Stuart S.

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.