I am publishing this early because I am so incredibly unimpressed with Volusion as an e-commerce platform, I am hoping someone will set me straight while I dig a little deeper.
Volusion has a lot of awards and some very impressive customers if you believe there home page – but I hate to say it I was incredibly underwhelmed when I gave it a test run recently. My only conclusion is that they have taken the original 1999 version of this software and tacked things on to meet the sales pitch.
It certainly looks the part
Search Engine Friendly
Oh my god. It is crap. I can only assume it is deliberately shit so that they can sell you there SEO services – which seem to be advertised on every other page – for shame.
Volusion Templates
Lots but they are pretty average, in fact they remind me of old Frontpage themes. One of the things that initially sold me on Interspire/Big Commerce was that it looked usable right out of the box – not so with Volusion – it is really quite ugly.
They give you full HTML and CSS access which is nice, but without a way to upload images and resources you will need some sort of external hosting.
Social Features
Nothing more than the Add This button. Seriously. They even have a video touting the social shopping solution – not even the choice of providers or a means to customise the Add This (that I could find) – I was pissed at this. I don’t mind if you have no social integration -it is easy enough to configure if you have HTML access, but to piss in my coffee and call it caramel is insulting.
It’s not all bad. There are several great features.
The 301 Redirect manager means you could fix the awful SEF URL’s. I have seen Big Commerce recently copy this feature and it really is great, simple enough to use and you can import and export so yippee for getting something right.
IP Firewall – I can think of a few times this might be useful – most especially during the construction phase.
Gift certificates, downloadable (electronic) products, coupons all things the other major vendors tried to sell as extras – bravo Volusion for coming the goods and giving every customer a full package
