KalioCommerce vs. Volusion

KalioCommerce is a good choice for mid market companies. IT support required would depend on your particular implementation, of course, but in our case our ecommerce team working with Kalio is able to deal with 95% of the work

Volusion is a good company if you're starting out. The problem is that, if you want more complexity out of the program, you're kind of stuck. Also the regular time out errors and slow downs can be very frustrating. Packages that miss overnight deadlines because your system stops working can cost you customers. In today's highly competitive market, that's just something that's hard to put up with. If you have a lower volume of business you might be able to work around these issues.

Incentivized

• They make it easy to create pages for each product.
• They have a variety of customization options to tailor to the needs of your website.
• Changes can be made from one part of the site, to the entire site, with ease.

• Templates are pre-built for a good end user experience. I've gone through the process of building custom sites as well as tweaking both free and paid templates that Volusion's design team provides.
• Their support team didn't use to be as helpful, but in recent years have answered nearly all questions I've had. Their support section within the database provides detailed walkthrus as well.
• Order processing is easy once you've been trained on the system. We got to a point where nearly the entire process was automated from initial purchase through shipping.

Incentivized

• Because Kalio has a growing client base, I find them a bit understaffed. The speed at which our company was growing, we needed to lean on them more, but they weren't always able to deliver because of the sheer volume of requests compared to their staff.
• It's difficult to physically write code within the space they have provided. I find that I have to copy and paste the code into a different text editor to read it better.

• API calls use the previous call as a reference, even if you weren't the one we made the previous call. Can lead to data gaps, so you often have to set a manual date range to look back to make sure you aren't missing any data.
• Not as customizable as most ecommerce platforms
• Not as many integration options as most platforms

Incentivized

KalioCommerce is not simply a software solution, it's an entire organization focused on helping our business grow and improve. They are an extension of my eCommerce team, and their insights and support help us move quicker in an ever changing field. That, in combination with a platform that has proven to be flexible, dependable and intuitive makes renewing a no-brainer.

When you spend so much time with a product like this and not only have you witnessed its growth, but you almost feel like you are next those that make the decisions of building features a certain way, you can't help but want to stay and be a part of their continued growth. It's simply a great product. Can it improve? By all means! But it will only improve because of users and avid resellers like me.

I know what to do to add a new product, promotion or do an analysis of sales.

Incentivized

You have to wait on hold for at least 45 minutes every call—the tech support person never knows the answer right away so they put you on 10 minute holds only to come back and say they're still looking for answers. The chat function could take days to get a response. Our "Dedicated Account Manager" never checks in or answers, nor are they ever in the office when we call. It's like they try to be as unavailable as possible until you forget why you even called in the first place. Insane.

Incentivized

It is best to use the built-in features and recommended services for the most turn-key experience (ie. Skipjack for payment processing so that it can all be done from the Volusion backend).

Having used Magento and Joomla in the past to manage websites, the KalioCommerce platform allows access to much deeper levels of the platform to better customize it for our needs. In addition, the platform is much more robust, able to handle complex, huge product catalogs, and is more flexible in terms of integration with other tools and services.

While k-eCommerce was very glamorous to us because it integrates with our main workflow, it just didn't have some of the marketing features that are so integral to the way we do business online. The set-up costs were also way too high. Volusion is so affordable and feature heavy, it makes it very difficult for any shopping cart provider to compete. You can find others who are competitively priced and have similar features, but they simply aren't as robust (at least for the way we use it)

• Increased employee efficiency
• Better customer service.
• Easier, hassle-free product management.

• Honestly, when you're in the dashboard, the UX is simply horrendous. I mean, everything that should be 1-2 clicks away is 4-6 clicks away, and each pages takes at least four seconds to load. You just find yourself wasting a lot of time waiting for things to load. This should be more simple.