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.

I have been using VisualSoft with two different retailers for the past 7 years, looking through some of these reviews I feel that, yes there are certainly areas for improvement however I don't agree with the fact VS don't care about there customers. I have had many issues over the years, some serious, however all of them have been worked out amicably in the end.

Ecommerce is a particularly complicated affair, it does help if you have an employee who understands various aspects be it design (science behind it), layout, functionality, basic coding knowledge to name a few areas in house; and like any major project you must have someone who can manage the project well your end and liaise with VS at each stage! Don't rush the design stage at the start, its possibly the most important factor be it layout and functionality to overall feel and flow... VS are always happy to make amendments until you are happy! The more accurate the information you give VS the less issues you will run into. The better you manage the project your end the more likely the project will go live on the date stated. Even if you are great in this area there will still be issues (usually as a result of misunderstandings), but you only have to keep on top of it and make sure they understand the issues and they will get them resolved. Any project, what ever it is can always overrun, I always factor in an acceptable overrun period but push VS to keep on target and when there has been an overrun it has been within the allowance I would be ok with because I kept on top of it and them. I should point out I have been through 5 new website projects with VS!. OK so based on the above I am saying don't rely on the account manager at VS to keep on top of it as well as you could yourself... you must manage the project yourself! We have had a different account manager on each of our new website builds and I learnt after the first two to not rely on them as they are dealing with two many clients!

As for customer service costing to much, this is old information, VS know longer charge for minor changes, only extra functionality, design work etc. You do not get charged for things breaking, going wrong through no fault of your own and never have! Other huge improvements in this area is the availability of the customer service teams who are busy working away for us mornings, afternoons evenings and weekends now.

My only gripe has been server speed from day dot, however last year we started using two dedicated servers which has improved it hugely, other than that I would say currently my only issue is hosting charges which I feel could be done in a more clearer with fixed monthly payments for various business sizes.

Other than that yes from time to time something will break on the website as a result of a global change however they have always fixed these issues in a timely fashion and rarely have they been serious... but yes it can be a tad irritating as I do find myself checking over the website frequently to make sure we don't have any unforeseen issues all though you really should anyway especially with third party plugins etc.

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...

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.

Great account manager, strong platform