Volusion vs. WordPress

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

In my opinion, smaller organizations with simpler layouts would be well suited to use WordPress, however, larger organizations with more advanced website feature needs may need another product. We found the website to be great at first, but as we grew, we needed more options that were not fitting for the product we had with WordPress and had to look at alternatives.

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.

• Easy to use User Interface
• Coding / Plugin Implementation is awesome
• There's always a solution available for the platform
• Security is easy to use and robust
• Implementation with 3rd party platforms, such as Google's variety of tools
• Can download and host on your own server or use their hosted servers

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.

• WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
• Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
• WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.

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.

As time goes on, websites will become less focused on paged content and more immersive. At the same time, the need for security will only go up. While WordPress has served the web community well for over 11 years, it's probably time to look for other better platforms.

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

Incentivized

WordPress has excellent UX/UI, mainly because it's familiar. The platform is still a bit dated on the back end, but it has improved from the past. I wouldn't give it a 10 in this area because it does require some coding and development knowledge. You can't just jump in and create a website with confidence, like you would with Jimdo, Squarespace or similar tools.

Incentivized

Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.

Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.

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

WordPress itself only has community service so your experience will depend on where you turn. Online, through forums and community boards, support is rudimentary but effective. You can easily turn to your local community and find exceptional individuals who know and use WordPress regularly for more advanced, inexpensive, support. I'm rating this less than 10 because of the lack of any formal support provided by a company.

Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.

It is very easy to find online resources to learn how to do just about anything with WordPress.

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).

WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution

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

There are no other site builders/platforms that stand up to the ease and versatility (heavy custom coding and customizations included) as Wordpress. Drupal is clunky and outdated, as is Joomla, and while Wix or Squarespace may be sufficient for someone with very low web needs, much like Shopify, it's incredibly limiting and either requires hitting it with a hammer and hacking code together to do what you want, or relying on often shoddily-built third party themes and liquid scripts.

Incentivized

WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.

• 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

• Allowed us to being all websites under a single umbrella, saving costs on similar products.
• It's increased our website turn time and made us faster and more efficient at launching websites.
• Edits and tweaks happen much faster as we have a customized environment.

Incentivized