Two of the more popular shopping carts for small businesses are Volusion and Shopify. This article is going to put them head to head, Volusion vs Shopify. Keep in mind while I compare the two carts that neither is a bad choice. Both are very powerful shopping carts and different merchants will have different needs.
Volusion vs Shopify: Price and Value
Volusion offers several different plans depending on the amount of products and customer traffic. Plans start at $19 a month for 100 products and go up to $149 a month for unlimited products. Bandwidth also increases with these plans starting at 1GB and going to 20GB a month. In general these rates a comparable to other carts when compared to the number of features that you get. We’ll get into the features later. Overall, Volusion has reasonable prices and value.
On the flip side, Shopify has a different model for pricing. Shopify’s plans start $29 a month for 100 products and go up to $176 a month for unlimited products. Shopify offers unlimited bandwidth (website traffic) on all of their plans, which is a huge bonus. The one thing that you have to look out for is the transaction fees. On Shopify’s lower plans, the $29/mo, $59/mo, and $99/mo, the charge a per transaction fee of 2%, 1% and 1% respectively. That would mean if you start to see some sales volume, it would probably be in your best interest to upgrade to the Unlimited plan for $176 /mo. for the 0% transaction fee.
Volusion vs Shopify: Design Tools
Both Volusion and Shopify have state-of-the-art design tools built in. For the most part, you can created a look and feel that you desire with either cart. If your not as technically advanced, both carts offer some really well designed templates that you can use for your store.
If you need to have a professional design created Shopify and Volusion go about things a little different. Shopify offers a directory of designers that are experts with the Shopify platform and you can hire on your own. Volusion promotes their own in house design service. While this limits your options, it does give you a designer that is very familiar with the inner workings of the shopping cart. There are 3rd party developers for the Volusion cart, but it is up to you to find them. Volusion has no such directory.
Volusion vs Shopify: Features
Volusion and Shopify are very powerful shopping carts. Volusion has more built in and in-depth features, but where Shopify really shines is with their app store. 3rd party developers create applications that are able to plug into the cart and expand on it’s functionality essentially giving it endless possibilities.
One downside with Shopify is that when you checkout, you are taken to a secure Shopify URL instead of staying on your own domain.
Click here for an example
Volusion’s checkout page: https://www.mystorename.com/one-page-checkout.asp
Shopify’s checkout page: https://checkout.shopify.com/carts/
This breaks up the continuity of your website. This may or may not be a problem for your store.
Volusion vs Shopify: The Bottom Line
My take on the two shopping carts is that if you are looking for a lot of control of your site, including having your customers stay on your website throughout the checkout process and want a cheaper month to month fees, pick Volusion. If your looking for a simpler cart with plug and play funtionality, but are willing to pay a little more, than pick Shopify. You really can’t go wrong with either of these shopping carts.
Nice comparison. I chose Volusion because I thought it offered better tech support and I have 0 programming capabilities. For the most part I like it. Many of the Shopify templates have a really nice, slick, urban look which I really like. I called them before I made my decision and discovered that at that time it took over 24 hours to get a call back and that there was a fee for customer service per call.
That was last year though and things could have changed.
I’m not sure,
Annie Cholakian