The two biggest hosted shopping carts (or e-commerce platforms if you want to impress girls) offer incredible feature’s, years of development and award winning customer service. This review will have to look at how each feature is implemented to split the difference.
Price
Both offer free trials. 14 days for Volusion and 15 days for Big Commerce
Both start at $24.95 a month – Volusion hide the link in the footer which always concerns me. Neither charge transaction fee’s – take that Shopify
Setup Cost: Big Commerce is $49.95 to Volusion‘s $49.00 – not worth mentioning except that some Volusion fan boy will cling to it and mess up my comments.
So what price difference’s are there ?
The basic (cheapest plan) at Volusion allows 25 products and 1 Gb or data – Big Commerce give you 100 products and 2 Gb data
On price Big Commerce trumps Volusion.
Look and Feel – Front End
If you have a designer on board that is going to customize your shop or integrate it into your existing design – skip this section now. I am going to say some truly awful things about the templates in Volusion and if you aren’t going to use them you might as well save yourself the blushing.
8 years ago you would have punched a designer in the mouth if they delivered you a online store looking like the one’s Volusion saddle’s you with. I hate every single one of them. They are horribly dated, poorly optimized, visually upsetting and atrocious to work with. Given the quality and quantity of Volusion‘s client roster I expect better – quite frankly it is an insult that they would even offer these disgraceful templates, free as they are.
Big Commerce on the other hand have dropped some serious cash getting some beautiful, clean and very usable templates created. You could very easily go live with one of the free templates or you could very simply get one made by giving your designer FTP access to your site. Yep, FTP access to your hosted shopping cart – perfect 10 points to Big Commerce, go straight to the front of every developer and designer’s list with this feature.
Look and Feel – Admin Area
I like the look of Big Commerce (it is identical to Interspire), it is clean, modern, intuitive and packs a lot of information and remains easy on the eye. Volusion is a little squarer, a touch old school but just as effective. I doubt there is enough between these two to hold one above the other so let’s call this a draw.
Search Engine Optimization
Both offer the ability to specify the Title, Keywords and Description fields.
By default Volusion uses ugly query string’s and Product Id’s but it can be configured to “look” a little better – but it is a weak hack reminicent of the crappy SEO offered by osCommerce and her bastard offspring.
Big Commerce comes to the table with some pretty clean URI’s using the product name as the page (replacing spaces with dashes) – there are some weird results if you use special character’s or punctuation, but you shouldn’t be using them at all.
Big Commerce also integrates with Google Website Optimizer for all your testing and analysis
Additional Features
Both offer Gift Certificates, Electronic (downloadable products), coupons, there own payment gateway product (only available to US customers), newsletters – there really is not much to split them at this level.
The big difference is what Big Commerce is looking to offer in the next release (version 6). Things like multiple warehouse, drop shipping, Mail Chimp integration, pre-order, back order, iPad and iPhone support and eBay integration
Reputation
Both have been around for at least 10 years in some form or another and generally have good histories and reviews, the next 12 months will be telling as Big Commerce tries to muscle in on territory that has usually been safe with Volusion.
Customer Service and Support
Lots of awards, lots of happy customer’s. We have had no trouble getting support to help us or sales to call us. We would love to know your experience with either company – leave your comments below.
For more in this series of see Big Commerce vs Shopify
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{ 54 comments… read them below or add one }
LOL, I tried volusion and bigcommerce and didn’t like either one. Volusion because of the templates and crappy support. BigCommerce because they are always behind on features. They are never ahead of the curve. They also have slow support responses and continue to lie like volusion with their “Spin”. IE Volusion “Add this” being a big thing and BigCommerce saying they have 10,000 BC customers when that is really counting interspire. Really puts me off. Can’t trust people like that. Not one bit.
I am currently between CoreCommerce and Shopify. Got to figure out which one would work for me.
Couldn’t agree more about the spin and the feature comment regarding Big Commerce. The marketing bullshit will never end – it is too much a part of the culture at Interspire, but they are charging forward with features, version 6 looks very impressive. Surprised you are looking into Shopify that has got to be the least “featured” shopping cart of the four you mentioned.
I would love to hear how you went with CoreCommerce, I have only ever had brief looks into it.
Good luck whichever way you go.
I really wish Volusion had better free templates for my clients, but I’m a designer so I don’t use them anyway.
I don’t know about BigCommerce yet, but I do know Volusion hides behind their agreement rather than standing behind their software. Their latest release (Winter ’09) crippled or removed features that existed in the prior version, costing us sales. Their agreement only guarantees network uptime and specifically excludes software issues.
That’s pretty ordinary – though not entirely surprising. What features did they remove/cripple that cost you the sales out of curiosity – hope you have been able to recover some ground
The biggest issue for us has been the loss of control over shipping methods customers can choose. We ship a physical product and customers are frequently only given an “online delivery/free shipping” option. Some customers order anyway and we eat the shipping. Some customers call to let us now this is why they are abandoning their cart. When they call, we are able to complete the orders via phone. For those that don’t call…
They also changed the search function to specifically exclude product descriptions. (Since restored after much “discussion” in the support forum.)
There are many other issues with the new version. One thing I’ve noticed since looking for an alternative is Volusion seems to be one of the few to require an account to access the community forums.
@ Bill – I am not only a Volusion reseller, but I’m also a forum member. I’m actually glad there is not access to the Volusion forum for non-members because there is a tremendous amount of Volusion specific activity/coding/and feature request discussion-something I feel should not be accessed by non-members. About your shipping method, I’ve worked with over 30 stores so far, on V5 and W09 and I’ve never had the issue with shipping like you have. Hopefully, you can get it straightened out. I can only assumed they are setup incorrectly. Usually, online delivery/free shipping comes up for products that do not have a weight attributed to them, thus creating the software to believe it is a downloadable product. Check that first and write back if you still need any help, or as always contact support.
I know what you mean, because the same thingt was happening to me with my site, but I realized the reason my customers weren’t able to chose the other shipping options was because I forgot to assign a weight to each of the products. If you are missing a weight value for any products in the cart, it will only show online delivery / free shipping. Try this, and I’m sure this will solve your problem, at least for that issue.
I’ve been bouncing between Volusion, 3Dcart, goecart, BigCommerce and now CoreCommerce. I’ve read numerous reviews and information from all over the web. Supposed “expert” reviews, user reviews, etc.
I have eliminated all bus BigCommerce and CoreCommerce. I need custom development, so BigCommerce is useless, but their software “Interspire” is perfect!
Sales didn’t seem to interested in helping me, but kept referring me to the features page of their site.
CoreCommerce seems to be winning a few points over Big now. Sales was very helpful, they have a great set of features, and they include more support and designing/customizing seem to be more cost effective.
Any comments welcome on either of the two. I will post any more finding!
I have a e-commerce wordpress site and I want to switch to Volusion or whatever is best. Can someone do this for me?
Scott,
In my opinion Big Commerce is the best. You can usually export from you existing shopping cart and import into a new shopping cart – if you would like me to have a proper look at it and give you a quote just fill out the form at http://andrewbleakley.com/hire-me.php and I will go over your options with you. Include the approximate number of products in your shopping cart if you can.
Andrew:
Since I had a custom design created for my vitamin store, the templates issue isn’t a big deal for me as I use my custom design. The biggest challenge I have with Big Commerce is that they don’t have nearly the number of features that Volusion and Core Commerce have. The other issue is that I don’t automatically get the new features added to my store like I do with Volusion and Core Commerce. I have to “schedule” an upgrade.
As much as you push Big Commerce, I can’t help but think you either are making money pitching them and/or you have never really sold anything using their platform. BC doesn’t even offer re-occurring ordering right now (yes, it will be out in about 4 months)—but I need it now, it’s HUGE in the vitamin business. I make 35% of my money with re-occuring ordering and most of my colleagues would say the same.
Finally, Big Commerce is really nothing more than “style” over substance–and to elaborate, they are winning the “BS battle”.
I make no money pushing Big Commerce, but experienced has shown me that if I recommend a simple to administer shopping cart to clients (like Big Commerce or Interspire) I save a lot of time and money with ongoing support.
Many of the client I deal with do not have the luxury of being able to get custom designs right away so good looking templates are a must – the software needs to perform from the minute they sign up and unfortunately Volusion doesn’t – Big Commerce does.
Your comments about the templates on Volusion are funny.
I’m a web developer and have reviewed several of these ecommerce tools, hands down the top two are BigCommerce and CoreCommerce.
Big Commerce has great useable free templates for the non-designer. CoreCommerce has the best features with social media, printable shipping labels, built-in newsletter tool, and 24/7 telephone support, however the templates in corecommerce are not very attractive – no biggie if you’re a designer but pretty disapointing since they win on everything else.
Well you’ll be glad to know someone from Core Commerce dropped a comment to let me know they are putting some work into more templates – it looks like Core Commerce is ready to step up – great. It’s a wonderful time to be in shopping carts. See the comment at http://andrewbleakley.com/blog/core-commerce-reviewed/#comment-359
Man, I need to spend more time on your site. I’ve been researching ecommerce sites for weeks and this article was just what I needed.
Keep it up, mate.
Thanks, it’s lagging at the moment because I have so much work on, should be back and updated again soon though.
Same here! Great resources Andrew; it’s so hard to find good cart comparisons.
Nice posting. We do business to business through Volusion and we’re quite happy with this solution. I guess we don’t put as much weight on attracting clients with attractive templates. For us, we just want a bunch of capabilities and 24/7 support.
Volusion’s servers used to slug along last year. System performance has certainly improved recently.
Glad you have had a great experience with them. How have you found contacting technical support when you needed it?
hi andrew i am just wondering if you can help me i don’t knwo which company to use for my ecommerce website that i dream to build. i need something like this to build http://www.wirelessemporium.com , please let me know thanks
Do you have a budget in mind ?
honestly i am not sure about the budget yet. i was thinking one to build my self. what do u think how much it will cost for something like that or can i achieve that goal my self. thanks
hi andrew u there my friend?
This company deleted my entire website and then threw all the blame on me. DO NOT USE MyBigcommerce.com. All I wanted was my $74.90 back and they would not even budge. This company is a loser!!!!!!!!
I love reading your posts and find them very informative. We have been looking to open a new store and have used Volusion for almost 4 years now. I have now tried the trials of Big Commerce and Core Commerce and I think we are going to stick with Volusion. I have read a lot of the complaints about Volusion, but we have had pretty good uptime with our 3 stores with them and I disagree with others about the tech support – they are usually very helpful – even if there is an issue at 3am or on Christmas day. Anyway, just my 2 cents – love the info, love the blog… thanks!
As long as you have found a cart that works for you. Thanks for the compliments spread the word and tweet the articles ;0)
I find this very useful. I have been on volusion now for about a year and a half. Customer support is very good over the phone – spotty if you issue a trouble ticket. Mostly if you really have a problem, support often does not read your initial ticket very carefully and sends back generic topic related information that is of no help. But phone support is very good. Volusion, to me, is a very antiquated basic piece of software that they keep trying to improve but the base architecture is out of date completely and very cumbersome to use. There are many features which just about all their competitors have, especially in the handling of multiple images, that they do not have. The templates are really awful and all the templates, even the premium priced templates, have exactly the same basic underlyling design. Search functions are poor from customer standpoint. Likewise their handling of options is very cumbersome. The software needs to be completely rebuilt from the ground up to stay competitive I feel. They are also pricey now on a per product basis. Servers are a huge problem for me. I check webmaster tools every day for server performance and page loading times are all over the place — we are in the top 25 percent of websites one week and in the bottom 25% the next week and this is really not acceptable, especially now that google is going to factor in page loading speed in ranking. Page loading is a vital statistic in an ecommerce platform. They say the templates can be customized, but in actuality many of them cannot easily be customized. There are some good stores up that have been custom designed from scratch but you can do that on any platform. I am very distressed over the conversion rate there – we have massive cart abandonment for some reason and that alone is prompting me to make a move. We used to be at yahoo and we never had this kind of cart abandonment, but the one thing yahoo did have was a good smooth friendly checkout. I’m not sure what the problem is but I would be interested in hearing if anyone has a comparison of Big Commerce and Volusion in terms of conversion rates
your comments about Volusions horrible template system are bang on. I bought a template from them for $475 and it was the worst piece of garbage I’d seen. I even tried to get a refund, but no go. The code and css would barely be passible in 1999.
the second worst thing about Volusion is the total lack of css selectors for the page and category views. to change anything you need a long trail of about 8 selectors (table > tr > td >table…) it is just horrible.
Having said all that, their support is top rate the the software is VERY fully featured. But often I just don’t need all those features so I’m jumping ship to another platform.
I don’t really know why someone will even choose volusion. I’m a designer/developer and recently had to do a new template for a client’s store hosted by volusion. I must say, this is the most horrible piece of commercial software I’ve ever seen from a designer/developer perspective.
First, volusion is so 1999, they use tables for most of their layouts and that was really surprising to me(We worked with the V5 software). Our team manged to do things like footer, sidebar and headings using our own css but the main content area was purely tables.
Secondly, we realised that most aspects of our design was not going to work with the volusion sofware. We did some custom javascript to do a few things we wanted but still we had several issues and volusion couldn’t provide us any answers that were going to help.
Eventually, we had to strip off a lot of things from our design
There’s is little documentation and zero lack of support when it comes to questions about templating or design. Anytime we called volusion about a what classes, selectors or variables that controlled what aspects of the store, they always made sales pitches of their own design services to us.
Finally, when we launched the site, there were issues with customers adding items to carts in IE. Volusion, said it might be a script in our file since we had a custom template. We didn’t think this was the issue since the template was just stripped down to basic html and css. We are currently shopping around for a different solution.
In conclusion, don’t choose this software if you are a designer/developer. This will be your worst nightmare. On the other hand, if all you want is a plain basic free template that would get you up and running, then volusion will work for you or be prepared to spend something like $6500 for their custom design service..
This was definitely really helpful! Thanks for posting.
I tried doing a bit more research into Big Commerce, but couldn’t quite find the answers I was looking for. When they say 1,000 products, what’s the exact definition? For instance, if I have a style of shoes, with 5 different colors and 10 different sizes, is that still considered 1 product if I post it as one product?
And I know they’re going to have eBay integration soon, but do they integrate with any POS system now? That would help a LOT with inventory and accounting for merchandise.
A product is just the product, not the variations (size and color)
You could use the API or Import and Export to integrate with most systems or use Big Commerce as a POS system on it’s own (see http://community.bigcommerce.com/bigcommerce/topics/using_bigcommerce_as_a_retail_pos_software?from_gsfn=true) for more info on that
Thanks! I think I’ll be trying out the trial version sometime in the next few days, but it’s killing me that they haven’t posted the release date for version 6. I feel like it’s better to try out the trial version once the new version is released…
I also have one more question about bandwidth. Is there a significant difference between 15 GB and 45? There’s a huge monetary difference… but what can I expect with 15 as opposed to 45? What does it even do?
I sent an email to Big Commerce on July 12 about Version 6 and was told to expect it Sept or Oct. The said it was delayed again because of other updates they are doing currently.
I’ve shopped the usual ecommerce sites myself and always have decided on Big Commerce myself. I’m going to have several vendors for products that will be drop shipped and have been holding out for the latest release before I open my store. It’s supposed to support “multiple warehouses” as they called it so it can automatically order a product for me from whoever the vendor is. From what I understand, it has to be done manually now.
If anyone has several thousand to spend, Zoovy looked to be best turnkey solution but the only price I got was around $8000 which included a lot of consultation/marketing support that I rather do without to keep the cost reasonable. $8000 is about $7000 more that I planned on spending just to open my store.
“Volusion has a lot of awards and some very impressive customers if you believe THEIR home page”
Volusion’s awards and customer base is spot on. You can go to all award sites and customer sites to validate. On another note, there’s been a rumor going around recently that Volusion might have been bought out by investors and/or a larger firm…
Rumor….do tell. Things are definitely different as of VERY late.
Hi Andrew, great post. took me some time to read all the comments but I did.
I have a client who wants to start a members only website. I have looked at all the features of most of the softwares and find volusion to be the best. Our client will also spend about $7500 for custom design with volusion since they want the store to look different, modern and like a leader in the industry and not a small mom and pop shop
Any recommendations for us? Are we doing the right thing by selecting Volusion? Also we are going to select the best plan with unlimited products so the lady at Volussion said we will get our own support person whom we can call and speak to by name
It’s a big commitment and we will be spending over $10,000 for everything so want to make sure we are doing the right thing. thank you
Seems like BigCommerce is ahead of schedule with a release of v6. I’ve been researching my options to death, and think I’m going to go with them. Anyone checked out the new features and/or used them?
Not really ahead of schedule – they pushed it back a few times from May 2010. None the less they are on track.
If you want to try out the new features sign up for a trial account – all trial accounts are v6
I’m trying BigCommerce. I have a problem with their UPS shipping calculations. If your package dimensions require additional handling because of length, it will not calculate the correct shipping charges. Add a second of the same item to the cart and it more than quadruples the shipping charges. Not good.
There seems to be known issues with package dimensions and UPS shipping on Big Commerce (only the the weight based calculations work properly). Apparently they are looking into it, when I find out more I will drop you a line
Hello,
I am looking to open shopping website. I was thinking about Magento. I even installed Magento, But the problem is you need to know programming to build your shopping website there. I am looking for something which will allow u to build the store without knowledge of programming
Is magento capable doing that? Or I need to look into diff software such as bigCommerce?
You don’t necessarily need to know any programming to get setup with Magento, but it is the most complicated of all the shopping carts to use – not recommended unless you like pain or have an IT degree
New to ecommerce and currently have a wholesale and distribution company looking to sell our products online(b2b). We are a general merchandise wholesaler and have HUGE amounts of products to sell( nail polish 180 colors and on and on…) looking for great features on shipping, payment and crm…. any recommendations??? We have a designer for te front-end and looking for feature rich but easy to use admin panel with great crm,email, shipping and payment options. Please help
With a HUGE amount of products you will be looking at the more expensive end of the market but you should be fine with Volusion, Core Commerce or Big Commerce – if you want more control look into Magento but it is a more significant investment
I did look into big commerce and core commerce and also 3d cart. They all seem to be sufficient for what we are looking to do but need to know if any of these sites will allow ftp access? We are hiring outside designers to work on front end and need compatibility with our pos system and accouting software. we saw a site called http://www.goldenstella.com and jennysplacega.com which is similar to what we are creating. Any advice?
All three of those carts allow FTP access – but only to the design elements (you can not install other software or access the shopping cart source code)
Just heard I should be careful about signing up with non-compliance(pci) sites. Which sites are pci certified?
Only 3dcart,corecommerce, and volusion are pci compliant. Bigcommerce is working on it bit was supposed to be done in may still not done, my boss is thinking about moving out to volusion or 3dcart…
What are your opinions on Pinnacle Cart? Do you think it is more feature rich and customizable than the others mentioned here?
I wouldn’t necessarily say it is more feature rich – I have had a quick look over i and will be doing a full review and some comparisons in the next few weeks when they release there new version. I like what I have seen but I will reserve judgement until I give it’s tyres a good kick
I have been given the task of researching whether, when a customer comes to a shopping site, it is possible to reveal prices based on the country the customer is surfing from. I don’t mean currency–I do mean prices, which may vary.
BTW, I have been testing BigCommerce and am very pleased
Thanks for an informative article and comments.
Hi Cara, by reveal do you mean show prices only to people from certain countries and hide the price from others?
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