VolusionReviews of volusion.com

Been with Volusion for nearly 20 years. They have some functionality that I love. For example, I can set customers up at different pricing levels, and I'm not sure other platforms offer that. I know Im in the minority on this one, but I hated when Volusion went away from the bandwidth pricing as I built my store over the years with that in mind. Now they take a cut out of every transaction, just like all the others I suppose. But it did set them apart and was a key factor in why I moved to Volusion in 2008. Not sure I would choose Volusion today, but at least they don't force me into add-ons and upgrades like Shopify does. I have my annual fee and a tiny monthly charge of $2 for something I don't even know what it is. But that's about it. I don't think the SEO is up to the latest standards as my site has fallen in the rankings over the years. And they really don't have much of a mobile offering. And the couponing abilities are VERY basic. Bottom line, you could probably do worse, but it is a decent solution for my needs. PS I complained about a lacking feature over this past weekend. And this morning (only 4 days later), I found that they actually added my suggestion to the platform. This happened about 12 years ago as well with a suggestion I made. Really solid experience this week. Good job Volusion.

Volusion has a 14-day Free Trial, and five price plans: Personal ($29 p/m) Professional ($79 p/m) Business ($299 p/m) Prime (custom) With all price plans, you need to purchase an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate costing $89.99. This protects your site from fraud. Compared to other eCommerce website builders, Volusion is quite expensive, with price plans up to $299 per month. On top of that, you need to purchase an $89-99 SSL certificate. However, it has a $13.50 per month option if you sign up for a whole year. If you’re a data-driven business owner looking for an e-commerce website builder with great analytics tools, Volusion is for you. For everything else, like designing the storefront or writing blogs, you should look elsewhere.

Customer Support has been very difficult to reach. Good once I get through, but way too much trouble. The system used to offer call backs. Now the menus do not work well and random disconnects are common.

Largely a good experience. Every ecommerce offering has its plusses and minuses, and it's hard to get the best of every one in a single service. With an upgraded account you have access to good import/export utilities and the google API which makes it simple to make bulk changes and publish your feed to sites like google, et al. I'm not a fan of the walled garden of images and pages. If I have a few hundred or thousand images to manage, the thumbnail and alternate image sizes are not trivial to change. You must resize them on your own and store them using the Volusion naming scheme, as only those file names are used for the specific image types…for example we recently changed templates and the file sizes uploaded were not appropriate for the new template. Files needed to be re-exported out locally from master PSD files and saved using the Volusion scheme and re-uploaded. Sure, it's a simple Photoshop batch operation, but one that shouldn't have to be done. And, other cart software may allow a designer to make specific changes to category and product pages as far as content goes. But, with Volusion if the field is not specifically outlined as one of the sparse variables you can enable/disable, then you're out of luck. We wanted to display our part number--a common field in the database-- on our category pages and in the shopping cart. In other software it may have been as simple as editing those page templates and adding the [productnumber] field. But, with Volusion it was a clumsy hack to get them displaying on the category page. I'm still waiting to hear from the dev team as to how we might get it listed in the cart. But, it's not all bad. Those two negatives notwithstanding, the experience has been positive. The free templates offer a good starting point for those with modest CSS and HTML experience. The API generates good code that uploads to google well. Managing the SEO at a product level is fairly straight forward, if not for a slew of clicks to get there on a product by product basis. Once done, our rankings on the search engines rise quickly. And, customer service is responsive and usually able to offer constructive suggestions.

Volusion was great when I had them. The themes are nice and the website functions well. The major issue I had was that I needed assistance with EVERYTHING. The platform just requires too much backend knowledge and without it, you can't do anything on your own. I would have to make a list of things I need done and call customer support (again, great customer service and the people know their stuff) to get them all addressed so I don't have to make 18 different phone calls. It took me almost a full year to get my website how I wanted it. What threw me off was the loss of features when I downgraded my account and the annual SSL renewal. In the end, I switched to Shopify because the platform was easier and all costs were included. I pay less now than I did with Volusion, I get a million more features to offer my customers, and it took me 2 days to completely rebuild my website and inventory with no help from customer support.

Difficult to handle large amounts of products. My store has roughly 30,000. Also, Volusion software only connects to a very limited amount of add-ons, you are constantly having to find and pay for connector services or have a developer custom make one. For example, Volusion doesn’t connect to MailChimp without paying for a connector called Vextras. Gets expensive to run you business the way it should. Volusion doesn’t even connect to Trustpilot, need to hire a developer to make that happen.

They have been very good making all meeting and answering all our questions. However I can’t find my website doing a web search so I’m sure others can’t and they can’t tell me why.

Site looks great runs smoothly had a bit of a bumpy start due to some schedule issues on my part and theirs wish I knew more of what my site can do and how to get to run to is full potential.