Ecommerce

Volusion Review

By Tinuiti Team

Jun 06 2013

Volusion Review

Interested in creating or transferring your online store? This unbiased Volusion review will help you learn the fundamentals as well as your fit with the ecommerce platform.

Curious about how other platforms measure up? Check out reviews of top ecommerce platforms here.

Be sure to check out our exclusive 1-on-1 with Volusion’s Product Marketing Manager, Ruth Dew.

Volusion Review: What Kind of Merchant Should Use the Volusion Platform?

Volusion gives an online retailer every tool necessary to make a highly functional and sophisticated online store. Volusion is highly prototypical of a premium ecommerce platform. There are simpler online stores available for smaller merchants, but Volusion offers solutions for retailers of every size. [ws_table id=”36″]

Check out all 5 Volusion pricing plans to find your best fit.

When comparing ecommerce platforms, it’s clear that Volusion is ideal for a wide range of business sizes because of the variance in product limits across their 5 plans.

Volusion Review: Good Volusion Features [ws_table id=”37″]

Volusion Review: Bad Volusion Features [ws_table id=”38″]

You can view all of Volusion’s features here.

Volusion Review: Volusion Customer Testimonials

Retailer Andreas Shuler of uHomeStores.com is a Volusion user that has been relatively unhappy with the platform’s bandwidth fees, especially for unqualified (ex. bots, crawlers, etc.) traffic. He weighs in:

“We have been battling this for several months now and even contacted their leadership team. So far all our requests have fallen on deaf ears and we have been given no indication they will change course anytime soon.

This really needs more coverage since potential store operators do not understand all the effort (besides the cost of course) of having to micro-manage your cart just so you can stay within those limits. Bandwidth is just one side of the equation, ridiculously low storage limits are another. Did you know Volusion only gives you a whopping 40GB of disk space for your entire site? (this is for their Platinum plan btw.)

We are what I would consider a Volusion power user. We are subscribed to their Platinum package, which gives us access to their API. We have written quite a bit of software to integrate with them (in addition to other customizations to our site), which is why we unfortunately feel somewhat shackled. We would love to move to either Shopify or BigCommerce; but the effort involved is simply prohibitive at this stage (and I think Volusion knows this…).

We have also pointed out how other carts are winning over new store owners in droves thanks to their less restrictive bandwidth and storage limits (see Shopify and BigCommerce for instance). I hope Volusion takes note, they certainly don’t have a bad product, but they need to be careful not to rest on their laurels for too long.”

Note: Check out more of Andreas’s thoughts below in the comments.

Ecommerce retailer Cynthia Lizana was kind enough to provide some feedback on the Volusion platform. She is a medium-sized retailer that manages 2 sites, TexCyn Wallets and TexCyn Wholesale. She weighs in:

“I have used many different platforms, including Vendio, ChannelAdvisor, and Yahoo! Stores.

After bad experiences with Vendio and ChannelAdvisor, I decided to find a website that was not part of a multi-channel platform. At the time, I did not feel that the multi-channel providers were able to keep up with the changes on Amazon and eBay. I looked at reviews of many different website platforms, and narrowed my choices down to Volusion and BigCommerce because they were the two top rated companies at the time. This was in the beginning of 2011. BigCommerce was not, at the time, PCI compliant and appeared to be having problems obtaining their compliance certification. So I chose Volusion.

Volusion has a lot of free templates and the site is almost fully customizable without needing a lot of web design knowledge. There are many little things on the backend that you can customize. Volusion allows for wholesale sites with their ability to show prices only to registered customers, and to designate a minimum order. Volusion can send retention emails to abandoned carts. The order process is seamless. They have excellent SEO fields. They have been very quick to add the new fields for Google Shopping integration. The price is only $99 per month and includes everything. You do not have to purchase “modules” as you expand. It’s all there and all included.

We had problems with Volusion and Paypal. If you sell on eBay, there is an issue with Volusion and Paypal. Volusion told us we had to have two separate Paypal accounts to use Paypal with Volusion and eBay at the same time. We finally just stopped taking Paypal on our website. I imagine there is a solution to this problem, though, if we wanted to take the time to figure it out.

I am very happy with Volusion, and doubt I will ever change to another website host.“

Volusion Review: Exporting your Product Data Feed from Volusion to Google Shopping

Compared to a lot of other ecommerce platforms, Volusion is quite transparent on how you can transfer your product data feed over to Google Shopping. Try to transfer your product feed from Volusion to the Google Merchant Center by following these feed export guidelines provided by Volusion.

Yet from what we have seen from our clients using Volusion, the ecommerce platform does not have an automatic or scheduled feed export option, which can be a major fault of a Google Shopping campaign.

Notable Volusion Websites/Examples

3M (multiple product categories)

School Outlet (Furniture)

Peterbilt (Automotive)

Volusion Review: Bottom Line

One of the oldest and most established ecommerce platforms in the industry, Volusion is a hosted ecommerce platform that offers an all-in-one ecommerce solution. If you’re looking for a very basic online store with only a few products, a Volusion website probably isn’t for you because of the multitude of features it offers.

Highly customizable and easy to use, Volusion offers a very standard and comprehensive experience.

Volusion Ecommerce Platform Comparison Grade: B+

How do you think this shopping cart stacks up against the rest? Have your voice be heard and your opinion known! Email [email protected] and request to have your experience be part of this Volusion Review.

View the master list of our ecommerce platform comparison to make the most informed choice when choosing your ecommerce platform software.

*Note: Grades are subjectively based on analysis and comparison to other ecommerce platforms, based on availability, significance, and functionality of the platform feature and overall value.