#1 most frequent
United States of America
89.3%5,554 installations of 6,218
What is Volusion?
Volusion is a cloud-based ecommerce solution from the company of the same name in Austin, TX. It features an intuitive dashboard, built-in marketing and promos, SEO, templates, and tools to customize look and appearance.
Categories & Use Cases
Media
1 / 6
Top Performing Features
Visual customization
Users can customize the look & feel of the storefront; storefront is visually attractive.
Category average: 7.3
Promotions & discounts
Includes tools for offering and redeeming coupons, promotional codes, and time-based discounts.
Category average: 7.8
Product variations
Products with variations or configurable options are easy to list and easy to browse.
Category average: 7.5
Areas for Improvement
Personalized recommendations
Display or recommend certain products depending on the customer’s identity or shopping/browsing history.
Category average: 6.9
Mobile storefront
Customers can easily shop on mobile devices; storefront is responsive or mobile optimized.
Category average: 7.9
SEO
The platform & templates help users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.
Category average: 7.5
Who Buys & Uses Volusion
#2 most frequent
Canada
4.1%254 installations of 6,218
#3 most frequent
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
2.7%170 installations of 6,218
Volusion Scam
Pros
- Volusion is a company with a great sales force.
Cons
- NOT user-friendly. Reporting tools virtually non-existent. VERY manual—no shortcuts ever for editing things.
- HORRIBLE customer service. Will wait on "Priority" Tech Support call line for an hour to talk to anyone. Completely UNHELPFUL/NOT KNOWLEDGEABLE tech support. ZERO accountability/transparency. We can't even get a hold of our "Designated Account Rep."
- Ever changing coding issues. We'll fix a problem one day and it'll return the next for no rhyme or reason. Even their own "engineers" can't make changes to hard-coded pages—it's ridiculous.
Return on Investment
- The end result of having our website on Volusion has negatively impacted ROI dramatically. It's a constant time and money suck. And it has turned away countless potential conversions due to its issues/lack of transparency.
Alternatives Considered
BigCommerce
Other Software Used
QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, Acctivate
Volusion - The Small Business Gold Mine
Pros
- Friendly and informative user interface
- Easy access to aggregate data and exports
- Great for small businesses who need a few more tools than most basic e-commerce platforms offer
Cons
- 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
Return on Investment
- Volusion is an integral part of our client operations, without it several of our clients and users would not be generating the kind of retail sales they wanted.
- Most of our use of Volusion is in partnership with a client, so its affect on our ROI is that our integration with it can generate client revenue for us as well.
Alternatives Considered
Magento, Magento Community Edition, Shopify, Shopify Plus, NetSuite, NetSuite CRM+, 3dcart, Miva Merchant and Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Chat, great for the customer in a hurry
Pros
- Quick way for questions to be answered
- Improves quality of online experience
- Modern way for a customer to communicate
Cons
- Saving chats for review or printing is not possible
- Creating pre-made or canned responses is tedious and can only be done by an administrator
- Limited number of users
Return on Investment
- Live chat can save a sale if the customer is looking for a quick answer and does not want to take the time to call or email
- We have customers order using coupon codes provided via chat
Other Software Used
Insightly, Volusion
Review Of Volusion From Both A Store Owner And Marketer's Experience
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- The user interface is relatively straight forward, but I've got more of a development/DB background. I think it could still stand to be made easier for clients that don't have a technical background.
- Their developer community is really limited. Platforms like Shopify and Magento have extensive developer communities with a variety of companies to choose from. Volusion seems as though they haven't prioritized building this out.
- A lot of my current and former clients complain about how the platform is limited from a customization standpoint. From personal experience I know that you can do just about whatever you want with it, but you have to pay a lot more than you might with more open platforms.
Return on Investment
- 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.
Easy to use and support that is out of this world!
Pros
- 24/7 support from people based in Austin, TX. The Volusion employees are very well trained and find solutions quickly. I cannot say enough good things about these employees.
- The functionality is very broad and covers virtually anything we would want to offer our customers.
- Their uptime is fabulous and they let us know when they are planning to do preventive maintenance.
- It is very easy to add products, text and photos.
Cons
- I would love to see a better interface with Amazon. It's awkward to use the Amazon template. I would love it if the information in Volusion could automatically populate the Amazon template.
- I would like to see a Volusion capability that would make it fast to enter an order in Volusion at a trade show. At a recent trade show we used the PayPal app with the swipe triangle. (It required us to set up the product codes and descriptions into PayPal ahead of time.) Then later we had to enter each order into Volusion manually in order to synchronize our sales, tax and inventory. We should not have to do it twice. We do not care so much about getting all the address information, etc. People are in a hurry. It would be good enough to get their name, email address, select the product codes, let Volusion calculate the state sales tax and swipe their credit card or accept a check or cash. Done.
- I would like to be able to grab photos that I've already posted on the website and reuse them for Instagram, Pinterest, etc. It is a time consuming process to find the original photo in my files.
- You need to update the fields for SEO. There are limits to meta titles, meta descriptions, etc. The limits you show are too long, based on the SEO consultant that I am presently working with . Also, keywords are not used by Google anymore and you should indicate that to your clients.
Return on Investment
- Better customer service
- Better understanding of where my sales are coming from
- Ability to do customized analysis of inventory and sales
