Unlimited
Products in Online Shopping Carts
I am really struggling to see
how any company can offer Unlimited products for an
online store for any price but for $100 or $200 a
month that is even more insane.
Now as a programmer myself, I
know having unlimited anything is just impossible, but you can
scale website to huge databases. Look at google for example, they
have billions of pages. But they also have hundreds of thousands
of severs and not just a $100 website.
So lets say I sign up for the
$197.00 Unlimited Plan at Volusion.com and I have 100 million
products, can the shopping cart handle it? Will they even have
enough bandwidth to support my uploading and downloading of new
products and the huge customer base I have?
In other words, can Volusion's
$200 shopping cart run a store like Walmart.com?
According the them, they can.
Now, the people at
walmart must be real idiots then. Why would they pay tens of
millions to operate their website when they could do it at
volusion for just $200 a month?
I must say, making a statement
like "you can have unlimited products in your cart"
is pretty risky since people like me are going to outright tell
everyone you are lying to their faces.
Just like a regular shopping
cart at any grocery store, it will fill up, and even if you keep
piling more products it will eventually it will break and be so
overloaded you can't push it anymore. Of course you could load
products into 2 or 3 carts or 20 carts to solve the problem.
Servers have the same limits
and for $200 you are not getting much at all on over priced
services like Volusion sells. So they are not adding 100,000
severs like google or big datacenters like Amazon, Ebay or
Walmart. They are just telling people, what they need to say to
get them as customers.
But I have been
down this road and when I have more time, I will get an
account at volusion and when it fails to hold unlimited
products sue them for false advertising.
You don't have to look hard to
find hundreds of complaints about volusion, their product and
their practices. For a small company they have made a lot of
people angry and it is because of misleading statements like
"Unlimited Products".
You can't tell me that your
programmers and network engineers told you they can support
Unlimited products, because anyone that knows anything would tell
you that is impossible.
But still volusion management
made the decision to advertise that very claim. Hey look, "Run
an Amazon.com size store for just $200 a month!", what a
deal for sure.
That is until you try to
actually run it.
Now, I have built a carts that
held 10 million products, yes 10,000,000. That is not even close
to unlimited, but probably more than enough to crash any volusion
shopping cart I am sure.
If I remember exactly, it took
about 4 days just to compile the initial database with 4 servers
running 24/7 and that is just because of the huge volume of data
in 10,000,000 product records.
Now, today, hard drive space
is cheap, so companies can offer huge volumes of space quite
cheap on cheap hard drives for pennies. But to access that data
is another story altogether.
If you have a 3TB hard drive,
it will take at least 8 hours just to copy the data over to
another hard drive, that is just one time, imagine if you have
thousands of people trying to access that data, they might be
waiting hours for pages to load as the hard drives comb through
all of that data.
It is not really ethical to
sell a car that you know has a maximum speed of 100 MPH to
someone and tell them if goes 500 MPH and certainly not Unlimited
MPH. Or tell someone they can fit 3,000 people in a 2 bedroom
apartment or have unlimited people live there.
But volusion.com
seems to think it is OK to tell people that can put, not 10
million, not 100 million or even 100 billion products in their
shopping cart, but "UNLIMITED products".
Now it seems to me that anyone
that would do that is just full of shit and will tell anyone
anything to get their business. Based on the plethora of
complaints that seems to be exactly what is happening at Volusion.
There appears to be no pride,
no concern and little effort by the support staff to help people.
The company seems to be more
concerned with getting people in their system then providing
something that customers can use. Obviously they are willing to
lie to people to get them to use their services.
Now volusion is not the only
company doing this but they happen to be the one I found so many
complaints about prompting me to write this article.
After all, if they can't even
support the smaller size stores, how can they support a store the
size of Walmart?
It just
horrifies me when I see this stuff because then when we
impose limits people think it is
our system that is bad.
Companies like Volusion making
false claims and offering products they could never deliver is
bad for everyone in the business because we can't be honest and
be competitive, so other companies make the same claims.
This has been a crippling
trend in website hosting with companies offering UNLIMITED
everything at cut throat prices then creating user agreements
that limit related resources preventing anyone form reaching
those limits.
For example:
You can put unlimited
products in the shopping cart, but the maximum
weight limit is 50 pounds. So you could never
actually put 100,000 cans of vegetables because that
would exceed the weight limit.
Or you have a lifetime
warranty on your car, but after 30,000 miles
the only thing that is covered is wear on the seats and
steering wheel which are also subject to typical use
and wear provisions.
In hosting, you get unlimited
bandwidth, but servers are throttled at 1.5MB
so they can't actually transfer unlimited data and that
data stream is shared by 500 websites on that server.
This deceptive type of
advertising and activity is really terrible. But companies do it
daily and you think you are getting the deal of a lifetime.
But the truth is, you are not
and in fact when you get into bed with a company that is that
willing to lie, don't be surprised if they take your wallet and
leave in the middle of the night.
As a consumer, it
is up to you to know better.
When I go to buy an auto part
for one of my classic cars, they ask do you want the part with
the lifetime warranty? Of course I do, since the car will be
around for ever and I will never have to pay for a new part again.
That sounds great!
So I ask, what
does the warranty cover?
The answer,
"Everything EXCEPT, Normal Wear and Use".
Let me think about that. If I
use the part normally, that is not covered? So if the part like a
headlight has a a normal lifetime of 2 years and mine lasts 3
years, it is not covered.
So is there a contract that
explains what "Normal Use" constitutes? Of course not,
just an ambiguous uninterpretable term that they can fall back on
and say that falls under the "Normal Use" policy and is
not covered.
But the unsuspecting buyers
pay the extra few dollars and the vendor makes more money for
absolutely nothing.
Eventually they will scam
enough people like Volusion and the people will react posting
horrible comments online and telling their stories in an effort
to get back at the people that have wronged them.
They have wronged
us!
By voulsion offering
more than any website hosting provide can deliver they have
wronged us and we actually can sue them as competitors and
recover damages and punitive compensation.
If we do that, then every
competitor would be in line for the same handout and volusion
would be done.
But we would spend huge
amounts of money and resources which would take away from our
main business and just waste time that we don't have.
And that is why criminals get
away with crimes. It is just too resource intensive to pursue
them.
Is it worth us spending a
million dollars to sure a competitor that might be broke when we
get done and not even be able to pay us? In our case, no.
So they can continue to offer
Unlimited Shopping carts and keep stealing peoples money by
making false claims or using misleading terms that make their
product seem superior.
What do other
companies like ours do to compete, they offer the same products,
Unlimited everything. Then the market gets worse and worse.
The legal system is
too expensive so they all just all do it without recourse, but
the customer is the one that pays in the end.
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