Big Cartel vs. OpenCart vs. Volusion

It's well suited for simple e-commerce and basic inventory management needs.

Incentivized

OpenCart is best suited for business owners looking to sell their products online. Building an OpenCart website requires no or minimal coding knowledge. Being a self-hosted system, it is not recommended for people who have no hosting plan or have no experience in hosting websites so it would be better to go with another platform that is hosted elsewhere.

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

• It's very easy to use and does not require a lot of configuration or setup.
• It has been extremely reliable. Clients never have issues with purchasing from it and it has always has been up for us.
• It's very fast. It loads quick both on the consumer/front end and also admin/backend.
• Pricing model is flat, not percentage of transactions.

Incentivized

• OpenCart is well suited in cases where our eCommerce web development clients want a very specific design with very specific shopping cart functionalities.
• OpenCart is very flexible in its native ability to work with a wide variety of payment processors and payment gateways.
• OpenCart makes it both fast and easy to setup and configure a new shopping cart website, especially if you use one of the pre-made templates.

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

• For our needs I really can't think of anything!

Incentivized

• It's a very buggy platform. Although OpenCart developers release new versions time to time after fixing bugs every version of OpenCart has a different type of bug.
• It should increase the security of the platform.

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

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).

Honestly, when consulting my clients, I would always recommend WooCommerce over OpenCart. Although I've had clients that had existing OpenCart websites and they were fairly happy with them, making additions/changes/customizations from a developer standpoint was not the easiest compared to other systems. For very large shops, I always recommend Magento over anything else.

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)

• The basic plan at $10/month easily saves us that in time from having to manage our own e-commerce system on our own site.

Incentivized

• Clients loves the design which is easy to integrate to; you can integrate multiple themes.
• Overall user experience is good, so number of conversions is good.

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.