For more in this series of see Big Commerce vs Shopify or CoreCommerce vs BigCommerce
Two of the most popular and well respected shopping carts at the moment are Core Commerce and Volusion. Deciding which one to use is often frustrating for most people because of how similar the two products are. I have lifted the hood on both for you.
Changing the look of the store
I have criticized both shopping carts in the past for having awful templates available out of the box. Core Commerce have made some great leaps in this regard recently and also offer FTP access which just makes life designing the templates a dream. It is so much more difficult to make a shopping cart great when you need to use some horrible pretend editor.
Price and ongoing costs
Setup fees
| Core Commerce | Free until further notice – usually $49 |
| Volusion | $49 |
Ongoing Costs
Managing your store
Product Management
There is no compelling differences except that Volusion is a lot more polished. They both offer a huge number of options but Core Commerce just looks messy. Everything is there but I get the impression that they left it to the programmers to sort out the administration screens at Core Commerce – I love the product but it’s about time they brought in a designer or two to give the product the front-end it deserves.
Features
SEO
Both need work, but Core Commerce has the edge on Volusion in terms of Search Engine Optimisation features and tools. I won’t bore you with too many details here but URL structure, canonical URL support and URL rewrites put Core Commerce out in front. If you are in a competitive industry and need every bit of search engine love you can muster up – go Core Commerce (or Big Commerce, but that’s another post)
Business Reports
Both are well equipped depending on how you like your reports. Core Commerce comes bundled with a large number of reports, whereas Volusion comes with a great report builder that lets you basically build whatever report you could want.
General Annoyances
Matt DeLong from Core Commerce has dropped a comment below to say that this is a requirement of PCI compliance (which means now we have to get annoyed at Big Commerce and Volusion for not having this in) – more importantly you can turn this “feature” off by going to admin > settings > store settings > pci/security
Stability and Longevity
Both products have been around for years and are working actively with there respective communities – there is no way to split them based on how long they have been operating and how long we can expect them to be operating, you are safe as houses whichever one you choose.
The Verdict
- Need a custom design created? Core Commerce
- In a competitive industry? Core Commerce
- Complex Products and Product Variations? Volusion
- Preference for easy to use, good looking programs? Volusion
- Want iPhone/Mobile Phone support? Core Commerce
- Want value for money? Core Commerce
- Want the simplest choice? Core Commerce
- Want powerful business reporting? Volusion
I don’t think you would have too many issues whichever shopping cart you choose, if you would like more help or a more complete and personal consultation feel free to contact me.
You might also like to read my review of how CoreCommerce compares to BigCommerce
No related posts.
Tags: CoreCommerce, Volusion
Andrew:
LOL, the annoying auto-logout feature bugs us too (@CoreCommerce), however it is a requirement for PCI compliance. so it’s enabled by default, but customers can go to admin > settings > store settings > pci/security settings to change it.
We have hired several designers to help w/ our admin area. (looks like a 747 cockpit at times)
Andrew! Good news, we just finished a major overhaul of how our merchants manage their products. If you can send me your email address, I can send over some screen shots or if you prefer, you can signup for a free trial and check it out. It’s been out about a week now and we are making some tweaks based on customer feedback, but we’ve gotten alot of good chatter about it.
Great news Matt, I will sign up for the trial later today., and no doubt have to go back over some old posts and update them :0(
Andrew,
Why don’t you do a comparison between free and paid shopping carts? I’m very interested in your opinion on popular free shopping carts such as Magento, Ubercart, Joomla, etc. vs. Volusion, BigCommerce, Core Commerce, etc.. Of course, whenever time permits for you.
Thanks for stopping by David. Do you mean a general comparison Free vs Paid or some one on one comparisons of a free cart vs a paid cart (or do you want both).
Great idea though. I find the biggest issue with free carts is that by the time you pay a geek to install, configure and skin it – then keep it patched and secure you have spent more money than if you had just paid CoreCommerce or BigCommerce $25 a month.
I have added it to my list and will definitely do some in the coming weeks so make sure you subscribe ;0).
A general comparison would be great for anyone new to shopping cart, especially paid ones. However, I’m no stranger to free shopping carts and I’ve yet to successfully open a fully functional website using Magento because of bugs and glitches and the steep learning curve for anyone with little experience in programming. Not to mention, Magento offers professional and enterprise level edition for a huge sum of fee not suited for small business owners. All of this made me want to drop Magento entirely and look for other options that offer a whole package such as paid shopping cart but I’m sure there are a few features that are missing in paid shopping carts such as BC isn’t PCI-DSS complaint and so on.
and a comparison of some of those to the wordpress shopping cart plugin (http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/) would be very interesting. many people have a wordpress site and might not have 1000s of products so this solution, even though feature light, is attractive.
Sales People are leaving Volusion because of how horrible the company is internally. I don’t know when they are selling the company, but it seems the insiders know something is up. What a shame…
I have been with Core Commerce for about a year now and although they have a lot of great features and their tech support are very nice, I’ve had a lot of problems throughout the year that never seem to get fixed and at this point, I would not recommend them to anyone looking for a new shopping cart just for that reason.
Right now for instance I’m trying to get them to remove the IP addresses from customer invoices – there are two places that you can print off invoices…..one of them is easy to find and creates a professional looking invoice, while the other invoice involves quite a few more steps to get to it and it’s unprofessional looking and hard for customers to read. So I use the nicer looking one that’s easier to find since in retail, I have to have professional looking invoices. They are refusing to remove the IP addresses from them saying that there is an alternative invoice that we can use (the ugly/hard to read one that’s hard to get to). And they never give me a reason as to why the IP address is there in the first place when it’s clearly a cusotmer invoice.
This is just one example of many – so many of their features are really great and I think they have the potential to be one of the best or the best shopping cart out there, except that when you get down to the nitty gritty of how their features work, they’re always complicated and never work as well as they should….I could go on about this but will leave it at that for now.
So anyone looking for a new shopping cart – I would not recommend Core Commerce at this point because I’ve had too many problems with small stuff never working the way it’s supposed to. They have a great team though who I’m sure could fix these issues easily but they are refusing to help me (on this issue) – I’m not impressed.
Matt Delong (owner) – it’s impossible to get past the tech people to talk to you …..if you’re willing to help me with this IP issue, I’d be more than happy to write better reviews in the future knowing that my issues are being taken care of.
Thank you.
Lisa
Ditto to all the above. Been with core commerce for two years. I have a problem with some glitch or bug with the software nearly every single week!
Support is nice and some effort is put forth to address the problem, but the BIGGER problem is just that the software is super buggy. So, one problem gets fixed and another pops up.
Seems to me they spend all their programming dollars on adding new features to win the marketing wars, but beneath the hood all those features are glitchy as hell and can’t be counted on.
Also I’ve had sudden massive increases in billing for gigabyte usage. Example: consistent usage for one year, then double usage for a couple months, then triple for a couple then suddenly a 300% increase in my bill even though site traffic and admin use was steady to lower during time period…. kind of shady.
Just when I started leaning toward Core Commerce, wham, one of those relatively simple yet annoying idiosyncrasies that eventually push people over the edge. Back to more research.
What was the “simple yet annoying idiosyncrasies” Scott?
Just a wee ebay seller navigating the web in search of a ecommerce solution…tried auctiva, vendio, inkfrog, then prostores. Navigated and read through application reviews & posts on auctionsoftwarereview.com (ebay related software). Then read the blogs here on volusion, bigcommerce, and corecommerce (including all reply posts).
Wouldn’t it be more cost effective in the long run, to just have a website built from scratch? Is the money you save on these generic solutions really worth the hassle? I guess it comes down to “you get what you pay for”! From what I read so far my only question is “which problems do I want to deal with?”
I have listed 1000-2000 products right now and add around 500 products every 2 weeks (dvd movies & media). I require a robust solution, that’s user friendly because I have no programming experience. A e-commerce solution that has easy (bug free) shipping and payment integration, as well as looking good. I’m not going to ask for cheap because my research has shown me that’s not possible.
What’s your personal recommendation Guru Andrew
!
thanks for the article. i currently use Volusion but I do not find it particularly intuitive or easy to get around in. this really scares me because most reviews I have read say Volusion is pretty easy to learn. Oh SH#@!
Anyway every so often when I get frustrated with Volusion I look around for something that might be easier for me which is why I came here. I am going to check out Big Commerce , again, and see if that offers any hope for me.
By the way I think you have a misspelling of there in their, better watch it or they’re going to come after you!
take care,
Jerry
We have been using Core Commerce for three months now and would not recommend it. The templates are among the nicest and the features are relatively easy to use once you get the hang of the system, but …. and this is a big but … at least one feature malfunctions amost every day. Since our site has been up ( in terms of pointing our DNS to CC) our down time is more than 60% – always due to some issue in their coding that either freezes the site or causes it to crash and burn. To their credit, they are quick to respond to emails requesting fixes, and their tech team is extremely nice and helpful – but we still end up with a down site sometimes for 15 hours at a time every few days -and in between various other functions go down sporadically for 3 or 4 hours at a time, sometimes affecting a customers ability to shop, select a product, add it tothe cart, select a size or color, etc.
I think the problem is they are releasing features before they are ready for prime time – and they don’t adquately test how one new feature is going to affect the functioning of other established features. There seems to be too many conflicts in their software -and I think maybe the problem is they are just growing too fast – and trying to do too much without adquate R&D. I think if they slowed down and made sure what they have really works before adding new features, they would be better off. We had high hopes, but disappointed now. Would have left already had we not put in so much time to building our site – hoping things will improve .
i have followed this thread or some time and had the same issue – researched 18 hour days sometimes for months. (painful!) i almost went with core commerce but they couldnt provide me with what i needed for a reasonable price, volusion forget it if they charge per option as well…!! i finally culled mine down to VIART. for a very reasonable and acceptable price of $50 a month unlimited items multiple stores, the works. i believe they have everything i need. well almost, but they are implementing things as they go. but just check it out for something that not many people talk about, they seem to have the majority of what i need…good luck guys.
when i say what i needed, i have a very big, long list of what i wanted from my cart. i wanted the best of everything, for not a big price. i despaired of ever finding it. and thought about going the customised cart… but of quotes from 13k upwards, forget it. why would you want the hassles of PCI compliance when you dont know what it is you need to do, or how, or even worse, giving that issue the time it deserves.! yyikes. bugs, maintenance, upgrades, new feature implentation, ok i gave up the idea of paying big money for something i would be then spending LOTS of time on site maintenance and money on top of that. stuff that for a joke, let someone else do all that so i can focus on my core business: selling. thats when i decided to go the leased / hosted cart option rather than build outright / use free carts like oscommerce and customise. i found the this viart’s features ticked most of the boxes in my long list and the ones it didnt i can implement in other ways or pay measly amounts for viart to customise, compared to customising a whole cart. dont let the php thing scare you off, it has a boat load of features that may just be what you need. i havent started my shop yet because i am currently working behind the scenes with my custom designer (i can now afford to do a proper design rather than cut back there due to cart costs) and i am taking things slowly. but its exciting. i had that good feeling when i signed up with them compared to all my trials with corecommerce, volusion and even americommerce. oh, and if you guys want another to test out that is basically up the same path as viart, lots of features for a reasonable price check out instant e store (great cart, $50 month, unlimited items, etc but i feel less features than viart, hence my decision) or another great one, VP ASP this one has heaps of features but from my last look it was $100 month, which pushed me to viart.
i definitely dont think corecommerce or volusion are the be all end all, they must just advertise a lot to get so much “airplay” / recognition. there are lots of other carts out there, so keep looking guys and dont just stop at that mob. i also never ever thought about bigcommerce, i dont think its worth the money, sorry.