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.
I have been a user of Volusion for a year now. I want to address a few issues that have not been mentioned yet in this thread.
Volusion is so restrictive in their customization that they do not allow you add product rating to the category page. For example, if you have category page listed with all TVs that you are selling, your customer will not see the product review rating until they actually click on that specific TV.
I requested a year ago that this be a feature Volusion add because it’s really easy for them to do – I’m still waiting…. We should have the ability to have our customers sort products according to product rating or identify high rating products on the category page. It’s really a simple fix.
I was told that there are exciting new features that are coming and maybe that will be one of them. When I asked can you tell me one that will definitely be coming and they said they couldn’t tell me. When I asked when I should expect it, they said by the end of the year. They have 2 weeks to impress me. Even in April, Michelle Volusion’s Spokesperson on this blog said “new features are coming”. WHEN MICHELLE? WHEN? WHAT ARE THEY?
BillMeLater is a new billing feature that they say cannot be used with Volusion. One IT person said it could be done but he didn’t know how -hmm?
I have experienced the arrogance and rudeness from the sales and IT staff – on the phone and on chat.
But until someone comes up with something better than Volusion, it’s really the only choice out there. I’m dying for someone to come out with something better or equal but with fair pricing.
We’re all business people and out to make a profit but nobody likes to feel like they have been mislead or to hear the words “its in the customer agreement” (aka fine print) when it comes to the bandwidth or the Volusion Link at the footer.
I have been a web designer for over 10 years, and also know SEO. A bug that Volusion has that needs to be fixed asap is the following.
When trying to get positioned with GOOGLE it is very important that the tag be placed immediately under the tag.
The Tag needs to be the first item under the Tag. This is very important for Google Pos. This appears to be a glitch in Volusion’s coding. Also, if you look at any of the internal page’s source code, it seams to fix itself, and the tag is placed 1st under the tag like it should be. The problem is with the first page of your site, and needs to be fixed as google does not see the tag if it is not the first tag under the tag. The tag is rated as 60% of what Google looks at when positioning websites. Very Important.
I have spoken to support about this issue, and hope that they understand that this is a major problem when trying to get good ranking with major search engines. Hopefully they will have a fix for this soon.
sorry for the previous message, the tag I am speaking about is the TITLE tag. It looks like on my last posting, when putting the TITLE tag and HEAD tag in brackets, it took it out of the posting. so here is the message again without brackets so you can see what I’m trying to say.
I have been a web designer for over 10 years, and also know SEO. A bug that Volusion has that needs to be fixed asap is the following.
When trying to get positioned with GOOGLE it is very important that the TITLE tag be placed immediately under the HEAD tag.
The TITLE Tag needs to be the first item under the HEAD Tag. This is very important for Google Pos. This appears to be a glitch in Volusion’s coding. Also, if you look at any of the internal page’s source code, it seams to fix itself, and the TITLE tag is placed 1st under the HEAD tag like it should be. The problem is with the first page of your site, and needs to be fixed as google does not see the TITLE tag if it is not the first tag under the HEAD tag. The TITLE tag is rated as 60% of what Google looks at when positioning websites. Very Important.
I have spoken to support about this issue, and hope that they understand that this is a major problem when trying to get good ranking with major search engines. Hopefully they will have a fix for this soon.
I used Volusion for over a year, had multiple sites there. We stopped using them once the sites started to respond very slow. We hooked up monitoring and would get notified every time the site went down. When we reported this info to Volusion we got a canned response of ” We will check it out” then “Everything seems to be fine on this end”. We began to ask our customers and many said that at times they had issued with the site. This was across multiple sites not just one.
This is a very typical problem when choosing a hosted Ecommerce, they cram as many stores on a server as they can. If you choose a Budget plan watch out that will be even slower.
In my option their customer service is horrible, slow servers, and my Credit card Company said they are not PCI compliant as they claim.
There are much better Ecommerce solutions out there. I won’t list they as it will look like an advertisement.
first off all, I am sorry about my english
I am an international online merchant for 2 years now and Volusion was one of my shopping cart software.
I have been using another software called ashop and I was really happy with it only problem I had was paying about $100 per month (including their optional affiliate feature) then I heard about volusion. first it looked to me that I just needed pay $49 for everything I was using with ashop.
I cancelled my account on ashop and signed up for volusion’s bronze package then the problems began to start.
It was actually easy to setup to categories, products and they had a very useful control panel. my first problem was setting up the affiliate system. in order to set up the feature you need to know some html and I didnt. unfortunately volusion has a weak customer service and it took about 2 weeks for me to set up the affliliate system with no help from volusion.
The other problem was the bandwith usage. after the first month they charge about $20 for exceeding my usage limit. then I have switched to their silver package and samething happened they again charged $17 for extra usage. I mean I was getting less traffic than I was with ashop but still exceeding my monthly limit.
last month I went back to ashop again and now I dont have to worry about all these html codes and bandwith.
In answer to Greg’s question (above this reply), the overage charges do seem to correlate with sales volume. Unfortunately though, that doesn’t mean that I don’t see overages when sales are down… just that they are lower. In other words, I’ve had bandwidth overage charges on every single bill I’ve ever gotten from Volusion, usually to the tune of $200 – $300 per month.
Honestly though, my biggest issue with Volusion is one that’s barely been mentioned in this forum. Volusion is VERY deceptive in advertising USPS integration and claiming that you can print USPS shipping labels directly through the Volusion back end. This is a half-truth and the missing half is quite important:
Volusion’s integration with USPS allows you to print a label with your customer’s address on it. However, it CAN NOT print labels that have any postal value. In other words, it prints something that looks just like the labels you get on USPS.com. They have unique tracking numbers and everything, but they have no value whatsoever. But if you want that package to get anywhere, you still need to buy postage somewhere else.
Be careful not to make the mistake we did… We were hitting the “print USPS shipping label” option in the Volusion back end, thinking that it was integrating with USPS’s API and making actual postage labels. In fact, we dropped about 400 orders into the mail with these labels, thinking they were paid for. Even crazier, is that they all got delivered! The postal workers themselves were just as fooled by the appearance of these labels as we were. Eventually, of course, they noticed and came calling for thousands of dollars in unpaid postage that we’d been entirely unaware of. To make it more farcical, Volusion’s customer service had me going back and forth with USPS, claiming the problem was on their end, until finally, someone at USPS informed me that the problem is that Volusion is not authorized as a USPS partner.
For me, this is turning out to be the showstopper that has me looking for a replacement for Volusion. No true USPS integration means that:
A: my shipping department still has to key in every single order on USPS.com (a huge time suck!)
B: Customers can’t receive tracking #’s automatically, so I’m stuck answering all those customer service emails asking for shipping details (until I ditch Volusion.)
This isn’t a volusion issue. The USPS web tools doesn’t have postage available. That would be with anyone that is integrated with their webtools. You will find other ecommerce software providers with the same integration using their online tools and yes you will see the same thing. Just an FYI.
I used to work for Volusion, and this review is totally accurate. However at this time when Gary was manager I wasn’t there. Once I was there Gary became the Knowledge Base writer and was replaced by Patrick Hannigan who has zero knowledge of the software.
I will admit about our support considering that I worked with Tech support in Simi Valley. Communication with Billing, Developers and Server Administrators are limited. Only Level 2 techs and higher can talk with them, and the majority of tech support staff are Level 1 and the Level 2 tech reps will rarely assist you hands on and will not listen to level 1’s on any ideas.
I gave them the idea of the V-ZOOM feature and made it with javascript. and I wasn’t given any credit for it and I figured out the solution to the SSL seal/server authentication issue and they did not listen to me.
I eventually quit volusion to join the Army: Special Forces. And also I was involved in the Metrolink train collision outside of Chatsworth CA. and was written up for not being able to work for 4 days so my issues with leaving are in reasons of well-being.
I don’t know any updates on the new stuff yet, I’m gonna talk with an old friend of mine in Sales and see if she can get me a free trial for a while so I can help others out that need better support than what they have now.
Also I helped some of you guys out too
Another shopping cart out there that is gaining popularity is SEO-Cart. I use SEO-Cart to manage my 5,000+ product online store and their customer support has been very knowledgeable and helpful when setting up my online store and if I have any questions (technical or simple). They have also even added some new features in their software upon my request free of charge. A couple things that stick out with this company is that their pricing is very good for the service you receive, bandwidth, disk space, and their responsive customer support. They seem to really focus on search engine optimization, hence their hosted shopping cart’s name “SEO-Cart”, within their software and it’s customizable enough to use your own website design and custom programming. If anyone is frustrated with their current cart I highly recommend SEO-Cart hosted e-commerce solution at http://www.seo-cart.com/
- Joe
Hi Kirtok, Thanks for the info. Can you tell me what other solutions you considered before settling on Volusion?
Looking at integrating Volusion’s shopping cart/check out feature in a custom site. I like all the features but the check out billing and shipping information require ‘State.’ I run a number of sites that have international customers. Volusion says they cannot disable the ‘required’ feature for ‘State’ but are exploring adding County/Province as an alternative.
Is anyone aware of a work around for this feature on Volusion or know an alternative shopping cart that is more international friendly?
Thanks!
Thanks a ton! This is extremely helpful! I’m looking into volusion right now. Forunately for me, I have a small number of products (even with sizes, etc.) so my only concern is the bandwidth issue.
I’ve seen bots (both from search engines and the malicious kind) clog up bandwidth in other cases. But it seems doubtful that this would cause such a big jump over an entire month.
Will definitely bring this up when I talk to Volusion about signing up.
Thanks again!
Liz
Folks,
Excellent and informative thread.
Intuit recommend eCommerce solutions called
1) IA Modules (fully hosted, similar model to Volusion)
2) PDG Software (just software, you host yourself)
Both integrate with QuickBooks Point of Sale (that we run in the physical store) with auto-sync capability.
I am starting a trial with IA Modules next week.
Has anyone heard and/or had experience with IA Modules or PDG?
I’m very surprised no one has mentioned Shopify. Has anyone used them? They are the biggest competitor to Volusion. Their prices are a little higher but their feature list seems much much better.
very serious problems with Volusion.
As a UK customer I have discovered several very serious problems with Volusion. They do not support integration with PayPal UK. They do not integrate with the latest security feature called 3D Secure which in the UK is now mandatory for the merchant to accept Visa Mastercard and Maestro. I don’t see how they can market in the UK as an ecommerce solution while not supporting these payment types! Their response – no plans to change. Thanks for choosing Volusion.
Image Storage —
AMAZON SIMPLE STORAGE SOLUTION (aka S3)
From: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
Pricing –
Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. Estimate your monthly bill using the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.
We charge less where our costs are less, thus some prices vary across geographic regions and are based on the location of the bucket.
United States Pricing
———————
Storage
$0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.140 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.130 per GB – next 400 TB /month of storage used
$0.120 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB
Data Transfer
$0.100 per GB – all data transfer IN
$0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer OUT
$0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer OUT
$0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer OUT
$0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB
Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests
I am in full agreement with Skippy Jones concerning the scam. I currently have a Gold store with Volusion and just purchased a $495.00 “Premium Template” nearly 2 weeks ago.
This template was the biggest joke ever. I had to redesign the graphics because it transitioned over unaligned. I lost the mouse-over feature I had with the free template and was just informed a few minutes ago by the design department that I would have to HIRE THEM AT AN HOURLY RATE to fix the moues-over so it would function in the new $500 premium template I bought!
Noone in tech support could figure out why I couldn’t change the links on the premium templates home page. Finally, a clever one over in tech support suggested that the template was just a jpeg and not actually a template! He advised I recreate the template image in photoshop, upload it through their FTP (which does not work for me), and then relink the new images of the links I create with the new text. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I actually relented and started working on this, however noone in tech support can figure out in the back end where the new links are to be written. It appears everything was hardwired with the template somehow..?? As a result, I have links on my homepage that are irrelevant to my site that can not be changed.
I feel I have been scammed.
I’m still waiting for someone to reply to my ticket for help which after two weeks of going back and forth, I now realize I’m not going to get. I lost all this money on the template and countless hours on a 500+ product store that I do not believe I can even relocate because my entire site is stored on their server.
I want to cry.
I’d like to thank everyone on this forum for posting such useful information. I have been looking at different eCommerce platforms for over 3 months now.
We started our site on Yahoo, but to be honest, are not entirely happy with how difficult it is to design and make changes. They do have a lot of great features, but the design is so difficult, and we do not want to pay programmers / designers for every change.
I think for basic sites and starting out it works well, because they pack a lot into their basic packages (including full e-mail, which is nice).
I plan on trying a full demo of Infopia (all-in-one solution, much more expensive – $1,000+ a month), CoreCommerce, and Finishing my trial on Volusion.
I will post results as soon as we are moved over.
Thanks again to everyone who posts on here,
I have considering the following websites outside of Volusion:
Pinacle Cart
Americommernce
Search Fit
I just removed Volusion from this list, please give me some feedback on either of the one that I am considering. I currently have a site and I want to be able bulk upload images and products. I have placing a lot of emphasis on SEO and integreation with Quickbooks.
Can 50+ customer’s be wrong?
I was also just a more searches away from pulling trigger (a typical impulse buyer) due to all the rave reviews I’d read, but when I considered how much this investment meant to me (aspiring small business owner), I decided to do a little more searching.
I’m glad I did!
I don’t like the idea of the exorbatant band with charges and customer service quality, or lack thereof.
One suggestion to Volusion, if you change nothing else, to your already unique and seemingly great company, have your bandwith and customer services issues addressed as soon as possible! You have the opportunity to be the best! It’s too bad you have lost numerous customers (and potential customers, who like myself) have considered (although some probably have),opening several ecommerce sites through Volusion.
The search continues………..
I am in way too deep (development time invested with Volusion) and think I may have made a mistake. Their stability is non existant and they offer no proactive communication about it. After months they appear to have finally fixed their email stability (they wouldn’t admit it was an issue until it completely crashed 1.5 weeks ago). Now since that fix the backend and front end of the store are not load/loading at a snails pace. Again they are not communicating with their customers about the latest problems. I have email and PPC traffic going to my site right now and they can’t load it. Does anyone know of a forum where Volusion customers can create a critical mass and force management to provide a stable solution with one single load voice? I can’t sit on hold any longer with “Thank you for choosing Volusion.”
I want to give to thumbs up to corecommerce. Went there and avoided the dreadful volusion customer service. I would highly recommend corecommerce to any serious small business owner. There customer service is top notch.
@Greg, please do not use different names to leave positive comments about corecommerce. I hate censorship, and I’m approving your comments, but please be honest about your position at corecommerce. thanks.
I am a small business owner that is currently using Network Solutions’ e-commerce package, and while it is relatively stable, it lacks in several areas and I am in the market to see if there is a better solution for my site.
I am pleased by this review – since it is a year and a half old, is there an update to your review? Have they corrected some of the issues you raised? Have new problems arisen? Perhaps I have simply missed the update. Please let us know your current thoughts!
I just wanted to share an interesting experience I had with Volusion.
I already have one web store and it occupies most of my time. I have been trying to open two more stores, and because my first store is with GoDaddy, I knew what I didn’t want.
Being this busy, I didn’t start using the Volusion trial for which I signed up. That’s when I got a call from their sales rep. She offered to extend my trial so I could have more time to familiarize myself with the system. To make a really long story a little shorter, I didn’t get around to seriously uploading products until a few nights ago, though I spent many hours on design and category placement.
I sent a review to the sales rep while I was in the midst of trying to upload the product images. The system idled and did nothing. This was not the first time. I had actually only successfully uploaded three products before that night.
I got an email from the sales rep the next morning saying that my trial has been deleted and that I’m apparently a “bad match” for their system. She further said that she has senior citizens who have no problem at all with their system and that I should get a webmaster to help me. Wow, what a b—h! Anyway, I’m bummed because I really liked their templates. Now I’ve been left to start the whole process over again because of an incapable, snooty, narrow minded sales person.
She should have tried to find out what the problem was and get me help. Instead, she tried to blame the system problems on my inabilities. Nice, huh?
Sorry for ranting but I am very upset. In fact, in reading what you’ve written, I’ve decided to try and contact upper management (if there is such a thing) and tell them all about my experience with her. Knowing my luck, she’s probably married to the owner
Thanks for “listening.”
We’ve been on Netsuite (www.netsuite.com) for several years. Netsuite is a one-stop solution and overall we’ve been very happy. Steep learning curve but all business processes, data models and website are highly customizable through their Suitescript language. Our biggest issue has been with their email marketing, couponing and checkout process.
Has anyone migrated from Netsuite to Volusion or any other provider and could offer any comments? Has anyone migrated to Netsuite and offer comments?
Thanks -
I have few websites on volusion and searching to move to a different one. I have lots of problems with them too. One problem is that sometimes product images cannot be uploaded from internet explorer and have to use firefox. The bandwidth is overly expensive. Their SEO is not very google frendly, like one of the earlier post mentioned about tag not appearing right after tag.
I am about to make a decision on using Volusion, however after reading all these pros and cons…I feel left in the dark.
As I write this message..I’m wondering if this post is even still alive or if someone will actually make a comment on this plight of mind.
I just started a t-shirt business and set up with a dropshipper who will print the shirts and ship them out using USPS.
I have my own advertising means and marketing schemes to drive business to my site. I just need someone to tell me what I need because I have never tried an online business before.
Volusion tells me they’ll call me back and then they don’t so I’m a little bugged. I need my website to take the orders and send the information minus the customers account information to the dropshipper.
I don’t know which ecommerce business to trust or where to go to get a reliable service. Can anyone help me?