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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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’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