James E.

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.