Digital River vs. Volusion

Well suited if you are wanting to implement a solution with minimal staff or resources to support a large project such as E-Commerce software delivery.

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

• Digital River's email marketing arm has always been top notch. They are very connected with their customers, quick to alert us to any problems they are experiencing and respond if we bring something to their attention.
• The Global Commerce platform has grown leaps and bounds in the last few years. Its great having a cloud based ecommerce platform that can be accessed securely from any computer in the world.
• Worldwide payments continues to be a Digital River strong point. They are continually investigating and and doing the work necessary to new countries and locales to their platform.

• 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

• Their flexibility and customizability are lacking. Changes to our cart or store require a lot of lead time discussions and development time.
• They have many strange UI implementations for things. One search bar is a wildcard match, while another is a string match. One setting might break your product, or be editable once, but you cannot change it after that one time.

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

N/A I wasn't the person that implemented or recommended Digital River. But from an eCommerce standpoint I liked the organization overall and would recommend it.

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).

We evaluated our ability to expand internationally with our current e-commerce platform and decided we could get to market faster with Digital River

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)

• Definitely positive impact in local markets
• Positive impact in email marketing
• Some positive experience with tailoring it for our business objectives

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.