Tool Supplies became a customer of Cloud Commerce Pro (CCP) in June 2020 and paid an initial fee of £10,596. The implementation process was much more difficult, complex and lengthy than we had been led to believe and we did not go live until October 2021, some 15 months later, despite committing significant inhouse resources to the project. Had I realised at the outset that implementation would take as long as it did I would never have selected CCP. They started to invoice me during 2020, despite an agreement not to start billing until the system had been fully implemented. By the time we realised the complex reality of going live we had committed too much time and money to pull out. That was a mistake, as any losses incurred up to that point have been dwarfed by the ongoing losses since.
In October 2022 CCP suffered a catastrophic failure, which had an immediate and substantial effect. They tried to underplay the seriousness of the failure, describing it as an “outage”. More recently a senior manager at CCP admitted they were unable to restore from backups and were having to rewrite large parts of the system.
Since the go live date the support and performance of the system has been woefully inadequate. We experienced numerous problems, a small sample of which are:
- Persistent issues with the support team. We came to feel that they were employed as gatekeepers, designed to frustrate our efforts to get the numerous problems addressed and resolved. It could often take weeks to get responses from them. If any third party was ever involved the standard response was, “It’s an Amazon issue”. Substitute Amazon for anyone else CCP interacted with.
- CCP consistently failed to operate as a reliable hub between our sales platforms with persistent issues around updating stock and prices. We routinely had stock and price synchronisation issues between CCP, Amazon and eBay.
- Magento in both versions 1 and 2 never connected properly despite them advertising support for these products.
- We had an ongoing inability to update stock in a timely manner. We relied on getting export files from CCP which in some instances could take up to twenty four hours to complete. Sometimes the export would run for several hours and then fail completely. This was critical, as these problems led to products showing as out of stock when they were not and vice versa, directly affecting sales, customer satisfaction and critically, Amazon metrics.
- CCP failed to update tracking data in Amazon consistently. We had to check the data daily to ensure we did not fall below the 95% valid tracking required to maintain our account in good standing.
- A myriad of other issues arising from the “outage” from which we never recovered. The impact on our Amazon metrics and the business was substantial. It should always be possible to rollback and restore in the event of any serious failure but CCP could not.
CCP recommended we migrate to another software product of theirs, namely ChannelGrabber. An initial review showed deficiencies in several areas. I had no confidence in their ability to support us or implement a satisfactory alternative. In the circumstances we had no alternative but to seek a more reliable supplier. Prior to October 2022 I paid a total of £12,180 in monthly fees and a further £1,896 in additional payments for one off tasks.
For several days after the October 2022 failure we were unable to process orders at all. Over 95% of our sales are through Amazon and we have suffered a serious downgrade in our Amazon ranking resulting in slippage against our main competitors and a marked reduction in sales.
Early in 2023 we found an alternative supplier that we were able to go live with within a matter of weeks. I have used and implemented several software packages during the course of my career and have never experienced anything that comes close to how poorly CCP performed in every aspect of its operation. I would not want any other company to go through what we did. The number of negative reviews on Trustpilot are probably only a fraction of the customers affected and the lack of responses to them from CCP is typical of their complete disregard for their customers.
