Client Review on Visualsoft

Feedback:

I have used Visualsofts shared success program for both a large established retailer and a relatively new company and unfortunately the experiences that I had with both fell way below the expected mark. Both companies were very successful retailers through other channels whilst Visualsoft quickly became the most expensive, time consuming and worst performing channel.The contract is a minimum of 24 months which is far too long, and locks you in with no chance of escape if things are not going as expected after the first year.Our first issues started at the website build, the expected build time for a new website is 12 weeks. However, despite quickly choosing a template, promptly providing all of the required information to Visualsoft and quickly signing off each section, both builds took around six months to complete. We were at a total loss as to why the builds took so long, you basically pick a range of templates, send a feed, logos etc, yet the whole process seems to be incredibly slow.It is worth noting that we were charged the monthly fee at day one and the monthly direct debits will continue if the site build is late, even if Visualsoft are at fault for the late delivery. Once the site goes live you are assigned an account manager and it becomes almost impossible to speak to the people who you made initial contact with at the presentation stage. Our account managers changed so much we didn’t even meet most of them. We had around six different account managers in the 24 month period. The overall feeling we had was that Visualsoft have far too many clients and not enough staff and once the contract has been signed you just become a number.There were times when the site was worked on by members of staff with questionable ability, some of the PPC executives we spoke to had very basic PPC knowledge and had clearly just graduated from university and had no real experience.The eBay integration was a total nightmare. Our eBay products would randomly go out of stock and Good Till Cancelled listings would close, resulting in us losing years of ebay sales history.Overall the revenue generated from the site and eBay integration were very poor and well below indications presented to us in initial meetings. Once you start complaining about the lack growth the suggestions are to spend more money on marketing, initiatives that ended up costing us further money with no return. As we had started to lose confidence in Visualsofts ability we asked if we could have a free trial of PPC for a few months to demonstrate their effectiveness. Visualsofts response was “why would we do it for free when we have clients who pay us tens of thousands per month for PPC?” Charming.After 18 months on the platform with little success and no indications that things were to improve we attempted to arrange to end the contract early. Instead of offering solutions to increase revenue, Visualsoft threatened us with legal action. We did indeed miss one payment which resulted in us receiving a solicitors letter and our website access was temporarily restricted. Whilst our access to the account was restricted, customers were still able to place orders, yet we were unable to see the addresses to dispatch them, so once we regained access we were met by a group of angry customers who had not received goods they had paid for.Having commissioned the shared success program for both a large online retailer build and a startup it is hard to see why either would be a good fit. If you are a startup the huge monthly cost is probably going to outweigh the affordability, Shopify is a much cheaper option, and the marketing team simply do not have the expertise to grow small unknown brands.If you are a large online retailer turning over in excess of £1m, shared success is likely to cost around £10k per month. In this case you would be much better off employing an experienced digital marketing manager, PPC executive and SEO executive, at least then you will have a team of people who are accountable to your business and who you can let go if they do not perform.