- Ease of Use
- Features
- Customization
- Integrations
- Help & Support
Volusion has been around since 1999 and has received multiple awards for it’s shopping cart and customer service. Volusion introduced to the market a one page checkout process that was unheard of at the time and is now commonplace. Kevin Sproles, the Founder and CEO of Volusion, initially coded the shopping cart from his bedroom and now it is one of the biggest and fastest growing e-commerce solution providers.
For a lot of merchants, the cart is an all in one solution. It does everything from take phone orders, manage customers with a built in CRM (customer relationship management software), print shipping labels to managing returns. Oh, and it’s also is a fully functioning shopping cart allowing customers to place orders online.
Of all of the shopping carts that I’ve tested, Volusion feels the most thought out. That makes sense as they have been one of the bigger shopping carts that caters to small merchants for some time. The major bonus with using Volusion is the little things. Things just work. The best features are the ones that you don’t even notice until they are not there. One such feature would be that you can have products hide when they are out of stock. This might seem like a feature that should naturally be included, but there is at least one other shopping cart out there that doesn’t include this feature. Volusion has been adding new features a little faster these days and seem to be listening to is merchants feedback.
If there is one area that Volusion could use work is their design of new features. Some of the latest and greatest features don’t have much depth to them. I think they should probably get more feedback from actual retailers before releasing a feature that seems like it is created to just market that they have it. Volusion just released a, “Deal of the Day” feature that you can only use on products that do not have options like size and color. They should have flush this feature out a little more to be more useful. I have to believe that there are a lot of merchants that sell apparel.
Will all that being said, it is my opinion that Volusion still is one of the best shopping carts available to small and medium sized businesses. I would love to hear what you have to say. Please use the comments sections go post your own Volusion review.
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Volusion is amazing and a perfect choice for anyone looking to open an online business. Before beginning my online store, I did months of research. I read the good vs bad comments people had posted online about multiple hosting companies. After weighing out my options I chose Volusion as my webhost, web-designer and merchant. It was the best choice I could have made. I have had nothing but amazing customer service from multiple departments and I have a great online coach who guides me along the way. Volusion offers customer support through phone, email tickets, and instant chat. If one representative does not know the answer to your question, they will let you know who to contact or where to find the answer. The videos, manuals and constant customer service has been priceless. Volusion has helped take away the stress and confusion of opening an online store. They have made this experience wonderful and fun. I highly recommend them to anyone looking to open an online store.
Stay Away is my main comment.
There are some many issues that after spending weeks designing a shop for my client, I’ve decided to start again with a new supplier.
1) Archaic system which claims to be flexible but is anything but! There are so many design flaws its not funny. It’s a system which was written by IT guys with no understanding of business or any awareness of a good user experience. I had to hack out every element to even make a halfway decent shopfront – but even for a skilled designer making anything which even looks like it came from this decade is nigh on impossible.
2) PayPal and Google Checkout integration sucks! Paypal standard can’t even accept credit cards!
3) If you’re selling services rather than actual products – forget it – shoot yourself in the head first!
4) Slowest servers I’ve ever seen – even on a high speed connection it can be minutes to change a single element, and the FTP servers are a joke – average download speed 0.5-1kb/s (i’m not kidding!).
5) Pages frequently slow and time out for customers.
6) Support is truly 24-7 which is great, on the downside half of the support staff haven’t got a clue and “Working as intended” seems to be the stock phrase. It’s like the Captain of the Titanic saying that to his passengers as the ship goes down!
7) They all but force you to buy a Volusion SSL (which takes 10 working days to register) because transferring your existing one costs £99!!!
I’ve wasted weeks on this system – I hope I can save someone else the same…
While not as bad as you say, I do agree that Volusion had some issues for a period of time. I think a lot of those have been worked out and they are making great strides recently. The recent partnership with Akamai to use there CDN (Content Distribution Network) has been great. Site performance is through the roof now and sites load very fast.
Tech support rocks at Volusion. They have the nicest, friendliest, and well trained team. Did i mentioned 24/7?
Mike H. just helped with an issue and he nailed it until it was all cleared and fixed. Tks Mike!
My home page was also designed by Volusion and I get lots of compliments from customers and people.
Having a professional online preserve in this cutting edge times is crucial for any business.
Tks Volusion
Connie
Ron– Hello Ron! I wanted to know how your business is going since opening it up online with VOLUSION. I am seriously thinking about starting an online business and picking VOLUSION as the main core of starting it up. I also wanted to know if you have any tips that may be able to help me in my venture. I currently don’t have any products generated, so i’m not exactly sure if i am supposed to do that first or start on my site first. Any tips you can share with me will be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much!
I’ve had great success with Volusion. I seem to show up well in search engines and have had good performance. Since the recent release of their content distribution network (CDN), my sites have been blazingly fast. What it does is host your images on servers all over the world and then serves those images from the closest server to your visitor making your site really fast.
While your sourcing and acquiring your products you could start working on your site. It takes awhile to get everything set up properly and you’ll be ready when the time comes.
i would recommend to use shopify or bigcommerce instead
I’ve been with Volusion over 3 years, and never had such awful service like this ever. Their credit card processing has been down for me almost a week, and no one even lets me know what’s going on. I have to send orders out that aren’t even paid for. Guess it’s time to move on to a new ecommerce host who cares about their customers.
Terrible!! Don’s use them.. Worst experience i have ever had!!
I know I was very upset with Volusion, but they finally came through, and I am so glad. They’re shopping cart has been great for me and my business. And I am being honest. I tried another’s shopping cart, a few days, and it was awful.
Volusion is still the # 1 contender, in shopping carts, in my opinion. And I apoligize to Volusion for being so impatient.
I’m looking for something new as we use shop factory at the moment and the design part is very basic and looks a bit amature compared to the other site I have made in Wix which is a great designing package but the shop is useless with pay pal only. I have tried the free trial in Volusion and it seems a bit long handed and not so user friendly, should I keep at it and does it get more useful when I sign up?? Also with the templates if I pay the money do I then need to pay for all the other things seperatly like the contact forms etc or is there a version that is ok to with the template?? I would love to hear back as I’m kind of new to this and have been working the whole website thing out as I go!! Thanks in advance.
Hey Vaughan,
I know that Volusion and other carts like it can seem daunting at first, but it gets easier the more you use it. The reason it is like this is because of the features that it offers. Believe it or not, for a premium hosted shopping cart such as this, it is more user friendly that a lot out there.
Everything you need is included in the shopping cart, including contact forms. They also have free and paid templates that you can use.
I hope this helps.
Cheers for that Ron! I’m pretty keen to use this program and between you and the lady helping me from Volusion I think I will go that way. I make a range of products and realise you cant keep everyone happy. From what I have seen there are still more “for” than “against” volusion
7/9/12
Volsuions crashes. Not only Storefronts, but the Admin side as well as the forums-not to mentions Volusion‘s own Site crashed. Classic!
7/9/12 Crash update:
UPDATE: The connectivity issue we are currently experiencing is due to a power outage at our data center in which the automatic transfer switch (ATS) malfunctioned. This in turn prevented the redundant generators from restoring power. Once power is returned to the datacenter, restoring full functionality can take 2-4 hrs. We are working closely with our upstream provider to remedy the issue as quickly as possible. As always, further updates will be provided as they become available.
Working with Volusion for e-commerce for me was a living hell. Its like I gave them my credit card info and the best looking company turned into the biggest pain in the ass I’ve ever had. Awful confusing platform and bureaucratic customer service that cant get anything done. I get random bills from them for services that i didn’t even know applied to me. If there is an e-Commerce version of hell they are it. If your looking to do e-Commerce, I wrote this for you. Use Shopify instead. It is like I just went from a virus ridden Windows XP that deletes my files to a brand new 2012 Macbook Pro.
i have been developing e-commerce stores since 2005. This is one of the most flawed of the hosted shopping cart solutions i have used. I am embarrassed and now eating the cost of re-developing the site because i recommended it to a client. bugs in the shopping card are called “designed that way”. features are assembled half ass-ed. I do NOT recommend it.