Overview
In the late 1990s, website designer Kevin Sproles
noticed a trend in his clients’ requests. They wanted shopping cart
software that they could use to easily sell online. In response, Sproles
founded Volusion, an all-in-one shopping cart option for small to large
businesses. Since its founding in 1999, Volusion has grown to employ
more than 350 people and now hosts over 40 thousand online stores,
including sites for Intel, 3M, National Geographic, and the Chicago Tribune.
As
comprehensive shopping cart software, Volusion offers most of the
features merchants need to manage their online stores. Keep reading for a
full analysis of Volusion’s pricing, features, add-ons, and customer
service.
Pricing
Volusion offers a 14 Day Free Trial
(no credit card required) so you can test out the platform with zero
risk. If and when you decide to use Volusion to host your online store,
you can choose from four pricing tiers. All are billed on a monthly
basis, without any setup or cancellation fees (though if you cancel you must remember
to cancel all your third party services individually to avoid
additional fees). Although you don’t have to sign any contracts to use
Volusion, if you do decide to make a year long commitment to the
platform, you can benefit from a 10% discount.
Here’s a breakdown of the pricing structure and the features that come at each level.
- Mini –$15/month
- Unlimited storage
- No transaction fees
- 1GB Bandwidth
- 100 products
- AND
- 24/7 online support
- Free responsive templates
- Mobile App
- Facebook store
- Social media tools
- Free Slideshow
- Automatic Tax Rates
- Plus –$35/month
- Unlimited storage
- No transaction fees
- 3GB Bandwidth
- 1,000 products
- All of the above PLUS
- 24/7 online and phone support
- Abandoned cart reports
- Ratings and reviews
- Import/Export
- Newsletters
- Pro –$75/month
- Unlimited storage
- No transaction fees
- 10GB Bandwidth
- 10,000 products
- All of the following PLUS
- 24/7 priority online and phone support
- Phone orders
- Deal of the Day
- Customer Loyalty Plan
- Batch Order Processing
- Amazon and eBay integration
- API access
- CRM tools
- Premium –$135/month
- Unlimited storage
- No transaction fees
- 35GB Bandwidth
- Unlimited products
- All of the above PLUS
- Dedicated account manager
As
you can see, Volusion does not charge any transaction fees. Your
payment gateway, however, most certainly will. Volusion offers their own
payment gateway with a slightly reduced transaction rate at 2.15%. More
on this later.
Rumor has it that one of the priciest aspects of
Volusion can be the bandwidth overage fees at $7 per GB. Make sure that
you choose a plan proportionate to the bandwidth your store actually
uses.
If you’re looking for an enterprise solution for your
high-volume store, you should check out our review of Volusion’s
enterprise platform, Mozu.
Web-Hosted or Licenced
Web-hosted.
Volusion is an SaaS (Software as a Service) solution. They manage your
site’s hosting, and they currently boast an impressive 99.98% uptime.
Specific Size of Business
Volusion’s
software is scalable and works great for small and large businesses.
Just keep track of how much bandwidth your site uses and plan
accordingly.
Hardware and Software Requirements
None! Just keep your computer and internet browser current and maintain a strong internet connection.
Ease of Use
Volusion offers a Free 14 Day Trial to
all prospective customers. While you will have to provide Volusion with
some contact info, you get to keep your credit card number all to
yourself.
Upon creating your account, you will immediately be directed to your admin. Here’s what the dashboard looks like.
A
one minute video shows you some quick basics of using your dashboard,
though the video is far from extensive. For more in-depth step-by-step
directions, I recommend Volusion’s video tutorial series. You can find
these videos by clicking the “Helpful Tutorial Videos” link in your dashboard; most of them are pretty helpful.
Unfortunately,
Volusion has disabled a few basic functions of the admin for their
demo, so I was unable to test out order processing, among other things.
However, I was able to add my own products. Thankfully, adding products and product images is simple.
When I was done, I just clicked “View Live,” and was able to see the product I had just added as a customer would see it.
It’s
easy to create discounts and coupon codes in the admin. And you can
make those discounts as specific as you need them to be.
From
the admin, you can also make changes to your site’s design via HTML/CSS
editors as well as a WYSIWYG editor. More on this in Web Design.
Features
Volusion
comes with all the features you’d expect from a popular shopping cart.
Here’s a quick breakdown of a few of those features.
For the Customer
- One page checkout. Help your customers purchase quickly for a higher conversion rate.
- Allow social media sharing. Let your customers share their excitement and promote your brand.
- Gift cards, daily deals, and coupon codes. Create all of these features in your admin.
- Abandoned cart reports and emails. Remind your customers to complete their transactions.
- Allow reviews and ratings. Inspire confidence in your products and your brand.
- Give customers a good look at your products. Post multiple product images and enable zoom and color swatch features so your customers know exactly what they’re purchasing.
For the Merchant
- List unlimited product options. You can sell the same t-shirt in five different colors, in five different sizes, in five different patterns, no problem.
- Company email addresses (at extra expense). Give your employees an email address that uses your domain name.
- Accept payments. Volusion can handle multiple currencies and has features for automatic tax calculation.
- Returned Merchandise Authorization (RMA) tool. Make returns a cinch.
- Mobile management. You can manage your store from your smart phone, tablet or even smartwatch.
- Email marketing tools. Keep your customer base informed.
- Sell on Facebook, Amazon, eBay. All of these channels are synced with your Volusion store, and you can manage all your orders from your Volusion admin.
- Marketing and SEO tools. Write custom URLs, meta tags, and image alt tags. Benefit from Volusion’s auto-generated sitemap.xtml, robots.txt, and custom 404 error pages.
For the full list of features, try clicking around Volusion’s product tour.
Web Design
Volusion offers 75 free themes, 23 of which are mobile responsive. Honestly, I wish all Volusion’s themes were mobile responsive. With 30% of all online sales coming from mobile devices, it’s imperative that your site looks great on smartphones and tablets.
If
none of the free themes strike your fancy, Volusion also offers premium
themes, which range in price from $50–$900. Of these premium themes,
only those priced at $900 are mobile responsive. I find Volusion’s
pricing needlessly steep in this area. Other shopping carts sell their
premium themes for around $150, and those themes look just about as good
as the ones Volusion sells for $900.
There
are a few ways you can go about customizing your site. There’s a
built-in template editor within the admin, and you can edit both the
HTML and CSS stylesheets.
Customization is more difficult for the less tech-savvy. While there is a WYWIWYG (what you see is what you get) Easy Editor,
it’s fairly limited in its capabilities. You can update some of the
content, buttons, and images, but you cannot change colors or fonts.
It’s really a pain to have to figure out HTML in order to make a few
simple changes.
Below is an example of the content changes you can
make using the Easy Editor. By clicking “Edit” you can change the
titles of each of those buttons.
Integrations and Add-Ons
Volusion’s app-store
is still in beta with 77 add-ons. While 77 is certainly not an
abundance of add-ons, it isn’t a bad number. Here are a few of the
add-ons in the Volusion app store.
- 71 lbs. Shipping refunds.
- Slack. Company messenger.
- Zapier. Integration service. (For a monthly fee, Zapier allows you to integrate with hundreds of add-ons, which makes up a bit for Volusions’s limited options.)
- MailChimp. Email marketing.
- Quickbooks Integration. Accounting software.
- Xero Integration. Accounting software.
There’s also an API available if you’d prefer to have your developers build a new connection.
Payment Processing
Volusion integrates with over 30 payment gateways. Here are a few you might recognize.
- Stripe
- PayPal Pro
- First Data
- Authorize.net
- Chase Paymentech
- CyberSource
- Skrill
As
I’ve mentioned before, while Volusion does not charge transaction fees,
your payment gateway will, so be prepared to part with around 2.4% of
each transaction.
Volusion also integrates with its very own, in-house payment gateway, Volusion Merchant Services (for
US merchants only). If you choose to go this route, you can benefit
from a slightly lower transaction fee. Volusion Merchant Services only
charges a 2.15% transaction fee on top of a $3.41/month PCI compliance
fee.
Note: I’ve seen rumors online about hidden fees,
contracts, and cancellation charges involved with Volusion Merchant
Services. It appears that you’ll have to sign a three year contract, and
termination of that contract will cost $99. Additionally, the
advertised 2.15% transaction fee is the lowest rate available. Some
merchants will be charged more. Be wary and always read the fine print.
Customer Service and Technical Support
All
plans (except Mini) come with 24/7 personal support via phone, chat,
and email. Additional priority support (read: faster response times)
comes with both Pro and Premium plans.
Here’s the contact information for those avenues of support:
- Phone – 1-800-646-3517
- Sales Email
- Live Chat (Link provided at the footer of most volusion.com pages)
For
merchants who prefer do figure things out on their own (as well as
every merchant on the Mini plan), Volusion has made some good
self-service resources available. These resources include:
- Knowledge Base
- Webinars and Video Tutorials
- Social Media Profiles. You can contact Volusion via Facebook and Twitter.
- Dev Wiki
There
are mixed reviews online about the quality of Volusion’s customer
support. Personally, I had a good experience with all of my interactions
with Volusion’s representatives. I asked a few questions via the live
chat in my admin, and I received comprehensive answers within two
minutes. That’s a much faster response time than I’m used to.
Negative Reviews and Complaints
As
with every service, there are some downfalls to using Volusion. I’ve
searched the internet to see what real customers say about their
experiences with Volusion and gleaned the most relevant, recent, and
recurring complaints:
- Bandwidth overage charges. Lots of customers report racking up big charges in bandwidth overage fees. Aim to choose a plan that matches your bandwidth needs and try to reduce the amount of bandwidth your site uses.
- Boring free templates. I agree that Volusion’s free templates aren’t the most exciting, though they certain aren’t the ugliest. What really gets to me is the limited selection of mobile responsive designs. It simply isn’t an option for your site to not work on a mobile device.
- Dated software. Customers often call Volusion’s software “dated,” “old school,” or “behind the times.” Volusion is simply lacking some of the bells and whistles that many other shopping carts (like Magento) have introduced in the past few years.
- Misleading sales representatives. I’ve seen a lot of complaints mentioning “bait-and-switch” tactics. Sales reps are reportedly over-promising and under-delivering. For some reason, these complaints are often directed at Volusion’s UK branch.
Positive Reviews and Testimonials
On
the other hand, many customers are satisfied with the service they
receive from Volusion. Here’s what those customers praise most
frequently:
- It works. This is by far the most popular positive comment. Volusion works. You can start selling with all the features you need right off the bat, and the software is relatively bug-free.
- No transaction fees. While Volusion does charge for bandwidth overages, they do not charge transaction fees (unlike Shopify).
- Good customer service/support. I’ve seen both complaints and commendations in this regard. What’s certain is that it’s nice to have in-person 24/7 support at most price points.
- Ease of use. Volusion’s admin is easy to learn. You can get to selling quickly.
Security
Volusion
is PCI (Payment Card Industry) Level 1 compliant. But, you’ll still
have to maintain your own 128-bit SSL certificate. You can purchase one
from Volusion for $89/year, or you can choose from the other options available.
Volusion’s hosting comes with automatic daily backups and automatic upgrades. You can also choose to use Volusion’s CDN (Content Distribution Network) powered by Akamai to deliver your content to your customers faster.
Final Verdict
While Volusion is an okay option, I can’t call it the best.
Volusion’s less-than-current software and additional fees make me
question whether it would be a good long term investment, so I cannot
wholeheartedly recommend it over other fully-hosted shopping cart
options.
However, that isn’t to say that this cart is the wrong
choice for every merchant. Plenty of merchants have found success with
Volusion. You might as well. Sign up for Volusion’s free trial by
clicking the link below, and try it out for yourself.
