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
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Hi Andrew,
Can we get a date on this article?
Can you advise other bloggers to add dates their articles were written?
I was reading your BC review and found they had no PCI Compliance, so I went to Core Commerce vs Volusion. If you call CC after 5 pm CT, they refer you to their website. Volusion picked up the phone on their Tech Support and Customer Care lines (I didn’t try the other options 2010-10-06).
Can you explain more about the SEO problem? I was watching Volusions’ SEO video this morning and left satisfied, but I don’t know much about SEO. Then I read this article.
Maybe you can come up with a better suggested product then instead of just being negative and critical? So what should a newcome to ecommerce get then?
C’mon – tell me???
BigCommerce
Shopify
Americommerce
Ashop
Core Commerce
Pinnacle Cart
3dCart
There are so many shopping carts better than Volusion. I have reviewed or compared many of them at http://andrewbleakley.com/category/shopping-cart-reviews/
Hope that helps Ray
I hate volusion!! Every day I run into a wall with their rigid, out dated structure. I keep trying to modify or improve the website and keep getting stuck. Their customer support team repeatedly says that they do not help people with customization and there is no support for those who want to customize their site. Although they claim that you can fully customize everything (if you know how) but they will not tell you how or even refer you to any web page with instructions.
When I try to use their built in html editor to customize the look of anything, it often strips out or messes up the tags I used.
Oh, and dont get me going about images. If you have thousands of products and want to change the layout a little bit, forget it. You will need to delete every single image for every single product, one at a time. Then upload each and every image new, then select the image sizes, in order to resize all of your images. There is no way to modify how your images are displayed with css throughout the whole site. You must delete every single image and then upload them all new.
Volusion looks like they keep just pasting on junk to their old code, patching and pasting without doing a major overhaul, like they should. They are using ancient code with pasted on updates. What a mess.
I could go on and on….
Working with Magento right now. What a breath of fresh air in comparison.