Comments on: All In One Shopping Cart Solution – Volusion Review

By: Taf Baig

Taf Baig — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 06:49:17 +0000

After spending the entire day trying to update FTP to work, I wanted to save all those using Volusion the misery of what I had to do today. Volusion Stores don’t allow you to Blog with FTP. They force you to capitalize one of the username words which makes it not work in Blogger. I should have been making money cleaning carpets instead fighting with this. http://www.MagicWandCompany.com Yes, a Volusion website. So this post doesn’t get to old today’s date is January 23, 2010.

By: George G

George G — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:47:27 +0000

I switched our company to Volusion after years of self hosting and designing, everything about them is good, UNLESS you do a lot of business online and have a lot of traffic. Firstly the max bandwidth you can sign up for is 50G after going through 200 gigs our first month and getting hit with $10 a Gig charge on top of the $200 set up cost and the $300 a month fee you can see why this would be a problem. This was also a slow month, we have used the same amount of bandwith in the last two weeks alone. They won’t or aren’t willing to offer and higher bandwidth packages so you are at the mercy of never knowing what your site will cost you on any given month.

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!

By: Jason Williams

Jason Williams — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:57:58 +0000

Wanted to let everybody know that Volusion no longer uses Rackspace for hosting. They now self host. FYI.

By: vera bradley

vera bradley — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:32:18 +0000

I have been looking into a good shopping cart tool and this one has seen some big reviews on several blogs so I think I will take the plunge. Thanks for the updates.

By: Wayne

Wayne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:12:45 +0000

We are having problems with Volusion support. They have a generic response to specific problems we raise. They have not been very helpful. This is many due to the people you deal with have a very low technical understanding of the Volusion system. It is clear our businesses technical team are far more advanced in knowledge than Volusion in understanding problems and how to fix them.

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

By: Wilbur

Wilbur — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 22:12:14 +0000

I used Volusion for over a year, had multiple sites there. We stopped using them once the sites started to respond very slow. We hooked up monitoring and would get notified every time the site went down. When we reported this info to Volusion we got a canned response of ” We will check it out” then “Everything seems to be fine on this end”. We began to ask our customers and many said that at times they had issued with the site. This was across multiple sites not just one.

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.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:19:07 +0000

I’m considering switching over to Volusion and leaving Channel Advisor, they basically lock you out of being able to design your store and the only way to get it done is to pay them thousands of dollars for a template, any time you need a new page, thousands of dollars, I also find it strange that only one company knows how to make Channel Advisor store templates.. they’re probably owned by Channel Advisor. Makes sense, lock your customers out of any design abilities and make it so they can buy incredibly expensive templates… bravo on that monopoly.

By: Jennie Heckel

Jennie Heckel — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 07:04:02 +0000

I have been looking for an all in one solution for my clients that I can really rely on and seems like I may have found a good one. The ability for live chat and calls is important to my customers who need a little hand holding at times. I love the fact that the intergration with Quickbooks and as a web developer that can easily edit a template for my customers, well this sounds fantastic! XML and Stonedge integration is really where it is at these days, and being able to customize a site for a client makes this program miles ahead of lots of the competition.

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!

By: Michelle Greer

Michelle Greer — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:40:47 +0000

Yaro,

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.

By: Kirtok

Kirtok — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 03:33:10 +0000

Yaro, you have a brief but very helpful review as usual. I have been a loyal reader of your blogs, but didn’t find the time to comment more often.

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