AspDotNetStorefront vs. Elastic Path vs. Volusion

If you need a tool to manage a website, this is a good place to start. If you aren't ready for something of this caliber it might not be meant for your business. It's a stepping stone and you need to be ready to learn and it may require a bit more attention.

Incentivized

Elastic path is a cost-effectively product which bring the advanced capabilities to enable business to drive a better customer experience. The ecommerce solution is very clean and it is built heavily using open source tools.Elastic path ecommerce is definitely a strong competitor which would fit for any retailers / telco's .

Incentivized

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

• Tons of reporting tools
• Easy to navigate
• Multiple user profiles

Incentivized

• Easy for non-Java programmers to understand
• Comes with a lot of built-in functionality

Incentivized

• 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

• Not everyone can navigate easily without training
• Some reports can be fairly large and take lots of time to download

Incentivized

• Product management tool should be assesible over web.
• Versioning of catalog items would a nice feature to have.

Incentivized

• 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

Team now has skill using Elastic Path

Incentivized

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).

More customization and ability to work with web designers make it an easy tool to manage projects and promote growth of your store front. It may not be as user friendly as others but it has more flexibility by far.

Incentivized

As a system integrator here are my thoughts -- Elastic path is one of best ecommerce tools, which would fit any retailer/ telcos business needs. The software architecture is well thought through and it is built with open source tools, the Ecommerce application is easily extensible and it enables clients to get there E-commerce application in less time. We have evaluated other products like ATG ecommerce, WCS, Magento. Elastic path is definitely a briliant ecommerce product which I would recommend to any clients.

Incentivized

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)

• Easy to use customer service tools
• Invaluable reporting abilities
• Tier users makes it easy to manage employees

Incentivized

• The positive impact was quick development time

Incentivized

• 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.