Floship vs. Volusion

I feel you should AVOID FLOSHIP AT ALL COSTS - in my experience, we have a USD 137,978 loss and counting; they have charged my card for $10,000+ without consent multiple times. I personally recommend AVOIDING THEM AT ALL COSTS. I was originally approached by Floship to provide fulfillment services for a Kickstarter campaign. After being provided a full cost simulation and in-person advice, it was my experience that all support disappeared once fulfillment should have begun. In my experience, our clients have been severely inconvenienced through ineffective and late shipping practices. I feel we have burned a significant amount of time and money in correcting this; to the extent that we will look forward to just shipping ourselves and/or using better alternatives such as Easyship in the future. I feel they do not provide any visibility to their costs which I believe are entirely inflated (e.g. more than $50 USD quoted as import tax for a $3 shipment). It is my experience that they need to provide receipts for their services charged. [...] In my experience, having not dealt with Floship for several months, they have now attempted to charge a card we removed from their website. I believe this implies that they keep your payment details stored separately and record your CVV and other sensitive information. I have since canceled the card since they haven't stopped, and we do not owe them any money. [...] I feel that Floship's complete hostility at the suggestion of any wrongdoing indicates the awful experience I feel you will also have if you work with them. It is also my belief that their responses do not attempt to address our concerns [...]. I feel our prior requests for support, transparency regarding postage receipts, and general work orders have been largely ignored until I spoke out publicly. [...]

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

• 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

• I believe that all costs were hidden with 0 visibility. For example, I was charged a 3% transaction fee and 3% card fee with no other payment options. Shipping costs are provided to you up to 3 months later, but in my experience, no receipts are provided.
• I feel that customer service is non-existent. In my experience, my emails went unanswered unless they are actively soliciting.
• In my experience, additional services such as pick packing inflate costs drastically making our costs 60% underquoted.

• 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 give Floship a one out of ten because there is no functionality, and I believe costs are deliberately hidden to obfuscate.

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

Incentivized

I feel that Floship support is hostile, and did not regularly answer emails.

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).

Easyship is a much better alternative; we selected Floshi, I feel, as a costly mistake.

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)

• Negative: Cost to us of over 130K USD
• Negative: Shipments and packages delayed by more than 28 days
• Negative: Complete loss of trust and goodwill for customers

• 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.