What Is Volution?

What Is Volution?

in
volusion platform

 

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.

Dashboard

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.

Adding Product

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.
Creating Discount
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.
Free themes
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.
Premium themes
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.WYSIWYG

 

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.
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:
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:
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.
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