Hi all,

I thought long and hard about whether or not to take up the valuable time of forum members with this post. In the end, I decided to go ahead because I want others to know of a particular problem that may be impacting them as well as the hope that the way Infusion released products can be influenced.

First the problem. I, like many, sell subscription problems that come with a free trial. Since the update last week, these fail with the following symptoms:

- When checking out, customer is told that the transaction has failed and asked to try again. This goes on, basically forever till the user gives up.

- Turns out that the order is successfully completed within Infusion but without receipts and the shopping cart actions associated with the subscription do not run.

The result is: frustrated customer and manual intervention on each order.

I did file a support ticket which, despite my protests, was categorized as "Need to fix eventually". It may be just me but it seems it should be of higher priority.

So watch out...

Now for my general advice for Infusion. For a while now, I've been suggesting (pleading?) that more effort be invested to making sure the product is stable and reliable. I'm not sure I can speak for everyone but at least for me, I'd rather have a few less features than a suffer a product that breaks and costs me sales and customer relationships.

At a recent Dan Kennedy event, Bill Glazer asked the crowd how many people were using Infusion. About 75% put up their hands. He then (tellingly) asked how many were having problems. Virtually everyone kept their hand up.

That type of reputation hurts sales. The temptation to invest in new features versus boring ol' stability and regression testing is always great as it's seen as key for revenue growth. But a reputation of "bugginess" and "instability" can hurt sales just as much.

I've been on about this for about a year and a half. I've annoyed everyone from Clate on down. But, as last week's release demonstrated, not enough is being invested in quality assurance to make sure new releases don't break fundamental functionality. I had five significant bugs due to the new release including the item above and not being able to send broadcast emails...

I've heard a few folks mention that this is software and that's how it is. Well, I've spent my career in the software business and I know that it is how a software company invests in and runs their development/qa team that influences this issue. Software can be much more stable than we are experiencing. I have no doubt the individual team members in development, qa, support, etc... are talented and committed. This is a management issue.

Sorry to go on and on. I'm just a bit frustrated about continuing to lose business to these issues. As I'm sure I've worn out any influence on Infusion, I would suggest that if you agree - let the Infusion team know.

Thanks, Chris

I understand what you are saying and have experienced some issues as well. I come from the world of Sage and ACT and was a long time "sufferer" with them, more than 12 years as a customer. One of my consulting clients jumped to Infusionsoft from Salesforce.com. They too had some issues with functionality. In the end, the issues were resolved, but not without frustration. The big positive for us and our clients is the Infusionsoft willingness to provide what I consider to be killer support, and a willingness to listen and address our concerns. This is more than I can say about other software related companies. My approach with clients, although probably not as experienced as you are in the software realm, is under promise and over deliver. Cliche, I know. I really do believe the Infusionsoft team is willing to listen and respond to my past requests. I think the reality is they are in fast growth mode and sometimes a bit challenged to keep up with delivering the functionality they promise. Also, sometimes it's me or my client who is the problem, not knowing how to work around an issue.

Hello Chris,

I need ur help, i gone many of ur posts and u did brainstorming with infusionsoft

I have a page detailing abt products at my website. from their i m redirecting to infusiosnosft thru link generator buttons. My queries:

1) can i pass other info as well? like userid
2) can i have search functionaltiy at infusiossoft like a user can search on basis of firstname or lastname
3) which table do contain transaction id once payment is made successfully.

Many a thx in advance.
Regards
Sonia

Chris, I fully agree with you.

Your Bill Glazer story surprises me, because Infusionsoft is using Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer as references. Apparently, both gentlemen are not so satisfied as the testimonials are meant us to believe...

For me a great product starts with sound design, not with a good customer service. If Infusion has less issues, we do not need to fall back on customer service...

I could not agree more with the last post. We sell seats in seminars and continuity products. For over a week now we have not been able to get accurate counts to our events. This is a nightmare. Forget about cool new functionality and let me run my business. Boring and stable is a heck of a lot better than cool and broken.

Thanks everyone for the thoughtful feedback on our shopping cart. I've forwarded these comments to our product management team for further consideration.

The good news is that we will be work on a massive overhaul of the shopping cart in the future. The real question is not if, but when.

I strongly urge you to share comments and votes on our Infusionsoft Ideas site, http://ideas.infusionsoft.com/ , so our PM team can adequately gauge the need, interest and volume of what our users want. If you have already, I thank you for your support and interest to make our product better for everyone.

For instance, right now PayPal integration and 1-click-upsell are features that users must have and we have our team working on it now (and testing, working and testing and deploying in the intermediate future).

~Joseph

Wow. Thats funny. Well it must be the fact that I am not a native speaker. Joseph, I interpreted those last posts not as 'feedback' but as plain complaints (and even cries of despair). I am surprised that the product management team needs to 'consider' fixing something that is broken.

And are you suggesting that we post a request to fix the shopping cart as a feature request on the ideas page? And when you say that 'PayPal integration and 1-click-upsell are features that users must have', is that a direct reply to alexcharfen's request to 'Forget about cool new functionality'? Or do you mean to say that those features have a higher priority than stability?

The fact of the matter is that I, and many users with me, fear every Infusionsoft upgrade, because we worry about what it will break this time. We fear it because we are left with the problems of trying to solve it and trying to explain our customers why our system does not work.

Yes, Han, complaints are totally great forms of feedback. It helps us identify what customers care about, why they care about it and (often) ways on how we can improve.

We don't deny that the Shopping Cart is not the most attractive features of our solution. Hence, my rather open and candid response on it.

With respect to the suggestions -- these are based purely, without employee engagement, on customer feedback. Stability is a given and keeping our existing features running smooth is a pre-requisite. I was only mentioning that the features customers find most pressing are relating to processing transactions via PayPal and the ability to upsell their customers via the 1-click-upsell ability -- both of which are currently under development.

While it may be a moot point, we have been casting a wider net to catch more bugs. This means that more bugs are caught before a release is pushed out; and likewise we've noticed significantly less bug-related calls and more how-do-I calls.

I'm sure our system architect, Eric Martineau, could more finely address the system stability, bugs and overall code "health." His email is ericm-at-infusionsoft-.com.

We understand the natural hesitance to new updates -- it's a real bummer when something as great as broadcasts or tags or (anything else) breaks. Especially when dollars and reputations are on the line. We are working very hard to ensure bugs don't make their way into releases and have been improving on that front with every release.

I hope this adds a bit more perspective into my potentially vague response earlier.

~Joseph