Blogger vs. Volusion

It's well-suited for helping you reinforce SEO for another site. It's OK for creating a real quick blog if you or a client needs something fast that does not demand a great visual design or a lot of visual content. If you want to create a super sharp-looking blog with a lot of visual content, WordPress will outperform Blogger by about 16 zillion to 1. Like, it's not even at all close. I would never use Blogger as my company's website. That would almost automatically consign your site to a very lonely existence.

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

• It's very easy to start using
• It's perfect if I want to write articles easily and share it
• Easy to connect to AdSense and make money out of it
• Can connect domain name easily
• Can be customized easily if I know HTML and CSS only too

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

• Blogger is not set up as well for all social media platforms.
• The Google+ social media platform was a flop and because of that, it can be harder to gain traction on Blogger as it was created to pair with Google+.
• Although the site is completely free the domain requires a purchase if you want to have it not say blogger in your URL.

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

I love the additional income and how great my blogs have turned out. It's given me ideas for others to build their blogs and has attained new clients for me. I make money using AdSense, how little or how much I want to make is up to me promoting my Blog.

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.

Blogger has a simple layout with descriptive instructions when you first sign up. It can be intimidating at first but is easy to learn through simple navigation and a little trial and error

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Google doesn't support anything that's free. Anything. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a help number for a free Google app where you could pick up a phone and get a credible voice on the other end. Unless you're actually paying Google for a service you don't exist.

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

Have a plan written out for yourself, you can always make changes as you go. It's more difficult to build a Blog if one doesn't even know what the Blog is going to be about. It's best to plan what your Blog is going to be about and what your audience is going to be and what you want to accomplish before you start building.

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).

I've selected Blogger due to its simple user interface and open source feature. I can make my pages within a few minutes and add them to my website quickly, unlike other software, Iike Wix or WordPress, which is more advanced and requires pre-learning to make efficient use of them. With Blogger, I can start my blog building directly without any prior knowledge and coding.

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)

• Before using Blogger, we were sending out information to agents via email and they would either delete them or just not find them. Now since we keep all the information in one place, it has cut down repetitive questions and has given our agents a voice as to what is working for them and what is not.
• We don't have any hard numbers, but we have heard back from our agents that the blog posts help them and not have to rely on contacting support stuff as often to find answers to simple questions.
• The only negative impact felt so far is with a few select agents leaving negative feedback to blog due to personal issues they have with policies within the company.

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.