of Pounds with them.

Project over-ran by over 7 months (what was supposed to be a 3 month project so 10+ months). Very sad and lame excuses where made. 1 - Horrible lock-in contract. 2 - £60 plus VAT charge to lift a finger ( including to fix mistakes THEY have made in development. 3 - Arrogant Directors who turn their back on you and leave in the middle of a conversation as they are not happy with customers calling up to complain

3 - Don't be deceived by the nice designs they make. They are nice on the outside but they essentially charge you tens of thousands for a re-hashed version of OScommerce (open-source free shopping solution. This is why they will not shos you the back-office system before you purchase)

You have been warned.