Hiver vs. Volusion vs. Wix

For group emails where follow ups are necessary and tracking the progress of team members is a must, Hiver is a good fit. We have 5 different companies where all the AP flows into 1 group email. This group email is then monitored and the work is delegated to the correct assignee to address those emails.

Incentivized

For a small business in need of a few more tools than basic platforms, Volusion is a good option. However, if you want infinitely customizable [tools] or to have multiple integrations extracting your orders and products data, then Volusion is quite limited. Additionally, if you lack in-house development teams, Volusion is a good product that is friendly for users who are not necessarily tech-savvy.

Incentivized

The fact of Wix moving away from their ADI web-building tool in favour of Editor, in my opinion, makes a huge mess of everything. I feel a lot of the ease and automation of designing my website has gone to such an extent that I now "recommend" Wix only for professional developers. Worse is that I have to redesign a big part of my website as items are now linked to each other in a different way than used to be the case. In my opinion, A big ZERO for Wix, who clearly should do their homework again.

• Manage support emails with more transparency than Gmail Groups.
• Reduces learning curves and boosts productivity by allowing users to function inside the gmail service they are already familiar with.
• Ttracking email status (open, pending, closed) helps ensure customer satisfaction.
• And CSAT follows up to ensure the customer was satisfied with the help they received.

Incentivized

• Easy to Use. Non-technical employees can be simply trained. If you can use a social network, you can manage the backend of Volusion.
• All-In-One -- without any add-ons, Volusion is a turnkey solution for eCommerce. No programming knowledge is required, no modules are needed (unless you have very advanced needs), and it features everything from website text, products, email marketing, customer accounts, shipping calculations, and back-end payment and order processing.
• Allows for inventory tracking (such as Small, Medium, Large or Male/Female)
• Allows for kitting (creating product bundles, up-sells, add-ons, and more)
• Easy to customize -- with a little HTML knowledge, you can easily customize the free templates included in Volusion to create a personalized, dynamic web presence without the need for hiring expensive designers
• Provides a great experience for the customer. Everything from search results, product display, shopping carts, wishlists, and the actual order process are delivered in a professional manner that will keep your customer feeling confident about making their purchase.
• Easily integratable with Google Analytics with Sales Goal tracking -- this allows you to see where customers are coming from, what they are looking at, what they are purchasing, and when they are abandoning their carts.

• User-Friendliness: Wix is a lot easier to navigate than other web-building sites. Oftentimes it's like Wix does the thinking for you instead of just throwing endless options at you and complicating the process.
• Unique Content: Many services for generating websites, images, videos, etc. are starting to look the same and, for that matter, they're starting to look stale. What Wix offers feels fresher and cleaner.
• Reliability & Respectfulness: We have yet to incur any issues that have affected our web properties or routine to this point. Furthermore, Wix does not constantly throw new offers or new pricing or new requirements at us. They value you where you are.

Incentivized

• export the rules and import rules
• bulk update of the rules, one assignee is no longer here we have to go into each rule individually and update
• adding custom status, integrating with other 3rd party apps so the status can be changed by their triggers

Incentivized

• Feature implementation. While they have a ton of features, they're often released haphazardly in my opinion. Sometimes it seems like they don't have testers. Typically, I'm unable to use new features until about 6 months after they're released (and over a year after I asked for them) because it takes that long to get the quirks smoothed out well enough for us to use them. It seems that they often don't understand programs that they integrate with well enough to do a proper implementation.
• Timeliness of features. This can be taken with a grain of salt for many looking to compare. I'm a super-experienced user with many, many needs. We're often limited when it comes to Google (and other platform) beta programs, and even just early adoption because I have to wait for Volusion to catch up. What's tough is that I often NEED them to make a change in order for me to move forward, it's not my own limitation (but that's what you can expect when you use a third party software to run your site rather than your own team of developers).
• Customer service in regards to live chat. While I LOVE that they have live chat (I'm needy, I constantly need support) - the operators are rude 75% of the time. They come into the conversation assuming I have no idea what I'm talking about and have a 'customer's always wrong' attitude. I'm sure it's frustrating to deal with ecommerce customers who don't know the first thing about websites - but I'm not one of those and I deserve respect. Our conversations nearly always begin with "Clear your cache" and "I don't see the problem" from the operator and end in "Oh, you're right. Well I don't know." from them. I will say I've dealt with one or two who actually know what they're talking about. Live chat is useless when the operators know less about the software than I do.
• Slow to updates. They are often way behind when it comes to development and code. Example: They use jQuery v 1.4. We're up to 1.10 now and I'm experiencing issues for which the blame has been passed back on to me. I'm keeping up. They should be too. For me personally, the quality of development should come first. THEN worry about all of those features.
• New live editor. It's seen a lot of scrutiny, which you'll find easily by Googling. My problem is that I don't need a WYSIWYG. I write in html. You have to pass through the WYSIWYG to get to the html editor. This has caused my javascript to get executed, so once I get to the html editor, I have to re-write my script because it's now shown as the execution. That's poor development. They should have an option to disable.
• Inability to access pages in FTP. If you are someone who needs customization and writes in html, have fun. You can't actually access your product or category pages unless you do it through the content editors. You can absolutely access & edit your template and css files. But if you need a unique header in a product page - say a script to run, you'll have to put it in the template - adding overhead to ALL of your pages. The only workaround is hard-coding pages as "articles," which can make a mess of things.

• One place where Wix falls short of other CMS's is with insights and analytics. On other platforms, I can instantly see how many page views I received, what time the pages were viewed, location, etc. But seeing this information on Wix requires a Google Analytics integration that is not automatically included when you make an account. You have to first go to Google Analytics to make an account, then come back to Wix to activate the integration, it's a little time-consuming for a feature that most CMS's come with instantly.

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’m happy with Square space as of now, and right now I don’t also have a team that would be able to review for me whether it’s worth switching again. Wix was great in the beginning of my career, but I needed something different to support the release of my new music. I like the price for Square space more too!

Incentivized

Easy to use

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

Incentivized

Great customization, but a pain to backtrack. They recently added the ability to set fonts etc as headings, title, body etc, but if you did not begin your build with these presets you are screwed if you ever try to change font/ colors/layout etc.

Incentivized

I never had an outage issue per say. I would say it was very reliable of a website building platform and as a marketing source there was never any issues connecting it to the server. I don’t recall there being any editing tools or hosting issues. Nothing went down when using it.

Incentivized

Not complex at all. It teaches you how to use their platform in a dynamic way. Each tutorial offers an explanation that can be reviewed later on. The connection speed of a web page has been smooth so far, with no major problems regarding this subject. Overall, Wix can manage 10+ pages with great connection speed.

Incentivized

Support is there, can be slow at times.

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

As stated before I didn’t use the support as I did not have the feature and did not often enough need the help. I was able to figure it out mostly on my own by exploring the site. I’ve found exploring and playing on it told me how to do most things.

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).

Like I said I was a beginner so it was fun to navigate and teach myself how to implement the features when building and maintaining my site. It was a fairly easy place to host my domain, and creat something simple.

Incentivized

True ticketing solutions are certainly more robust in that you can typically manage social media channels and phones, etc. But, in my opinion, when you don't have a team solely responsible for managing a ticketing system they can be complicated to implement. With HIVER, we're already all accustomed to managing our own G-Suite inbox, so it was simply a matter of teaching the team how to utilize the solution.

Incentivized

I've also used Shopify as a base platform, as well as Magento. Both are better. My company has looked into moving there twice since I've been here, and the only thing stopping them is the complications of making such a move. I think Shopify offers similar value for the money with a cleaner albeit more minimalist look. Both are better options in my opinion. I would only recommend Volusion if someone had used it before and doesn't plan on making it a crucial part of their business plan.

Incentivized

Wix is GREAT for a drag-and-drop website editor, but I prefer Squarespace. Squarespace has a lot more polished drag-and-drop modules. Squarespace feels more like a name-brand editor, as it's frequently discussed by many influencers online and has a high level of brand awareness. Wix is more customizable and can create a more tailored end product than Squarespace. Additionally, it is cheaper, which is another advantage for Wix.

Incentivized

I give this rating to Wix because it's a great content creator. It has a great platform and also offers great customer service. If you encounter any technical issues, with Wix you will find a solution. For premium members or domain holders, this is the same as for Trial members or non-domain holders.

Incentivized

• Hiver has increased our ability to get back to tickets from customers more quickly.
• Hiver has helped our customer service rating.

Incentivized

• Increased product database efficiency. It's really easy to import and export products/categories. Has likely saved us hundreds of hours.
• Integration with other platforms. Integrations with comparison shopping feeds, email auto-responder tools and fulfillment tools is quite easy. This saves us on the cost for custom integrations.
• Because it is a hosted solution, Volusion takes care of all the PCI and other security compliancies. Not having to monitor this and update ourselves saves money and gives us piece of mind.

Incentivized

• Affordable - for those on limited to zero budget it is easy to get started and getyour business online. I was able to create a portfolio website that I could direct my clients to in order to view my previous projects.
• There is no need to pay a website designer (save on costs)- it is easy to get a website up and published on Wix that you save on not needing to pay a professional to do it for your start-up business.

Incentivized