Right now it is December 24, 2011 and our store still can NOT process credit cards. Their support does not provide any answers or solutions, the problem has NOT been fixed, and Volusion does not any plan in site to fix the problem. They blame it on someone else of course, but I hold the person who sends me my merchant services bill responsible, which is Volusion.

Their support is horrible, and does seem like a bunch of high school kids who try to give you some IT dribble that offers nothing in the form of support or problem solving. They used to be good, I don’t know if they had some personnel cutbacks in the last two years or what, but I would not reccommend Volusion any more.

My New Years resolution is to find a new web hosting company for my e-commerce store.

I have simple needs, an e-commerce provider whose Credit Card servers don’t go down, and allow my customers to buy things. Imagine your store can’t run credit cards, and the people in charge of support do nothing about it.

Happy Holidays everyone!

The second problem with their site, is that if you do a lot of shipping and we ship about 50-200 packages a day, we need any easy way to generate labels. Volusion does not integrate with UPS at all. You can export your orders to a CSV file and then import to world ship, but if you have orders coming in live all day you can’t do this all day long.

After only two months we are in the process of switching to 3DCart, after extensive testing and very expensive lessons learned from using Volusion, 3dCart looks like a very favorable solution, and although they don’t advertise a high gig plan on their site they did tailor a plan that will give us 1000 gigs a month, allowing us not to have to worry about what our fixed costs will be monthly. Their system is fully integrated with both FedEx and UPS for easy and quick one click shipping in the admin panel right from the order without any exporting and importing.

So if you do a lot of sale and ship alot, stay away from VOLUSION!

Wilbur I think it is important to list the ‘Better eCommerce’ solutions that you raise.

This is a very good review of Volusion from Small Business Arena by Kirtok and has 121 comments which most are extremely helpful.

Including one from Josh who used to work at Volusion.
http://www.smallbusinessarena.com/volusion-shopping-cart-review/comment-page-3/#respond

This is a very typical problem when choosing a hosted Ecommerce, they cram as many stores on a server as they can. If you choose a Budget plan watch out that will be even slower.

In my option their customer service is horrible, slow servers, and my Credit card Company said they are not PCI compliant as they claim.

There are much better Ecommerce solutions out there. I won’t list they as it will look like an advertisement.

Having full html access, and good reporting with affiliate tracking tools will sure make my sites easier to monitize. So I am going to check out the newest Volusion features, and let you know how it goes. Remember a software/cart application is only as good as the hosting and cart combined. Up time and fast transaction processing plus all the other bells and whistles make this sound like a great program to check out, a higher price than other carts, but PayPal is getting to cost me more and more each day. Thanks for the tips!

Thank you for writing this review. We just came out with version 5 of our software, which now includes XML integration, shipping label printing from the backend, a more direct Quickbooks export, as well as a more css driven layout. here’s the list of the newest Volusion features:
http://www.volusion.com/version_5_features.asp

Although our software is an “all-in-one” solution, we have worked hard this year to improve our ability to integrate with other systems. Our improved Quickbooks, XML and Stonedge integrations allow customers more freedom than ever before. We also give customers full html access, enabling customers to use various reporting and affiliate tracking tools.

I am new to your blog, but I look forward to reading more posts. Keep up the good work.

Before I decided to move my business to Volusion, Andy Bear’s review was the only one out there. Now, you have a wonderful review about Volusion added to the list. But both Andy and you are not customers of Volusion, and I wanted to write a detailed review of Volusion as a customer.

As we all know, you get more depth insight and information about a software when you become a customer.

I hope my review will help biz owners who are looking for more information about Volusion and other shopping carts. Here’s the link:

Volusion Shopping Cart Review

As someone who has used the cart a good deal I can say that I cant really fault the product, I think the big question is if its worth it. Thats something you will have to decide for yourselves.

I especially liked the part where you discussed “…There are often inherent problems with jack-of-all service providers…” From working with various development companies and others that promise the moon and stars this i notice happening more and more… the people that they do work for must be confused as to what they do exactly.

As for Volution, I may need to review this service and pull it apart from a technical standpoint just to see how it truly stacks up.

Excellent content as always Yaro!

Luc

the only thing i didn’t like was their built in affiliate software, but providing such control over all of your pages, you can use any 3rd party solution.

support is grade A.. they’ll hang out with you on the phone until whatever you called about is resolved. it’s rather simple to use QuickBooks with this site. in general, it’s designed to managing your business the way business is meant to be managed.

and yeah, RackSpace is top notch too.

i wouldn’t worry about Volusion being “do everything well” company, because the things they do are all connected. it’s their business to provide ecommerce solutions, and they know if your site isn’t successful you won’t remain a customer long. much like internal departments in any corporation, they have specialized teams for SEO, support, development, etc,.

they’ve got all the eggs necessary to provide the right service. they’ve hired the right employees, and they’ve got their act together.

I do agree with you in saying that putting far too many eggs in one basket is a very risky proposition. I’ve always kept hosting and domain services separate, and that extends to other services that I use (analytics, etc.) but I think having my LiveChat and shopping cart/checkout solutions from one company such as Volusion is well worth the minimal risk.

All the best Yaro.