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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.
***Update*** After being contacted for copies of my interaction with Visualsoft, 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 [protected].
There are also emails between myself and one of the upper managers at Visualsoft Neil something. I'll let you decide as to whether this is a kickass company.
They are not in order so you'll need to read them all. You will see that there is one issue that reoccurs and is the one issue that highlighting for me that something was badly wrong with my site. There is also a ticket from Visualsoft confirming that my site wasn't built correctly, hence why I lost the plot.
Please email me 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.
I hope that this helps people and provide a more transparent view of Visualsoft.
Good luck and wishing you all the best!*****
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.
If you want to discuss any of my experiences or to be sent a full copy of all of my emails to and Visualsoft to see what a bunch of cowboys these people are then email me at mary8dcase@Gmail.com
Good luck
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.
Sorry to hear your story but it doesn't surprise me at all. Unfortunately you won't be able to leave them with a fully accessible website if you ever choose to.
I am a genuine client of Visualsoft and have now done two projects with them over a period of 4-5 years.I have to say I can see both sides of the fence on this one having done two websites with Visualsoft, I agree with those of you complaining of service as on the whole it is simply not good enough. Times are tough out there as it is with new competition almost daily and price wars and expensive advertising campaigns without the added issues of losing sales due to unnecessary and at times ridiculous mistakes.
On both projects I have managed with them we have had a huge list of Snags that were needed to be resolved to make the websites function appear and work as expected. Nothing they do is checked and everything is done in a rush which is why most of the problems exist in the first place. You have to go through the website with a fine tooth comb yourself. Unfortunately for many of the clients they don’t even realise they have serious issues, be it SEO, function, layout because most clients don’t have anyone in house who are technically minded and experience in all sectors of the ecommerce industry. I can go right now and find some of their clients and highlight serious flaws in their websites.
I have made several constructive complaints to them over the past 4-5 years, and some very good ideas for them to keep on top of websites like ours that are more customised than the majority of the websites they have built, suggestions on dealing with snags/errors so as to stop wasting time for both us the client and them but none of them have been taken on board. They say they keep restructuring the company to cut down on mistakes and provide better service but if I am completely honest the service is as bad today if not worse than it was 4-5 years ago when we started the first project with them.
Our second project was only completed last month and unfortunately again it was far from a finished article come live day and as a result we have again wasted an awful lot of time back and forth with them and seeing very little being fixed, some of the issues we have are very serious indeed and costing us money on a daily basis. Trying to get hold of the account manager is simply incredibly frustrating, I have tried to be as nice and polite as I can be during the whole process as don’t want a situation where by they simply get pissed off and stop everything. But enough is enough now, we again have waited weeks for what are urgent and often simply things to fix! The account manager rarely replies to emails or updates you, is rarely answering the phone and we are left losing money on a daily basis through lost sales and time wasted back and forth trying to get all the snags resolved! If they ask me to do a Trustpilot review for this latest website they will wish they hadn’t.
In terms of the cost of projects I can see some of the points that are being made, yes it is based on a freeware back office, and yes everything is modular and yes they then re-sell that module on hundreds of times after paying a coder once to code the module which is then simply tweaked for your particular website. On that basis it could be said that they could lower the costs a bit, but of course they do need to make money. The company is large and technical staff are not cheap so on the whole I would say what you get for your money is actually quite good (when the website is fully working and problem free) having worked previously with independents. One example is a project costing £120, 000 with an independent coder and designer, Visualsoft made a site with all but a few of the functions for just £25, 000 that looked better and functioned just as well when it was finally snag free. The websites once complete and all snags fixed run fast, are well coded and great for SEO; it’s the amount of time and stress in-between that ruins the entire process, otherwise value for money would be a 10 out of 10, instead it is hard to give a rating higher than 5 given the hassle you have to go through to get the website to that point. On both my clients website projects that I have trusted VisualSoft with they have probably wasted hundreds of hours doing stuff they didn't need to do or did wrongly because the information was not read correctly and at times couldn't have been read at all. Being technically knowledgeable with code and website structure and design should enable me to make it as clear as can be but time and time again they either fix something that didn’t need fixing (which breaks it) or make a problem far worse. They never call you to clarify any points and as a result on my first clients website with VS they caused an issue so bad that I had to spend 7 solid weeks fixing the issue they caused across all products, if they had called and stated what they were about to do I could have told them there and then that it would bork all the products across the store so don't do that; which just made that situation all the more frustrating. My client didn’t get any compensation for the hundreds of hours we spent fixing (small print protects them from claims as a result of lost revenue/man hours); actually sorry they offered us two free modules which all though we accepted cost them nothing as they have been paid for hundreds of times over by other clients which was an insult quite frankly given the issue they caused through no fault of our own. For me price/cost of project is irrelevant, I am prepared to recommend other companies who charge more to my clients if it means saving time, lost revenue and wasted hours dealing with the team over at VS with problems that should have been seen already, problems caused by them themselves and sloppy rushed fixes and integrations.
VisualSoft please don't ask me to talk directly, I have done so on so many occasions that any conversation we have now will not be fruitful for either party. Just concentrate on fixing the issues caused by working in the way you do with clients not just for us but you yourselves; as a company you guys are also losing a lot of money daily for preventable issues and misunderstandings; most issues have to be fixed twice through simple misinterpretation!
Hi,
Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback - we’re disappointed to learn that you feel your experience with us was a negative one.
At Visualsoft we’re committed to delivering outstanding online stores for the retailers that we work with, and we're really proud of the many positive reviews and testimonials from our clients, however we also take on board any constructive criticism – this is crucial for us as a retailer-driven, customer-focused provider.
We have a transparent and upfront approach to pricing, we provide dedicated account management and technical support to every retailer we work with, and we continuously enhance our module-based and cost-effective platform (built, supported and managed entirely within the UK) to ensure we offer excellent return on investment, however if you feel that there are specific areas of our service that we could improve, we’d love the opportunity to speak with you directly.
If you would like to view more details on the way we work, including a detailed process flow which illustrates just how we build an eCommerce website and our full module price list, please take a look at the resources section of our website. All of the documents here are free to view not only for our clients, but also the general public, and you can also access a demo version of our platform and admin area which allows you to 'testdrive' the platform we have developed.
We would usually address any issues directly with our clients, but unfortunately I'm unable to find any clients on our system by the name of Scott Wingo, or any of the other names used within this thread. Therefore, if you would like to get in touch to discuss the problems you have mentioned above, please feel free to contact myself or your Account Manager on [protected].
I look forward to hearing from you
Sarah McCormick, Visualsoft
This is an honest review about these people. We are so gutted to have gone with them.
They will not lift a finger for less than 15 quid even if it's something very minor.
The average cost of a feature that should be standard is 450 pounds. Their marketing service is
Very very dubious. We used their marketing retainer and we were conned for a few large.
I hate the fact That they can literally hold u ransom since they own
The code ur site is written with. Before u make any decision consider
Drupal or magento since it is open source. Visualsoft are Expensive and
Downright arrogant. They are essentially selling you a template for a lot
OF your hard earnt cash. Expect no sympathy or goodwill once yoU are locked in.
Don't say you werent warned.
Agree completely. What a scam of a company. Do not use them!
We have also been recently burnt by Visualsoft horrible service. I wish we had looked a bit deeper at the reviews. We would have realised how bad the service was and that they write their own reviews. Surely that this illegal and should be reported to Trading Standards for false advertisement and customer deceit. We lost thousands now and we hope others will read this before they even think about using them!
Totally agree - be aware of sales people promising the earth and not delivering. We went with them because of the so called great reviews - they are brilliant at fabricating them. We got totally sucked in and lost a lot of money
I agree with this post. I lost over 7k with them and after a lot of chasing and getting nothing but false promises, I decided to just cut my losses and move on.
@Catherine-B - I think you are the one impersonating someone else. My experience and gut feeling tells me you are non other than one of the directors at Visualsoft who is going around pretending to be someone else.
for a true reflection of visualsoft from genuine customers (rather than one person posting under multiple aliases to sabotage their reputation) google visualsoft reviews
Avoid the visualsoft.co.UK scam at all costs
Total agreement with you. The going rate is 225 quid to lift a finger. Very dubious and ignorant company to deal with. Been done for 20k.