Volusion Shopping Cart Review
By Kirtok in Ecommerce, Reviews | 54 comments
I know how frustrating it is to find the right shopping cart solution for your business. I have worked with many small businesses and helped them finding the right solution for their needs.
Every ecommerce business has different needs just like real life brick and mortar businesses. Some of them start as home based, and some start larger with an initial investment. But they all have this question in mind;
What is the BEST shopping cart solution?
Very brief answer to this question is; There is not a solution called BEST shopping cart solution. If you want to start an ecommerce business, or if you are ready to upgrade your shopping cart, your question should be;
What is the RIGHT shopping cart solution for MY business?
The right shopping cart for my business may not be the right one for your business. Therefore, you should write down your needs step by step before starting to shop for a shopping cart solution. If you are planning to upgrade your shopping cart, start writing down the pitfalls, and bottlenecks within your business workflow. Maybe your shopping cart is not the problem, it is something else within your organization which you need to fix.
After a brief instruction about choosing the right shopping cart, I will review Volusion Shopping Cart, and share my experiences. Because it is sometimes very hard to find unbiased opinions of current users of a shopping cart written step by step. You can always find great information at forums, but most of them come from newbies, and might misdirect you.
Why Do I Review Volusion?
I am a current customer of Volusion Shopping Cart. I don’t work for Volusion nor I get paid for this review. After doing some research online, I was able to find only two very good and detailed reviews about Volusion Shopping Cart. They were both paid reviews, but very good ones. The only thing missing was these reviews were written by users who are not Volusion customers. So I thought, a detailed review written by a Volusion customer would give some more insights.
Please also visit these very well written Volusion Reviews I have mentioned:
- Andy Beard’s Review from AndyBeard.eu
- Yaro Starak’s Review from Entrepreneur’s Journey.
Before Volusion Shopping Cart
Our ecommerce site was launched as a Yahoo Store on August 2006. We decide to move to Volusion during May 2007. Yahoo had its pros and cons, but I won’t get into them for now, I might write another review for Yahoo Stores. I wanted to disclose this information before reviewing Volusion. Because you will read comparisons with Volusion and Yahoo Store within this review.
Volusion Shopping Cart Review Step by Step
1 ) Volusion, Inc. Corporate Information
My business ethic always tells me to check the company behind the product before dealing with it.
I have visited Volusion’s website to find more information about the company.
If you take out the nicely put marketing sentences from 4 paragraphs of Volusion’s About Us Page, this is the only solid information you will get:
- Volusion, Inc. is in business since 1999. (My note: Archive.org’s earliest record for Volusion.com goes back to April 06, 2004.)
- Company has offices in Simi Valley, CA and Austin, TX
I had to leave About Page and find Contact Page to find the contact details for the company:
Corporate Contact Details for Volusion, Inc.
Toll-Free Phone:
1-800-646-3517
CALIFORNIA OFFICE:
Volusion, Inc.
1736 Erringer Rd
Simi Valley, CA 93065
TEXAS OFFICE:
Volusion, Inc.
4926 Spicewood Springs
Austin, TX 78759
If you think about so many shopping cart softwares out there without even a toll free number, Volusion’s corporate background and overall company information gives me the trust I need to get into business with them. Volusion gets a thumbs up for my first criteria.
2 ) Volusion as an All in One Ecommerce Solution
Volusion claims its shopping cart as an All in One Solution, and even though it has missing parts for an all in one ecommerce solution, it is as close as you can get for the price.
Pros: Volusion has all the basic components needed for an ecommerce business. You can upload products, track inventory through the backend, do your purchase orders, make the products live with one click, bulk edit products and/or categories. Order fulfillment is pretty straight forward, and 100 times better than Yahoo Store’s. Reporting functionality needs some work, but offers basic data. Users with SQL knowledge can generate more detailed reports. Before we have upgraded to Version 5, we were promised a much better reporting, but it wasn’t much improved.
Cons: Some basic components of an ecommerce business have either limited functionality or missing. Email marketing is an important part of online business. Volusion’s email marketing is limited, but Aweber has announced their integration with Volusion, and I was happy like a baby. Aweber is my favorite email newsletter and autoresponder solution. For higher volume ecommerce businesses barcode functionality is missing, or it is not functional at all. Questions asked about barcode functionality at Volusion Forums such as this one were never answered by Volusion Staff. Volusion packages comes with very limited disk space and bandwith, I will get into this detailly.
3 ) Volusion Pricing
Volusion has a limited 14 Day Free Trial, so you have the chance at least to try the software before you buy.
I couldn’t decide to give thumbs up or thumbs down for Volusion’s pricing. Very important factor to consider is; Volusion charges a monthly fee, and they do not take a percentage of your sales. This was the most tempting part for my business, because Yahoo’s Pricing structure was monthly fee plus the percentage of your sales. You may end up paying high fees if you have a fast growing business. Do your homework, and calculate your numbers to see how much this might affect your business.
Volusion has 5 main monthly packages from Steel to Platinum. Volusion packages’ details:
- Steel Package: $29.95/month includes 20 products
- Bronze Package: $49.95/month includes 100 products
- Silver Package: $79.95/month includes 250 products
- Gold Package: $99.95/month includes 1000 products
- Platinum Package: $197/month for unlimited products
Very important: Volusion creates a new Product ID (SKU) for each product option. Something you may not find at Volusion Pricing is these options count as products.
So you have 10 shirts with 10 available colors each. You will need the Bronze Package, because Volusion will count your product total as 100 products. This is an important piece of information to consider if you have too many options within your products.
Bandwith Pricing:
Volusion has servers hosted by RackSpace, and over their package bandwith limits, Volusion currently charges just $0.01 per additional MB of bandwidth, or $10 per GB.
This number is very high comparing the hosting industry average prices, and Sitesell, who in many ways are competitors to Volusion offer unlimited bandwidth.
Even though this might not look like a big issue, it might become a big issue very soon.
We have the Platinum package with around 2000 products, and very low traffic for the months of July and August, and as a big surprise, today I have received an invoice for $288 instead of $197 (Platinum package monthly price). I went to check my stats in Google Analytics and was very surprised to see the overage charges with my traffic.
Volusion’s Platinum Package has 15Gb bandwith limit, and my Google Analtyics details are:
Last 30 Days Average
371 unique visitors/day
2499 page views/day
6.73 pages/visit
But when I check Volusion Stats, it’s so high that it’s not even comparable to anything. I know Google Analytics will miss some visitors (who don’t enable javascript), and it might not be 100% accurate, but how much would be the actual difference? Unfortunately, Volusion Stats shows SEVERAL times higher bandwith usage than Google Analytics.
I have posted a question/comment about this at Volusion Forums, and it didn’t get a reply from Volusion Staff.
There is a work around for bandwith problem. You can host your images at a different server, and instead of uploading your images to each product, you can enter the image URL’s. But it brings an extra step of work. Because Volusion automatically resizes your images for each needed size while uploading, but if you will upload to a different server, you need to download Volusion’s offline thumbnail generator.
Bandwith, email newsletter, and live chat features comes with extra pricing if you outgrow their minimum numbers. Remember to consider these within your budget planning.
Volusion also offers Semi dedicated and dedicated servers, and for my business it looks like we need to move to semi dedicated server ASAP. You might view corporate solution pricing page for these options starting at $349/month. You also have the option to purchase Volusion Software, host it yourself, and fully customize it. I saw it around $10.000 but I couldn’t find the information right now.
Overall, I can’t say Volusion is cheap, or expensive. Consider the extra charges, and decide yourself.
4 ) Volusion SEO
Volusion claims it is; Completely Search Engine Optimized. Compared to other shopping cart solutions, Volusion does a pretty good job about SEO. But there are still missing parts, and important parts.
Volusion lets you customize meta tags (title, description, keywords, alt tags) which is a big plus for search engines. Volusion’s category and product URL structure is very search engine friendly if you turn on the SEO feature. But search engines still catch your SEO friendly and Non-SEO friendly URL’s. Volusion needs to work on this little bit more. Google might consider the same product page as a duplicate content, and degrade the value of this page by sending it to the supplimental index.
Volusion does not use the Header tags with their templates. This is a very important issue needs to be fixed. Most of the shopping carts already assigns H1 tag to the product and category names within the page. We manually create an H1 tag for categories at the category description field. This is an extra step of work, it should be within the template. Since Volusion’s template system is not 100% flexible, this is the best solution for now.
Overall, Volusion is search engine friendly, but not “Completely Search Engine Optimized” as advertised.
5 ) Volusion Support
If you have a basic question support is very helpful. They read and reply from the manual right away. But if you have a complex problem, then you are in trouble.
If you are lucky and your question is handled by a knowledgable support staff, you might get an answer, otherwise you need to constantly email and call until you find your question’s answer.
I was going to give a thumbs up for the Volusion Support but we had an incident which changed my mind. One friday morning couple of weeks ago our site was down around 8.30am (eastern time). And without any explanation or any given reason we had to wait until 12.30pm to get our problem fixed. Our site was down (not accessable) for exactly 4 hours. We had to wait for their server people wake up and go to the office to fix the problem (in California). During or after the problem we did not get any detailed explanation about the problem. There was a server problem.
After many emails and phone calls I couldn’t reach anybody from the management team. But my request to speak with a manager was returned that afternoon. Gary Spillman called from Volusion, he was very friendly and tried to help. I also had the chance to explain him other problems we were having. My special thanks goest to Gary Spillman who’s spent time and sent detailed answers about my questions.
Volusion’s servers are at Rackspace. I haven’t heard any 4 hours downtime with Rackspace servers before. But it has happened to us anyway. I hope it will not repeat, especially during the christmas season.
In case of emergency issues, you are on your own. Do not accept much from Volusion Support.
6 ) Volusion Forums
When I was researching before I have moved to Volusion, I have spent quite some time on Volusion Forums. Everything sounded so perfect, or close to perfect. After I’ve become a customer, I was trying to spend time, but suddenly one of my posts has disappeared. Overall I’m happy with Volusion and I keep recommending it to my friends, and readers. I haven’t written anything against the product, nor did bad PR.
Sometimes it is hard to have a forum for a commercial product. You will have competitors acting like customers and talking against your product. These posts might be moderated, but there is a thin line between moderation and cencorship.
As a customer I must have the right to share my problems with the software, and ask for new features, improvements, etc. If you don’t want this public, then make a private forum for only customers.
Moderating your happy customers’ perfectly fine questions at the forum might turn against Volusion.
One of the main reasons which made me to write this unbiased review about Volusion was the cencorship at the Volusion Forums. I hope the management team will reconsider their policies about moderation.
7 ) Templates & Design
Volusion’s template system is pretty flexible. With the version 5, they have more free templates. If you know basic html, you can easily modify the Volusion Templates. Volusion also offers customization services, but they are pricey compared to freelancers out there.
Volusion needs to seperate code, and design fully. I believe they are working on it since I see improvements with the version 5. But overall their template system is much easier and better than many solutions out there.
8 ) Checkout, Shipping and Payment Options
Volusion has one page checkout, and very user friendly. You can customize and add extra options to the checkout.
Your visitors have 3 options for the checkout. If they are returning customers, they can login and complete their purchase. If they are new customers, they can easily create and account or do an anonymous purchase without registering an account.
You can accept credit cards if you have a merchant and gateway account without any problems. PayPal integration is pretty good. With version 5, volusion promised a better Google Checkout integration. We currently offer all credit cards and paypal as payment options. We were planning to offer Google Checkout also, but when we realised that we had to create all shipping rules and tables for Google, we decided not to use Google Checkout. I don’t know if this is Volusion’s or Google’s fault, but it doesn’t make sense for us to create each shipping rule table for Google.
If you use Fedex, UPS, or USPS Volusion’s shipping system is great and very flexible. As a DHL user, we were promised a full DHL integration with version 5, but it came with bugs. Volusion shipping system pulls DHL rates, but most of them are not accurate. We have already lost money on it, and our support ticket about this was simply refused by saying “There is no problem with Volusion’s DHL Live Rate integration, please contact DHL”. We are 100% sure that DHL is working fine (other shipping softwares we use with DHL API proves it). As I have mentioned at support review, if you have a problem which the customer support can’t fix or doesn’t want to get into, they will simply refuse the problem, or blame others about it.
One very positive feature with Volusion 5 is the multiple warehouse option. We haven’t tried it yet, but I’m sure it will help many small businesses which use multiple warehouses or dropshipping.
9 ) Volusion CRM System
We have been using Kayako Support Suite for our email ticket and live chat system. It does a great job. We have Kayako’s hosted version, and pay $39.95/month for both ticket and live chat systems. Our live chat button was at our site’s header (on all pages). It worked fine with Yahoo Store. We had to remove it at the checkout page due to SSL error prompt window, but we couldn’t do that with Volusion. Currently we can only use Kayako live chat image on the homepage, and we are looking for a solution.
Volusion heavily promotes its “Free Live Chat” feature. It might be enough for beginners, but if you like to run a fully functional Live Chat system, then you will need their Premium Live Chat software. It costs $29.95 per operator. You can compare free and premium live chat features here at Volusion’s site.
We will either pay $499.95 for Kayako and purchase it. Then host it on an SSL enabled server. This way we will keep our great email ticket management system, and live chat. Or we will move to Volusion CRM and pay monthly fees. Main concern here is the per operator cost of Volusion Live Chat.
I also need to check Volusion Email Ticket System since I couldn’t find detailed information about its features and pricing as of now.
Even though Volusion’s CRM system might come with an extra cost per month, Volusion is one of the few companies that offer a fully integrated CRM system. Overall, it is a big thumbs up.
10 ) Marketing
There are many great marketing features integrated with Volusion. Some of these features needs improvement or a paid membership for their full versions, but overall Volusion has one of the largest feature set for marketing.
Some of Volusion’s Marketing Features:
- Gift Certificate: Great feature, both online and offline delivery options.
- Coupons: Perfect coupon system. Create many types of coupons, very flexible.
- Export Feeds to Third Party Shopping Marketplaces: I haven’t tried this yet, but looks very promising.
- 5 Tier Affiliate System: Not very advanced, but very simple and easy to use. Would be a great marketing tool for small ecommerce businesses.
- Built-in E-Mail Marketing/Newsletter Marketing: Said before, limited but builtin. You can easily integrate Aweber if you need a more powerful email newsletter system.
- Phone Order System with Sales Rep Tracking: Excellent new feature. Automatically credits the customer rep who took the phone order. You can run reports about this and give bonuses to customer reps.
- Quantity Discounting: Works fine, but needs little improvement on the product page.
11 ) Inventory Management
Volusion’s inventory management is as close to PERFECT as it gets. There are so many options and features within inventory and categories, and I honestly don’t know which ones to list. Just a few of the most important inventory management features comes with Volusion:
Pricing Flexibility: You can have list price, regular price, discount price, rename the wording for these features (e.g. show OUR SPECIAL PRICE to the customer). Also you can have multiple pricing levels. e.g. Setup wholesale and retail prices, and show retail prices to all visitors, and retail customers, and show wholesale prices to only wholesale customers. This is a great feature, and we use it to setup retail, wholesale, and VIP customer levels and pricing. No more wholesale phone orders, and manual tracking of wholesale orders. You can also have recurring pricing. We do not use this feature but it might be very helpful for subscription type sites.
Realtime Inventory Tracking: You can track your inventory realtime, add vendor price, and always see the profit margins, and many more detailed reports.
Vendor Information: There’s a whole section for vendor information. Vendor price, UPC Barcode, automatic purchase ordering, manual purchase ordering, and many more features.
Digital Products: Volusion supports digital products. Customers receive an email with a link to a downloadable digital product. They can also re-download these products within their account. Great feature, and not offered by many shopping carts.
Multiple Categories and Multiple Warehouses: You can assign a product to multiple categories, and multiple warehouses.
There are so many options within inventory management. We have found almost all available features offered for inventory management within Volusion Package.
12 ) Order Fulfillment
Order fulfillment becomes easier with Volusion. It is easy to do batch processing. Each order has a private comment field to enter comments about that order for inhouse staff communication, and also a comment field to update the customer about order. All emails are automatically sent when an order is updated. There is a great search feature within orders.
With the new version, you can easily take phone orders. It is also very easy to keep track of problem orders. Until an order is fully completed you can leave it as opened. Also an order can be partially shipped which helps in many cases. You can upload several tracking numbers per order also.
Overall, Volusion’s Order Fulfillment System is one of the best I have ever seen. Much much better than very expensive softwares’ such as Order Motion.
13 ) Web 2.0 Friendly? User Generated Content
Web 2.0 is all about user generated content. Volusion has Product Reviews, but not much more. You cannot even easily integrate a blog within volusion. You either need to setup a subdomain and host it somewhere else, or face many problems trying to redirect your blog to your store URL with blogger.
Before it is too late, Volusion might consider adding more Web 2.0 social marketing and user generated content features.
Even only a “customer reviews” feature which comes fully integrated with Volusion makes it a great marketing tool for your business. Only this feature might cost you hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a Yahoo Store customization.
14 ) Multiple Staff Management
Volusion has one of the best multiple staff management system. When you create an account for a staff, you can customize all permission levels within one page.
Before, even our temporary staff had access to ALL parts of our business including reporting, daily sales, etc. But now, each staff has his/her own access level, and never sees anything more than they need to see.
This feature is a big thumbs up compared to many other solutions out there.
15 ) Stability
One of the key factors to decide a shopping cart software for us was the “international language support”. We have mentioned this as a first question to Volusion, and decided to go with Volusion when we saw this feature.
But unfortunately when we moved to Version 5, international language support was gone. Such an easy issue (integrating hardcoded UTF-8 meta tags to storefront and backend) has become a big problem with Volusion. After being on the phone and email for 2 weeks, they have fixed the problem. Now, it’s broken again. We have told them exactly what the problem is and how to fix it. Even though it was fixed for a while, now they offer a temporary solution. If we decide to move to another solution from Volusion, we will have to correct each product manually, because Volusion’s great inventory export feature will export our products with all broken characters. Hoping to see a permanent solution for this.
International language support might not be a big issue for many businesses, but think about having the most important feature of Volusion removed while upgrading to a latest version. Maybe that feature was the main one which made you decide to move to Volusion, and now it’s gone.
Stability is an extremely important part of software business, and we hope to see Volusion take this as a friendly advice.
We also hear complaints at Volusion forums from members who have upgraded to Version 5 and lost all of their custom work. These people trusted Volusion and spent time/money to have custom code for better usage of Volusion, but now Volusion tells them, hey we have a new system and your custom work will not work. This is not a good stability practice for Volusion.
I did not intent to write a review this long, but I wanted to share as much experience as I can about my experiences.
I hope this unbiased Volusion review will help my visitors to make their decisions.
I will be glad to update/edit any information above if I made any mistakes. I will also try to update this review when Volusion rolls new features, this way we will try to keep this review most up to date.
Please share your questions, comments, and reviews here under this topic.
This review contains solely my personal opinions, and Volusion is more than welcome to answer any of the topics officially or unofficially, I’ll be including their replies/comments.
Since there is not a “Best Shopping Cart Solution”, instead the “Right Shopping Cart Solution for My Business”, please decide yourself if Volusion is the right solution for your business.
I currently use Volusion for my business, and do not have any short term plans for moving. Therefore, currently Volusion is the right solution for my business.
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I’m an entrepreneur living in NYC. I enjoy the benefits and challenges of running my own companies every day. I share my experiences, success and failure stories and best practices here at this blog. I also consult a number of ecommerce businesses around the globe. More about 
Andy Beard | Sep 3, 2007 | Reply
Hi Kirtok
That is a really impressive review
Some things I thought about whilst reading it.
Is there some way through redirects such that you can force the Volusion system to store images etc in an offline location and still use their interface?
Is the coupon system linked into the affiliate program so that with phone orders affiliates can still gain credit for the sale?
Bandwidth could well be due to the search engines crawling your site. If you don’t get traffic from image searches, you might want to block them from your images, or limit the frequency images are crawled in your sitemap.xml (though they might not pay much heed)
Kirtok | Sep 3, 2007 | Reply
Andy, thanks for the nice comment.
For each product, you have an option of either uploading your images, or entering a URL. So you can easily store your product images at a different server. This is what we are planning to do. I’m sure this will save us the bandwith overage.
As far as I know, cuopon system is not linked to the affiliate program. When you enter a phone order, it shows the person who’s entering the phone order as default. You can manually change the sales rep from a drop down within the phone order page. But you only have the option of choosing another staff member. It’d be a great addition to have the affiliates list within this drop down menu. I will have to ask volusion if they we can credit affiliates for a phone order, if not, I will submit a feature request.
This is a great suggestion, and I never thought about this. Volusion creates your sitemap automatically. I have to check and see what I can do about editing the frequency of crawl rate.
Thanks for very informative questions. I’ll update my answers when I hear from Volusion.
Iris Faber | Sep 3, 2007 | Reply
Very very good review. Overall, I love Volusion. We tried finding others that were just as good, and are still searching.
Volusion is in the process of upgrading to V5, so I asked them when they are gonna upgrade. They said I can be a beta tester….so I said yea. They mentioned that they successfully upgrade about 30 websites with no problems.
They tried to upgrade mine twice, and I can’t sign into the back end. I get an error, ‘Unable to open the ile “\PlanInfo.cdx” because of error “Object required”.’
So now I cannot process orders for our customers. We are still waiting to get into the admin area after chatting with support 2 to 3 times. So support is a thumbs down.
Kirtok | Sep 3, 2007 | Reply
Hi Iris
I know Volusion lets you upgrade before a stable new version is released. We were one of the beta testers for V5. Other than the international language character problem, we did not have any main issues.
You should definitely call Volusion ASAP. Your problem is far worse than anything I’ve seen. This is emergency, you NEED to access the backend, and process orders.
I hope it will be solved very soon. Please let us know the updates.
As I said within my review, every solution has pros and cons, but for my business, Volusion seems like the right choice for now.
Good luck with your Volusion store.
Michelle | Sep 4, 2007 | Reply
Kirtok,
It seems as if you put quite a bit of thought into this review. We put a lot of effort into giving you the features you need to succeed online, and it sounds like you are using many of the capabilities of our software. Please note that Volusion is very interested in improving our service to our merchants, so your comments will be noted in these efforts.
I do apologize that your site went down that morning. We do everything we can to ensure that our sites have as minimal downtime as possible. Although four hours of downtime is too much, your issue was escalated to our primary Tech Support Manager and the issue was resolved as soon as we were able. We do focus on uptime issues during the holidays especially since this is a very important time for our customers and traffic tends to be higher than usual.
Search engines do tend to take up more bandwidth than merchants expect. You can track this traffic in your control panel and can block spiders as need be. I have seen Yahoo spiders take up quite a bit of bandwidth in particular.
I sincerely hope you are happy with your Volusion store. We strive to make our stores as efficient and effective as possible and will continue to dedicate ourselves to your success.
Regards,
Michelle
http://www.volusion.com
Kirtok | Sep 11, 2007 | Reply
UPDATE about Volusion V5 DHL Integration:
Volusion promised a DHL Shipping Carrier integration with version 5. We have been waiting for this since we ship mostly with DHL.
After many trials, and tests, I can clearly conclude that Volusion is NOT integrated with DHL.
I have also received a confirmation from Volusion Support about this.
Volusion vs DHL Integration Problems:
1) Volusion never pulls the correct DHL rates.
2) If the total rate is a decimal number, it will not pull DHL Live Rates. (if your order’s total weight is 1.4lbs it will not pull any rates, it has to be 1 lbs or 2 lbs in this case).
I keep wondering; Why would a company advertise an important addition to their product when this addition is NOT working at all.
As usual, my questions to volusion support were replied with a nice tone; “We are sorry that this problem is not solved, but we always try our best to help our customers”.
hiutopor | Sep 18, 2007 | Reply
Hi
Very interesting information! Thanks!
G’night
Reece Muru | Sep 19, 2007 | Reply
Great review Kirtok.
We are looking at changing from AceFlex to Volusion due to very poor local AceFlex support (we are in New Zealand). I was very impressed with Volusion’s website and product features, especially the online training videos. A similar company to us based in Australia is using Volusion and I asked the owner what he thought of Volusion and he gave a “thumbs Up” for the product, but said their service was very poor.
Can any other International (non-US) users let me know what they think of Volusion?
Thanks
Reece
www.tactical.co.nz
Amanda Sherwin | Oct 15, 2007 | Reply
Very impressive review. I’ve been using Volusion since 2005, and would like to add a couple of things.
First, Volusion is currently experiencing difficulty with ScanAlert on several customers’ sites. ScanAlert is “bombarding” these sites, leading to significantly increased bandwith and overages. For example, I have the $77 package, and have never gone over it till now. In August the overage charges were $28, and in September the overage charges were $13. I’ve talked to both Volusion and ScanAlert, and they simply point at each other. Volusion refuses to waive the overage charges, saying they’ve incurred costs, and ScanAlert refuses to reimburse, saying it’s Volusion’s problem. volusion also suggests that the customer can cancel their ScanAlert subscription to resolve the problem. Since Volusion originally recommended ScanAlert, this “you’re on your own ” attitude is very aggravating.
Second, if you try to use Volusion’s marketing team, forget it. I asked them to fix one problem last December, that was occurring because my site has a custom design. They assured me the problem had been fixed, but it kept recurring. I spoke, left messages and emailed the Marketing Director, James Gonzalez over several months. He responded once, said he’d look into it, and has not responded to any follow up contacts. With Volusion’s rigid scripts, custom designs can create significant problems.
Just my observations as a customer.
Amanda
Jeff | Oct 31, 2007 | Reply
The Volusion bandwidth charges are very frustrating and definitely add significantly to the cost of the published packages if you generate decent traffic. I find it akin to the old “cell phone pricing” where everybody always went over their allocated minutes and found unpleasant surprises in their bill.
We almost immediately encountered overages when we started with Volusion and have since upgraded to the highest plan. However, our bill is still over $1,000 per month due to the bandwidth we generate with no sign of it retreating. We will look into hosting our images on another server, but it seems extremely antiquated to do so and we would LOVE To see Volusion step up and provide pricing plans for mid-sized online retailers.
We have asked for a customized proposal but have been told that there are no plans to offer customized pricing plans at this time. Argh.
Kirtok | Oct 31, 2007 | Reply
Hi Jeff
What’s the average daily unique visitor number for your site?
Are you on the dedicated server plan also?
Kirtok
Jeff | Oct 31, 2007 | Reply
Hi Kirtok,
We have about 3500 uniques a day and are on the dedicated server plan.
We do not use Scan Alert so it does not chew any bandwidth (I was never convinced that adding the word “Hacker” to my website even if modified by the word “Safe” would positively impact sales, lol).
It looks like spiders ate up about 9GB in bandwidth this month too with MSNBot being the most hungry at 5GB.
Although I’d like to see Volusion implement more Web 2.0 and revenue generating features, I do give their overall service a thumbs up, like you.
Just would like to see pricing consideration that meets the needs of higher bandwidth users.
Kirtok | Oct 31, 2007 | Reply
Very helpful information Jeff, thank you.
I think volusion should definitely consider mid-sized online retailers. Many of the small businesses grow, and grow quickly. Moving to a different solution might not be the right choice for the short term. I definitely agree with you, overall we’re also very happy with volusion.
I think if volusion finds a solution to the bandwith charges, and improves its customer service, they might be the best choice in the market.
Thanks again for taking the time to answer my questions.
Considering Volusion | Nov 3, 2007 | Reply
Kirtok - Great review!!! It’s good to see these Volusion folks doing some PR work on your site.
Can anyone provide alternatives to Volusion?
1. Also, for the small business owners just starting out, Volusion’s bandwidth issues shouldn’t be a big deal right?
2. How “no-string attached” is their cancellation policy? I’m planning to use Volusion for the first seven months till I code my own system.
Thanks for this awesome review!
Jeff | Nov 5, 2007 | Reply
We did 6.3 GB in our first month of sales and had to upgrade from our inital “Silver” subscription. By month six, we were at 25GB, well eclipsing the maximum bandwidth of the Platinum plan which only allows 15GB.
Jeremy | Nov 16, 2007 | Reply
As a current Volusion customer, I found this review to be mostly fair. Having said that, I’m amazed at the whole bandwith issue. We are a small delivery service in Madison,WI only and usually get under 500 unique visitors per day. Yet somehow we had to pay $80 extra this month (up from our standard $99 bill) due to using over twice our allotted bandwith. Bottom line, bandwith should not be this much of an issue for a basic site with nothing more then a couple of graphics.
I also was less then impressed with the answers I received from customer care when I called regarding this issue. Basically I was told, check out why you are using so much bandwith and make a change. My site doesn’t need a change, Volusion does!
Jason | Nov 17, 2007 | Reply
I’m building my site currently with Volusion. It was a difficult decision - who shoudl I go with? Out of the box websites are never perfect - but when you consider the sort of functionality they provide could cost anywhere from $10 - 50k with a web dev/design company, you can’t complain too much. Support is ok if simple. If complicated they simply don’t respond.
Can anyone explain how I manually enter h1 tags? I’m getting pro copywriting done so I want to ensure I utilise this properly. Help would be much appreciated.
Cheers
J
John | Dec 5, 2007 | Reply
Kirtok,
Thanks so much for publishing your review! I’m doing my research and am close to choosing Volusion. If you or someone could answer a few questions for me, I’d really appreciate it.
1. V’s merchant + gateway fee seems high at .34/trans, even though the 2.17% is good. Quickbooks Merchant Services are cheaper and I use QB acc’t. software. But V’s website doesn’t list them as a merchant service they support. QB Merchant CSR says it will work, but its the cart/software integration they can’t guarantee. What’s up with this? Does anyone out there use QB Merchant services and acc’t software with Volusion?
2. I’m hoping this is a really naive question, but after a fair amount of research GoDaddy seems to at least market the most similar set of cart features and they are way cheaper then V. Is anyone in a position to give a top-line comparison of the two?
Thanks!
david | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
How was this resolved? Are you still with volusion?
Dennis | Jan 3, 2008 | Reply
I recently sold a business that was a past customer of Volusion. With that business we had a lot of sales of the same item each day. With those sales I wanted to bulk process the printing of mailing labels along with emails to the customers to notify them that their item was being shipped. The only way I could do this with Volusion was to download the sales, process them through another company to print the postage on the label, then upload the shipping information back into volusion. All of this was extremely time consuming.
I am now looking for another solution for our new company and I don’t want the same problem. Is there a better way?
Also, We could not work with Volusion unless we used Firefox. M.S.Explore took forever to download pages from Volusion. Has this imporved?
SkippyJones | Jan 4, 2008 | Reply
My two cents is that you folks are being way too easy on Volusion regarding their bandwidth scam. I was quite excited about this solution, and have spent quite a bit of time researching carts. I was floored by the bandwidth pricing. This is bait and switch on unsuspecting small business owners, to say the least. Bandwidth is simply NOT AN ISSUE with most hosting providers - at least not down in the single digit GB realm! For goodness sakes. It is a bottom-of-the-barrel marketing practice that reflects very poorly on a company whose r&d has made a good product. I mean look at the logic of it - you have to buy their ‘corporate’ plan - at the equivalent monthly cost of leasing a high performance sports car - to get a measley 60GB of bandwidth????? For 7.99 a month there are plenty of hosting companies that will provide you about..well…uhh….20 times that. 20 times the bandwidth for one hundred times less the cost. Well, buyer beware, and I’m passing on Volusion, and am quite angry at having spent the better part of 4 hours tonight getting excited about a product that is run by a bunch of scam artists. Their design services, by the way, are also ridiculously, i mean ridiculously, overpriced. What I smell is contempt for their customers, and prospects, and I’m not impressed.
athensoh | Jan 12, 2008 | Reply
A great review and discussion - thanks!
I am considering moving from Yahoo Stores, so my main concern is how easy (or painful) it was to migrate from Y to Volusion, including transfer of the catalog and description, as well as the entire hosting matter. My domain was purchased through Yahoo too, so was it easy to set up new forwarding, name servers, email, etc.?
Thanks!
Nicole | Jan 24, 2008 | Reply
I am so glad I found this review — I am currently in the 14 day trial. The issues on bandwith charges are interesting. Where can you track your bandwith usage and does anyone have any steps that you can take to keep it low?
Nicole | Jan 24, 2008 | Reply
As I am finalizing my store — I contacted volusion to see if they had any stats on my current usage (as a demo). And someone named Kristina, would not give me this information. Stating that they don’t have that information for demo stores — which is absurd because the pages are on their servers and they should be able to view the total usage of my web space. Not impressed on that end with the level of support. If they are attempting to convert trial customers through the purchase cycle… they are not succeeding!
Richard | Jan 26, 2008 | Reply
I am a current customer that may be leaving Volusion very soon.
I cannot find out why my visits and page views show up to 5 times more in volusion than google? They say the data comes from raw data on their server???
Google shows one visit and volusion shows 4 to 5 visits every time.
The Stats history takes an extremely long time to load. 30 min or more sometimes.
I have tried many times to VERIFY their stats but have been unable to and cannot find a solution at this time.
Kirtok | Jan 30, 2008 | Reply
SkippyJones; Bandwith seems like the major problem from many volusion customers’ perspectives. We hope volusion listens to us, and works this out.
athensoh; yes migrating from yahoo to volusion was pretty easy.
Nicole; I am sorry to hear your experience during the trial. I hope sbd from volusion is reading this.
James | Feb 4, 2008 | Reply
Hi, Great review kirtok, i know averyone has said it but its good to hear a actual user being frank about the product.
I am from the UK and after looking at lots of options i came across volusion late saturday night. I seem like a dream solution. I am totally unfamiliar with website building and havent got the first clue. Therefore this seemed a good choice. I went down the usual ebay/paypal route to see what it offered and the charge for selling on their site would be like £13 an item, which is the profit margin i am working on going into ebay’s deep pockets. So this system seems to provide a much better solution. I am a young busisness man and I am new to all of this really, but very excited about the possiblitys this volusion may give me in order to sell my products.
Speaking to the support line [on live chat] last night as it was a sunday evening and no sale reps were available. I found the serivce to be slow and I had to spend an hour to ask a few simple questions. The serice was polite and she apppologies for the slow service. As a potential UK customer i will only be able to use the live chat sytem, calling it totally out of the question apart from emergencys as the cost is astronomical. Therefore am worried about the level of serivice through this support as i cannot in effect yell down the phone to make people pay attention !!!
I also wonder about the compatability with mac computer as i am a recent convert, buying an new imac and iphone. I wonder if i will beable to recieve emails through the iphone as i am away from home alot. Whether they are compatable. I dont anticipate you will know this but its worth asking.
As a Uk website i will want to make sure that the recognised uk payment and security features are present and accounted [increasing customer assurance], and that prices are displayed and calculated in sterling pounds and potentically euros, as it will be no good in dollars at the moment.
Well i seem to have rambled on for to long, i hope you are able to enlighten me, in the not to distant future as i need to sort this out quicky.
James
Tushar | Feb 7, 2008 | Reply
This is a short comment. We are in the UK, having been with volusion (2 sites) since Dec.2006.
Overall, we have found Volusion excellent! It would be nice to have greater access to their development people.
I am interested to learn of the bandwith usage issue, as we have just been clobbered with an additonal $50 for bandwidth that we have no idea where it came from. It just shot up the last month. I certainly will be taking this up.
Other issue in the UK - Have been trying to get Volusion to incorporate a UK payment gateway called cardstream into the payment system. There is no word from development and we cannot reach development by phone. Cust.services who have been helpful say it is now in development’s hands. The payment gateway company is also getting frustrated.
We have also just found we cannot use googlebase as googlebase will not accept VAT exclusive pricing, which is what Volusion produces. Have sent email to support. Overall, though, googlebase export works like a treat if only it would allow vat inclusive prices to be uploaded.
Support can be patchy, depending upon who you get. Somebody mentioned Kristina, who we have found to be more of an obstacle rather than a help. Often she failed to understand the issue and appeared to block all attempt at moving forward. In contrast, Tara is excellent. Each time, she has come back with very positive suggestions and we have managed to sort a number of major problems, 2 of them being integration with googlebase and google checkout.
We mainly use live chat for support. I would be interested in other Uk users’ comments
Tushar
Robert | Feb 14, 2008 | Reply
We have several sites, OS Commerce, Miva Merchant, and Volusion. I would say the right site is not necessarily vendor dependent (unless it is a little home business) but more dependent on having a professional team behind the platform to tweak it to high performance. Hard to find this kind of shop however.
I would recommend a look at non transactional fee based packages. PDG Software, Miva Merchant, AceFlex all have robust features and end up doing a better job at much less cost.
Kenric | Mar 5, 2008 | Reply
“Very important: Volusion creates a new Product ID (SKU) for each product option. Something you may not find at Volusion Pricing is these options count as products.
So you have 10 shirts with 10 available colors each. You will need the Bronze Package, because Volusion will count your product total as 100 products. This is an important piece of information to consider if you have too many options within your products.”
I just talked to Volusion about this. They said that if you are using their inventory system for each product that the above is true.
So if I have ABC Shirt available in Pink and Green and S,M & L and I want the Volusion system to track inventory on Pink smalls, Pink mediums, etc… then these will count as 6 products. However if I just want the inventory system to track ABC shirts, then its 1 product. Or only pink and green ABC shirts, then its 2 products.
Bradley | Mar 7, 2008 | Reply
Volusions bandwidth charges seem to be excessive compared to what is out there. They claim its because they host at rackspace, which is more expensive. This may be true, but Godaddy is a HUGE company and seems to delivery 1000 times the bandwidth for 100 times less the cost. The other point of interest I have recently seen is that volusion charges $100 to “install” a 3rd party SSL Cert, while they charge $79 a year for theres. So basically this equals you basically having to purchase their SSL for way more then say Godaddy which is $29 a year. I complained about this to support and they claim the reason is because it takes a lot of “time, money” to install SSL cert from 3rd partys and that there are security concerns when going with an outside SSL cert. provider. I find this to be completely bogus. It doesn’t take very much time to install SSL at all and could probably be automated to the most major SSL providers, which Godaddy is one of them. As far as “security” is concerned I would argue that Godaddy is their own CA, while Volusion appears to use an outside CA. These types of business practices are very annoying and I am sure drive customers AWAY from Volusion’s offering, even though it is pretty good in terms of features.
Ed | Mar 15, 2008 | Reply
Having experience with some storefronts, I was pretty excited to migrate to volusion until I learned about all the bandwidth issues. It seems whatever package you choose, you would need to at least double the cost per month in overage and one of my sites even the platinum package at 15GB is limiting… All in all, not sure if this is suitable for anyone who wants to grow their company.
Sam | Mar 15, 2008 | Reply
So you have 10 shirts with 10 available colors each. You will need the Bronze Package, because Volusion will count your product total as 100 products. This is an important piece of information to consider if you have too many options within your products.”
—-
That is right. This is why I am looking at CoreCommerce (www.corecommerce.com). They are launching in April and don’t count options against you. BTW I am one of their beta testers. It is a real sharp looking system. Competes on features with Volusion with a much easier to use admin interface.
SESOwizard | Mar 25, 2008 | Reply
I’ve been a customer for a couple of years- 2 stores.
Re: above comments:
- the products with options can definitely be a problem. Even if you are not tracking inventory, if you want to generate specific product codes to drop ship, the only way you can do that is with the inventory function. I have shirts in 22 colors , 5 sizes, and 3 styles- that’s 332 “products” in their system. Rightfully so? Yes, but obviously, you need the most expensive plan, even with 5 items. In order to generate a PO with a separate line for each shirt with a different color, size & style, you’d want different product ID’s.
- support via ticket I’ve found to be generally fast, never waited more than a few minutes if I call tech support. live chat- forget it, long waits & people who can’t give answers.
- stats- their web stats are completely useless, other than researching keyword referrals- use Google Analytics instead
NEW
My biggest issue is since upgrading to V5, we’ve lost ROOT ACCESS. This is a major issue. There are so many needs for root access. Their solution is 301 redirects to a subfolder any time you need to put something in root. That only works part of the time and is not a very good solution for SEO.
- google site map- auto generated. for some reason it only picks up products, not any pages you may have made to build content. Again, since you cannot access root, you really can’t easily create your map and direct google to that instead.
- H1 tags- logically, all product name short would be h1 tags. Volusion has no H1 tags auto generated and adding them is a manual workaround for every product.
- links- Volusion requires you link to them on every page, or you pay them $25/mth. They do not offer a customer directory that could potentially boost your SEO, unlike every other major cart out there.
I like most things about the Volusion solution, but if I could find another alternative, I’d leave in a minute just to get back root access so I can add my own feeds and other SEO that I want. After all, if I can’t drive the traffic the way I want., what good is it?
Moving ON | Mar 25, 2008 | Reply
I was considering purchasing Volusion Gold package until I got to the terms and conditions during checkout. I am REQUIRED to advertise Volusion on every page footer on my site or pay a monthly $25 extra. I hate being REQUIRED to provide free advertisement to my service providers. I should receive a discount if I advertise for you, right? I thought my $99.95 a month should be enough for the measly 5GB of bandwidth I am allotted and the small amount of items per plan. The plans are not designed for the apparel industry. Back to the drawing board.
Moving ON | Mar 27, 2008 | Reply
I was interested in Volusion so I emailed Volusion sales with concerns about topics discussed here. Here is the conversation:
>>>> INITIAL EMAIL:
Terra,
I am considering Volusion but have some reservations due to some of the reviews by current users of Volusion I have found online. Can you address them?
Bandwidth Overages - We are a small business with a set budget. We hope to grow quickly (as all businesses do
). Our site will host images of our products and some small flash intros. The Volusion bandwidth complaints cause me to hesitate. Some of Volusion’s current customers are hit with overage charges twice their monthly bill and the charges happen overnight and unexplained. Sounds like a lot of finger pointing. This is reported by many, many customers. I agree with your customers that the bandwidth you provide is very small compared to other hosting sites.
Required Footer Link - Why does your company require free advertisement from your customers or penalize them with a $25 charge if they remove the link?
Number of Products - We are a lingerie company. How many products would this be? One bra style in 3 colors and in common sizes (32B, 32C, 34B, 34C, 34D, 36B, 36C, 36D) According to reviews; this would be 24 products…is this true?
Please response. Thank you and have a great day.
>>>> RESPONSE FROM TERRA AT VOLUSION:
Good morning! I would be happy to address your questions!
We determined our package bandwidth limits based on average client usage. We strive for optimal server speed, and for that reason, we try to avoid overcrowding our servers and assess bandwidth overages accordingly. This is the main reason that our bandwidth is lower than many providers.
Along the same lines, we do not charge transaction fees or limit content pages/flash design/images for client sites, nor do we charge for additional functionality. However, if a client chooses to host a massive amount of images/flash/content pages on their site, they may use an enormous amount of bandwidth. Rather than raising all package prices across the board for all Volusion clients, we simply require that only those clients who surpass their bandwidth allotment pay overages. A majority of our clients do not surpass this limit, and for most that do, their overages are still less than what they would pay elsewhere by being forced to purchase additional functionality/paying transaction fees.
The $25 dollar/month charge to hide the Volusion tagline on the footer is not meant to penalize those clients who want to hide it. We are a brand name just like any other company - we are proud of our clients and their work, and including our tagline on the footer has been our policy since our company began.
Different sizes, colors, styles of a product are considered different “products.” Our robust inventory controls require this to maintain accurate stock status/inventory management for our clients. If there is no differentiation between different sizes and colors, inventory cannot be properly maintained.
Hope this helps!
>>>> MY RESPONSE
Thank you for your response.
So how many clients are on each virtual server? Sounds like a lot to only offer 15GB for $197 a month. If that’s’ the case bandwidth will not be the only issue. According to reviews online and replies to my emails from your clients, a majority of your customers are indeed paying overages.
Transaction fees are predetermined monthly expenses, overages are not.
Bandwidth cannot be controlled unless you use an additional hosting service for images, flash, etc (which defeats the purpose). You are not charging a transactional fee, in theory, but with the overages…you are getting it (and then some). I guess it’s semantics. Sounds like you get a lot of complaints about it but continue to conduct business as usual. No happy median, I guess.
I understand what you are saying about the footer link but it’s still required free advertisement no matter how you word it. You are using Windows or Linux as your operating system but they do not require that they are advertised for free. You use Rackspace and boast about there service quality but they are not required to be advertised on customer sites. I’m sure all of these companies are proud of their clients and their work. The
$25 fee…it’s a penalty to your customers and they should be rewarded not punished for advertising for you. That is a big turnoff. If you are so proud of your clients, then why aren’t ALL your customers listed under your “client list” as opposed to only a select few? Then there’s free advertisement on both sides, right?
As for the number of products, most apparel companies with real world inventories cannot use any of your small business solutions except for Platinum. Your package options are definitely designed for non-apparel businesses. Also, it’s interesting that all the packages increase in increments of $20 until you get to Platinum…which doubles.
Thank you again. Still looking.
>>>> FINAL RESPONSE FROM TERRA AT VOLUSION:
Considering that you disagree so vehemently with our fee structure, perhaps Volusion is not the best solution for you. If you would like to discuss the functionality or benefits of our software, then I would be more than happy to do so. I have no problem addressing concerns by potential clients, but it seems that no sort of explanation can justify our fees/services in your eyes, and I’m not interested in arguing back and forth on the matter.
>>>> MY FINAL RESPONSE
I am aware of the advantages/benefits (those are listed on your website) but the disadvantages are the ones that concern me since you do not list those. I am trying to obtain information and to understand if the reviews/other customer concerns are accurate. To elaborate on that point, no where on your site does it state your customer service department will be rude to actual (or potential) customers regardless of their concerns. Your lack of answers and the way you addressed me says it all. I’m glad I emailed you…you made up my mind for me. By the way, the reviews DO state your customer care and support is arrogant.
>>>> End of Email Conversations
Bradley Barker | Mar 29, 2008 | Reply
We went live with Volusion. Hope it won’t be a very big mistake. I have found the PO & Phone Order & Order screens for that matter to be confusing. They need re-thought out in my opinion. One thing I do not like about Volusion is their forum. They approve every single post. If they don’t like it, it doesn’t get posted. Example: If I disagree with an answer from support & post it on the forum to see if anyone has any answers, the post doesn’t go live. This is completely ridiculous.
Mike Lang | Mar 30, 2008 | Reply
I mentioned this earlier as I am a beta tester for CoreCommerce. Check this out http://www.corecommerce.com/ecommerce101.html. I know they don’t charge $25/month for their “powered by” statement. They don’t charge anything to remove it. The way it should be.
Michelle Greer | Apr 4, 2008 | Reply
Kirtok,
Stay tuned for more updates from us. Exciting stuff coming about, especially in terms of flexibility.
BTW, I am forwarding this post to higher ups regarding commenters’ concerns/requests.
Regarding Andy Beard’s review: Andy Beard actually never spoke to anyone here at Volusion, even though we call everyone who signs up for a demo. He even acknowledged in his review that he had little time to review the software. And while Andy Beard is spot on with blogging tips and SEO, I’m not sure if he’s ever run an online store. Perhaps it was not a good fit from the start.
Regarding bandwidth overages: please note that not all hosting is created equal. Unlike the type of hosting you can get for a blog, ecommerce hosting is very expensive. You are dealing with your customers’ sensitive credit card information, physical addresses, and phones numbers. A breach would probably put every single person who has commented on this blog completely out of business. TJMaxx’s breach ended up costing them over 250 million dollars. We take security very seriously because a breach could affect our business and the livelihoods of all of our affected merchants.
People who use a lot of bandwidth end up costing the company money. We can eat that cost and go out of business. We can pass it on to all customers, even if they are not the ones incurring those costs. Either one of these options does not seem fair to us or our customers.
Regarding SeSOwizard: I’m sorry your experience was negative. I spoke with Terra and she acknowledged that the matter was not handled appropriately. She was new at the time.
Kirkok, feel free to email me any questions/concerns you may have. Thanks!
Michelle Greer | Apr 4, 2008 | Reply
BTW, I was so concerned about the issues in these comments that I forgot to mention that I work for Volusion! LOL We are taking many steps to ensure that our customers stay as competitive as possible on the web.
James Samson | Apr 4, 2008 | Reply
Michelle,
nothing personal but it just sounds like you are trying to cover your butts. Your team has made many mistakes with many customers. A few sorry’s after the fact doesn’t make up for the mistakes.
ShopFinder | Apr 6, 2008 | Reply
I am in the process of finding a solution and was leaning towards Volusion for a client. They have less than 40 products, but have a lot of sales. Now, I am quite concerned about the bandwidth issue - especially because everyone seems to say that Volusion’s stats show 5 times as much as Google Analytics.
I had also liked the idea of well-supported product but it seems like the support isn’t so great. I have been trying the demo and have already had a few previews into the “limited support” issue.
CoreCommerce looks good, but it’s too new to entrust a client’s platform on.
Michelle Greer | Apr 7, 2008 | Reply
James,
You are welcome to email me your concerns at michelle_greer@volusion.com. We are not in the business to hurt our customers’ business by any means.
Fred | Apr 13, 2008 | Reply
So I guess Volusion doesn’t have any integrated method to print UPS shipping labels…this is very odd for a company selling e-commerce solutions. This definitely would hurt the productivity of any business selling products to residential customers as UPS offers the best rates and discounts to these types of customers.
Does anyone know of an automated way to integrate with volusion for the printing of UPS shipping labels?
Adam Smith | Apr 16, 2008 | Reply
Thanks for your review.
I just wanted to note how terrible the affiliate program and support really are. If you need a stable/accurate affiliate program, volusion is not the way to go.
Andy Beard | Apr 19, 2008 | Reply
Michelle you are quite correct in that I don’t currently run any online “hard goods” stores, and even when I was the international sales director at Techland.pl who also run http://www.msw.pl/ I stayed clear of web development from 1998 - 2002.
Note:- that site isn’t a good example of SEO but I am not involved with them.
I also run affiliate stores built from datafeeds, some of them built on Wordpress, some built on other platforms.
I now avoid anything which might involve physical products that I might have to handle, but that doesn’t preclude that I might in the future.
When I wrote my review, I did a fair amount of research, not only on the Volusion site, but elsewhere.
All the reviews I found were little more than a press release based list of features.
Maybe I wasn’t suitable and you weren’t looking for feedback at that time.
That being said, my blog this month has so far used 140GB of transfer - I know it is an issue you will be looking into and look forward to updating, just like I wrote a fresh update as soon as you added support for Aweber.
Generally search engine spiders index websites more frequently than they have in the past. Sometimes Google picks up posts within 10 minutes.
Each time a shop updates one item, that could change on multipe pages with links to related items, category pages etc.
If you change special offers which create changes across the whole site, that again is going to add to bandwidth use.
A search spider when it arrives at a page checks the headers to see when a page was last modified. That isn’t a huge bandwidth use. If it finds a change, it is going to index the whole page.
For some items it might be advisable to include them using javascript if they are the same on every page, and are not part of the information architecture of the site.
As an example for WordPress, if you want to display recent comments on every page, that is something that could be javascript based.
You also have to allow for scrapers, competitors using tools such as Xenu Link Sleuth etc.
One aspect that is of concern is how long it is taking to address public concerns
Andy Beard | Apr 19, 2008 | Reply
In addition I should point out that I don’t as a rule contact anyone I am requested to write a review for to clear up concerns when writing the reviews.
Sometimes I have contact before hand.
Time restraints, location and timezone often preclude direct contact, plus I feel it would have some baring on the integrity, which already comes under question with sponsored reviews.
To remain in good faith with my readers I do have to invest far more time than the potential financial rewards justify.
As an affiliate, I do get to see the backend of lots of different solutions.
At the time I wrote my review, I even applied for the affiliate program of one store owner, but for some reason they never got back to me.
Bradley | Apr 23, 2008 | Reply
I’ve noticed something with Volusions drop-ship feature. When you drop-ship items they actually allow the system to go into negative inventory because “our system doesn’t receive inventory when using a drop-ship PO because you aren’t actually receiving any inventory”. Actually we are. If you are going to reduce inventory for a sale, then a drop-ship PO should increase the inventory by the same amount. Here is a link to Volusions KB article that actually says at the bottom that an inventory item going negative is fine. I can’t believe my eyes:
http://manual.volusion.com/Vendors-Drop-Shipping/11.htm
Bradley
Bradley | Apr 23, 2008 | Reply
Support was not receptive with me when I told them this was a bug and should have never been designed this way to begin with.
Bradley
Kris | May 1, 2008 | Reply
Hello all, this is Kris with CoreCommerce. Yes we are an up and coming solution, but we treat our customers with class and respect. Our system DOES NOT count product options towards your product limit, and the fees we charge for bandwidth overages are 30% less than Volusion. We have a 30 day, 100% free trial with NO SETUP FEE that you can sign up for, just to see how our system works. Our #1 goal is to provide the BEST shopping cart experience on the web for a low monthly fee and as many bells and whistles as possible. We also have a FREE SSL you can use IF you decide not to use your own. We also offer much more generous amounts of bandwidth and hard drive space, email accounts and products. Updates are made on the fly and when you signup, your store is created within 5 SECONDS. Anyone who has any questions about CoreCommerce, please feel free to contact me directly at 800-747-4270 ext 25.
Have a great day!
Michael Stein | May 3, 2008 | Reply
We would like to move our websites to volusion but we use Ordermotion: OM enables you to have same products on multiple websites (we have 5 websites and adding more) and keeps you inventory live with many websites. There are also a few other options that OM does that we wish Volusion would have - and Stone Edge is not an option. It’s just not as good - but we are so siked on going to Volusion. Any suggestions?
Parag | May 3, 2008 | Reply
This is indeed an awesome post with great reviews for Volusion. On April 14, I signed up with Yahoo stores and today after reading all the reviews, I am happy I made the right decision not to get bogged down by bandwidth costs and then hearing excuses from customer service. Excuses are not way to Customer Satisfaction. Solving customer issues and keeping Customers FIRST should be the priority.
No Customers! No Business! No revenue! Simple!
If anyone had come come across a good comparison between Yahoo and Volusion, please post it. Thanks.
I would suggest IMHO for Volusion team to take customers very seriously or the longevity of growth will fade.
I was considering switching to Volusion after reading initial review, but I am happy with yahoo and will choose best practices form Volusion and implement in my store.
David | May 6, 2008 | Reply
After having so much problem, I started to checkout complains about Volusion on the web using Google. I was surprised that there are many others who have the same problems as I do.
Currently, I have been with Volusion for almost 4 years and thinking and researching very very very hard for another alternative. The best time that I had with Volusion was only the 1st year. Afterward, my experience was going from bad to worst to hell.
Overall, I agree with all Volusion customers out there… the Support is rude and arrogant. Most of the time, they cannot solve your problem. Their response is wait and just create a ticket. If any of you there who are planning to go with Volusion, you may not want to look at my support tickets that contains all my bad experience from email problems, server not processing order, bugs, and, best of all, the bad support.
Right now I have couple of tickets opened and furious at how long it take them to response and also the response they gave.
In my opinion, Volusion is not for serious business. It is for recreational business. For serious business you need support. They have very little… worst…. they will help you rudely and arrogantly.