Volusion - What do you guys think of them?

Hey Guys,

I have found product I want to sell and found a reliable supplier. Would you guys recommend Volusion to run the shopping cart? How is their customer support? Their up time? issues?

thanks for all answers

P.S. I have recently noticed they're doing tons of promotion for their website.

 

No idea, this is the first time to hear them.

 

They're a good company. Solid product, solid support. They have some very large ecommerce sites using their platform, so it can definitely scale.

Personally, I would take a hard look at whether you want to use a platform that requires a continuous cost, vs using a cart like Magento or oscommerce, and handling the hosting yourself. Whether it be Volusion, Yahoo stores or anything else, make sure you are ok with their prices, and that you are going to stick with them for the long haul. Once you chose a proprietary platform like theirs, it is almost impossible to switch once you get going.

As far as carts like this go, Volusion's pricing is reasonable since they handle the hosting and everything else. Yahoo stores requires a continuous % of your "Gross" revenue, which is insane once you start getting a lot of sales. I would never under any circumstance use a cart that costs a % of gross revenue.

 

Thanks for the reply Jestep.

I don't want to worry about hosting, hackers, downtime and so on. I just want to worry about more important things such as selling the product, seo, customer service, and so forth.

 

There's also ecwid and wp ecommerce plug in for Wordpress. Volusion is a decent company, I guess the plus about paying a monthly fee is you don't have to upgrade any new version that may come out for security reasons. I had a client that had a database go bad and was using an older version cart which was not supported so the hosting had to be updated to run the new version a new payment process api had to be installed since the old version was not supported by the database as well and a whole list of things went wrong in the process. Just some things to think about, I think most of these pay per month carts offer a trial to test if you like the solution or not.

 

Thanks, I'll give the free trial a try and see it's suitable for me.

 

Love them! Worth every penny.

 

They are OK but I've heard really good things about BigCommerce. From what I can see they have more features and better support.

 

Many e commerce websites developed by volusion. Seem to be a reputed company

 

Bigcommerce is basically the same thing maybe a couple more features and seems to be a new player in the field so not many real users to actually compare how good their services really is, but I agree with uptraffic volusion does have some big brand names using their cart. If I had to choose one most likely go w/ volusion after checking out the site and reputation comparing the 2.

 

Take a closer look at their client sites and you will find that there are some major seo problems with their e-commerce enabled sites. And since clients don't get root access, everyone has the same unresolved problem.

 

I've been using Volusion for one of my smaller site which sells performance auto parts, as far as SEO is concerned, in each category / product page you have the ability to define custom meta data, you can also override the default head tags with your own, and yes you have limited access to the root files.

personally, I don't like it very much. one for its cost (i'm payng $97/mo for limit of 1,000 products, and i'm maxed out), and they also charge over bandwidth usage, I don't remember what i'm being charged for every month, I just leave it alone and I don't advertise the site at all. but i get about $30k sales from it a month.

2nd I think volusion is very slow sometimes, but once you are on it, it's normal. maybe it's just me.

overall, it's very easy to use and has lots of features built in. and their support is superb, they usually respond within an hour or two on a workday, their live support is also very helpful.

and for yahoo store, AVOID it at all cost please. they are not cheap, and they charge a ridiculous rev share (.5% or something of your sales). I dont even remember what % it was, I was paying about $2k a month to yahoo store when our biggest site was still hosted by them. and not to mention their VERY limited features, nothing can be customized, and non standard coding, which means you must hire someone who knows RTML to modify yahoo store. all that will be very costly. (we spent $6k for a redesign 4 years ago vs you can easily outsource one to modify a asp/php site for ~$1k)

just my 2 cents, hope this helps.

 

why would you want to pay monthly price when you can download cart like zen cart, oscommerce, magenta, cubecart. im sure there are guys here who can help out with that with little money, without having to pay some company money every month to have a shop

 

Probably should figure out everything you want your cart to do, how you want it to look, if you want to integrate it into an existing website and all that then pick the solution. I've used osCommerce and didn't really like it, yet it is simple to use w/ plenty of support. Hear good things about Magneto but no experience using it. Maybe anyone that have used the different solutions can chime in. That was good information to know about Volusion.

 

The issues with Volusion run deep. The homepage was being linked to internally a few different ways (https, index.php, etc.). This caused many that used this ecommerce platform to experience a difficult time ranking their homepage for any competitive keywords. I'm not sure if they resolved the issue yet, but without root access (they did not allow) these problems could not be corrected by the store owners.