Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

How Infusionsoft cost me 50k but gave me a great education

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 07:08 AM PDT

While I lived on 5 different campus colleges over the course of 7 years I never really can claim that I "went" to college much. Hell I barely made it through high school and honestly that was somewhat undeserved (my mom was a teacher at my high school and everyone loved her and gave me passing grades when I didn't really deserve them).

So my education has come all from the school of hard knocks…. From trial and error… and many times painful adversity.

If you have been a reader of this blog since its inception you have come a long with me on the journey. I have always been transparent about both what I find successful and what I have failed at… and learned from.

I always believe you learn more from your failures than your successes. Or at least I know I have.

So let me tell you about my latest painful and expensive lesson that I documented very well at the time. It took me a while to post it because I wanted to make sure we had zero dependancies with Infusionsoft.

Companies usually delete my account when I post something like this.

Last November when I left Lincoln for Las Vegas all was well. I just placed a insertion order for $30,000 worth of advertising for the ShoeMoney System.

When I landed to make my connection in Denver I got a call from Tigh telling me that we have a very serious problem. He went on to say that Infusionsoft, the company we use to process our orders and handle all affiliates, had blocked all of our affiliate links. I run all traffic through affiliate links… even my own so that I can properly track the ROI.

So then Tigh conferences me on the line with a Infusionsoft "specialist" who tells us he is not sure what the problem could be.

At this point my plane is boarding to Las Vegas.

I ask him to please escalate us to someone who does know whats going on. He says he will have to call us back…

(I am watching people boarding the plane)

I immediately text an executive I know at Infusionsoft and tell him… and I quote, "Our shit is broken and I need help". To which he tells me he is on it.

(Still watching people board the flight. Thank god it's a big plane lots of people in line.).

I quickly log into my Infusionsoft account to see that everything looks fine. No warnings anywhere about anything… and I can send email just fine.
So I do what I normally do when one of the services I use is busted.

I search twitter for Infusionsoft to see if anyone else is having problems. There was like 150 mentions of Infusionsoft in the last 48 hours but nothing about it being down.

I now knew more then the support guy we just talked to did. This was an isolated incident and was not a wide spread issue. (I am looking at the support ticket and it took the initial guy many hours to come to that conclusion.

(The plane has now fully boarded and they are calling my name saying I have 1 minute until the doors close).

I get up put my laptop in my bag and run to board the plane. Just as they are about to close the doors they run my pass, snarl at me, and let me board.

As I enter the jet bridge Tigh calls me with another support guy on the line. This guy says that its probably due to a "spam problem".

I ask him if he is sure. He says no but normally when an account is locked like that its because of spam.

(keep in mind I am now that annoying guy on my cellphone talking loud in a airplane).

I then say to the guy, "Ok if it is a spam problem then why would you disable the affiliate links but still allow me to send email? "

He said "Oh that's a good question, I thought it would be a spam issue , maybe it's a affiliate support issue"

I stop him and say, "DUDE LISTEN. Someone there disabled our account right? He says, "Well we are still not sure, It could be a system thing".

(The stewardess taps me as she is walking by and tells me to end my phone call and turn off my phone. I motion like I am doing so as she walks away then put the phone back up to my ear. I am very frustrated).

I tell the support guy, "Listen, I have to turn off my phone. When I land this better be fucking fixed. He tells me that he understands my frustration but I need to act like an adult. I tell him to fucking fix it, again… this time loud. I hear a gasp from the 2 older ladies behind me).

I get off of the conference call and notice everyone staring at me. I honestly don't care if I have offended them. As of this point in the day I have lost more money then all of their first class tickets combined.

I am fucking pissed and now I have 2.5 hours on a plane with zero access to the outside world to contemplate all the money I am losing.

I need to calm down. I need a drink. After 4 bacardi (why can't they have capt morgan on flights =( ) and cokes I am pretty calm.

It starts to occur to me that honestly I only have myself to blame (yes I know this will surprise most of you).

The truth is that I got lazy. Infusionsoft makes it very easy to process credit cards, run your own affiliate network, and email. But the truth of the matter is while it CAN do all of those its not very good at any of them individually.

I also ignored my friends who told me about nightmare stories using the Infusionsoft platform. But I thought it would not happen to me. Why?

I am ShoeMoney!
I know several executives there including the president of the company.
I JUST a couple weeks back spoke at their event at my own expense!
I am ShoeMoney!

Not to mention I also pay for the most expensive account they offer. I have a dedicated support line with "experts" at my disposal.

But now I have suffered the same fate as those who warned me not to use Infusionsoft.

What I should have done was:

Use Aweber for email
Process my own credit cards through the gateway api.
Use HasOffers for my affiliate network program.

The crazy thing is I already pay for and use these services everyday. I just got lazy.

As soon as I landed I was stunned to see all the affiliate links are still down. I have messages from a bunch of our affiliates…. And even affiliate networks asking me 1) why Infusionsoft was broken and 2) why in the hell am I using Infusionsoft?

I called Tigh and he said Infusionsoft still had no idea why our affiliate links were down.

I texted the executive I knew at Infusionsoft and asked him to please call me.

He did call me write away but was very cavalier about everything. Even when I told him I was down tens of thousands of dollars he just said that these things have happened to people much bigger than me and I will be stronger because of it.

I was furious.

Let me be clear.

NOBODY AT INFUSIONSOFT COULD TELL US WHY OUR AFFILIATE LINKS ARE DOWN 8 OURS AFTER IT HAPPENED.

I got off the phone and started moving forward. I had no clue why this was happening but I knew there was no way IN HELL I would continue to risk my company using Infusionsoft.

7:00PM – I put our offers into our Has Offers platform. Damn this is a nice platform. I can setup our payout, revenue per sale and it makes really nice conversion reports for me. Why didn't I take the time to set this up in the first place?

7:30PM I contacted all of our affiliates who were actively promoting and after apologizing and telling them I will make it right with them financially, asked them to please change their affiliate links to our HasOffers platform.

8:00PM I downloaded all the API documentation from our merchant gateway and dove in.

8:15PM I cloned our order form and had it post to my own script, which hit the merchant gateway direct instead of going through Infusionsoft.

8:30PM I was successfully processing credit cards with the new system I just wrote.

9:00PM I moved our entire conversion funnel over to Aweber. As I am doing this I am pissed at myself as to why I did not do this from the start. Aweber is 10x the platform that Infusionsoft is.

That's it. 2 hours. That's all it took for me to completely move off of Infusionsoft and onto a much more stable and robust platforms. I was back in business. We had moved on that fast. Why the hell didn't I do this before?

Friday morning my executive friend at Infusionsoft called me and said one of my email lists was the problem. He said there was excessive spam complaints and that they needed to roll back the import of those contacts.

I told him we had moved off of Infusionsoft and he can feel free to delete all 100,000+ contacts in my account. Just turn on the godamn affiliate links.

KEEP IN MIND I CAN STILL SEND EMAIL FROM OUR ACCOUNT AT THIS POINT.

He takes somewhat offense to this and tells me again that this has happened to "much bigger" people then me and they always come back stronger.

I admit to him that indeed this would make us stronger…. Because we would no longer be using their services.

I was also perplexed by how that was their excuse.

Lets recap what's gone on by this point:

Infusionsoft has shutoff all affiliate links costing me over $30,000.00. These are hard costs and are not counting profit.
Infusionsoft at no point tried to contact me to let me know they were shutting down my account
There is no indication in my Infusionsoft account that anything is wrong or disabled.

So far the only thing I keep getting is that:

It is my fault… although nobody at Infusionsoft can tell me what I did wrong.
This happens to a lot of people and they come out stronger for it (WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN!!!!).

24 more hours go by. Links still broken.

Sometime Saturday morning Tigh calls me and says that they finally got ahold of the guy who turned us off and it had nothing to do with us sending out email. Rather one of our affiliates "supposedly" sent a spam message to a spamcop honeypot.

When I contacted the affiliate he immediately gave me documentation for that email address including ip address, double opt in and other stuff.

Infusionsoft didn't care. They now required we delete that affiliate from our system. My response:

YES PLEASE FUCKING DELETE HIM.

Really? I mean REALLY???? You disable my business (or what would have if we didn't act so fast to move off) because of 1 spamcop report about an affiliate ?????

REALLY????

Geez I would have maybe just disabled that one affiliate…. Or notified me to disable that one affiliate OR I would have my account shutdown.

We were now turned back on…. Not that it mattered really… and their only excuse was that "they have some communication problems internally and are very sorry".

I told them not to worry… that I would be fine… but I was gong to never do business with them again and I was going to share my experience with the world. The support monkey said he understood.

But I dont think he did.

So in the end honestly I think we will look at this as a blip in the radar.

I paid 30k for a huge education and now have a rock solid setup.

I am not writing this telling you that you should not do business with Infusionsoft. I am just simply sharing my experience which I feel I owe my readers. Especially after I have recommended them before.