TrustRadius Insights for Volusion are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Volusion has been a trusted e-commerce platform used by many organizations across various industries. Users have relied on Volusion to power their websites, handle sales, analyze sales data, and calculate earnings and taxes. The integration with platforms like Amazon and PayPal allows users to seamlessly integrate with these popular marketplaces, expanding their reach and streamlining their operations.
For those looking to improve their website's visibility, Volusion's SEO consulting service has proven effective in delivering good results. Moreover, users appreciate the user-friendly interface provided by Volusion for managing orders, products, marketing, design, and reporting. The platform also offers robust features and functionality at a cost-effective price point, making it a popular choice for businesses of all sizes.
With Volusion's intuitive interface for customization and branding, users have successfully created unique online stores that represent their brand identity. The platform's out-of-the-box capabilities make it easy to set up and customize an e-retail store quickly. Additionally, Volusion seamlessly handles the entire business process from store front to customer management, analytics, and payment gateway integration.
While some users have experienced limitations in terms of features and reports, as well as occasional website failures, they have still chosen Volusion for its flexibility, comprehensive online tutorials, and overall usefulness. Whether it's managing inventory for small e-commerce sites or serving as the exclusive e-commerce solution for large organizations, Volusion has consistently demonstrated reliability and longevity as an all-in-one e-commerce platform.
Volusion is being used across the whole organization as our company website. The only way we accept orders is through our website. We utilize it for e-commerce as well as retail channels.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
If I could score Volusion lower than a 1 I would. Since launching with them we've had more issues and frustration than ever. I wish we could go back in time and select anyone else but them for our website. We've funneled an insane amount of money into making this site suitable for our business needs (6x more than what was quoted to us initially) and our #1 customer complaint is how terrible our website is. There's no telling how many sales we've lost due to this. I would NEVER recommend Volusion to anyone.
Volusion is what we use for our web store. Being that we are an online retailer, that is a very significant function for our business. Bottom line - does it work for day-to-day business operations? Yes. Does it do it well with minimal errors? No, I'd say not. I'm personally not satisfied with Volusion. I think its features are limited and the reports that you can run aren't the most useful. We also experience total website failures, including gateway errors, painful slowdowns, and other errors. To their credit, Volusion always springs back into action in due time. But I've seen it take them four or five hours to fix errors where the site was moving so slowly it took customers 20+ minutes to check out. No way of knowing how much business that cost us. We've looked into moving platforms and the only reason we haven't is the grand nature of doing such a thing.
Pros
Customer service is pretty good.
Layout is intuitive.
Decent range of capabilities for small business.
Cons
The site slowing down on such a regular basis is devastating to an online retail company.
Easy to outgrow Volusion and its feature sets.
No ability to create item-by-item discounts for certain customers.
No ability to stop customers with tiered pricing from using coupon codes.
Lacking in analytical features.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Account Manager in Sales (Printing company, 51-200 employees)
Our customer service team uses volusion live chat as a way to connect with our customers. It is another avenue that they can reach us if they are uncomfortable doing so by phone or just need a quick question answered without the hassle.
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
Likelihood to Recommend
Volusion live chat is perfect if you are currently using a volusion site and need the functionality of chat, it works seamlessly. However there are several scenarios where a user will have to contact an administrator for simple things which can reduce its effectiveness as a time saving tool.
Our organization uses Volusion to manage our online store, including processing orders, credit card capture, etc. It also gives us the ability to easily edit and publish, while quickly updating our sitemap to submit to search engines. Overall it is very user friendly and has been a great solution for us over the past 8 years.
Pros
They have a great how to section, so if you are unsure of how to change or create something within their platform, their knowledge base sections typically has the answer.
The platform is very user friendly and lays out each section separately so you can easily add for SEO.
Cons
Blog integration - they have evolved over time, but there is not a way to easily implement a blog.
There is also some need for improvement in terms of duplicate pages, where they are really tabs.
Likelihood to Recommend
I have recommended this platform to many people in the past in different industries. Overall, it is a great solution for all ecommerce merchants.
Volusion was chosen as a solution for opening an online e-retail store. The products for the store were acquired through third party dropshipping services and manufacturers. Volusion made it simple to choose a store front design, load products into the site, and set up a payment gateway to accept purchases using integration with PayPal. After setting up the legal and mundane aspects of the business (business licenses, domain names, etc.) the actual store was able to be created and set up in less than 24 hours from the time I decided to create an account. Volusion takes care of the design, makes it easy to customize your colors and logo, sets up custom pricing and shipping, and works on mobile devices. In short, Volusion was the entire business - from store front, to customer management system, to analytics, and payment gateway.
Pros
Volusion has an excellent simple and intuitive administrative area.
Volusion stores work great on mobile devices and tablets.
Volusion integrates with many third party services like Doba.
Volusion makes it easy to accept payments.
Cons
Volusion could offer more free modern responsive themes.
Likelihood to Recommend
Volusion is an adequate solution for any ecommerce website. It's comparable to all of its current major competitors in price and services, as a one-stop packaged solution that can handle every aspect of your online sales presence.
VU
Verified User
Supervisor in Research & Development (Consumer Goods company, 1-10 employees)
I've used Volusion for a website that sold thousands of bicycle related products such as actual bicycles, parts, accessories, etc. I also consult on a small business website that went against my advice and built their site on Volusion. Both had goals of building simple to manage ecommerce sites.
Pros
Volusion has a stupendous inventory / warehouse system that includes the ability to create PO's (purchase orders) which is something that I pay an additional $20 a month for using a different eCommerce solution.
Cons
Unless you plan on spending close to $1K on a template, the more reasonably priced templates have some major spacing issues on the product listings. You have your standard listing, then below that something like 300px of white-space and then some more content that's usually off the page. So while the pricing seems reasonable at first, be prepared to spend a lot of money on a template if you'd like a visually pleasing product listing template. At that, some of the cheaper templates are using nested tables, and from what I know that's an extremely outdated no-no.
Working within the dashboard is a horrendous, unpleasant experience; the load times are excessive, and from SEO best practices to images to variations, editing a product, a standard five minute process takes about twenty minutes on Volusion.
Adding and navigation is a complete headache; again it's an overcomplicated process that's even further bogged down by excessive load times, and the need to navigate through half-a-dozen pages to change one simple thing.You could simplify this process using a CSV upload, but yeah, that's not available on all plans
Products with variations are a complete headache to manage.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think if you have a website where you have products that aren't going to include a lot of variations, and you need a more robust warehouse and inventory solution Volusion might work really well for you.
Volusion was chosen and the e-commerce platform by the company and my job was to customize the appearance and brand it. The interface was easy to digest and took me only a few minutes to get the branding started. Updates that have followed have made it even more intuitive. I would recommend Volusion to any future clients or employers. Great job!
Pros
Ecommerce - I have used other products in the past and have definitely found a product I will use again
Pricing - the billing was great in that if calculated all the necessary fees.
Adapatation - modifying themes was very simple and allowed me to achieve the desired look I was shooting for.
Cons
Please improve on the on screen editor. Especially when it comes to using tables. Editing and customizing tables was kind of the weak point.
Likelihood to Recommend
I recommended volusion specifically for the price calculations it provided including shipping cost.
Volusion is used exclusively by me as our ecommerce solution. We run a few websites using Volusion as our shopping cart provider. We use nearly all of the Order Management, Product Management, Marketing, Design, and Reporting tools they provide.
Pros
Features. Volusion has a ton of features that we've found with other ecommerce solutions, but never all of them. We're fairly reliant upon a few of the features that we can't find elsewhere.
Price. There's no denying it's a very fair price point... given that you don't go over bandwidth limits (we always do).
Live Chat. They provide me with a quick way to get a hold of them - which I make FULL use of.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
My recommendation would be based on the following:
1. How much are you willing to pay? If your budget is tight, this is probably your solution. Sure, I am constantly frustrated with Volusion's inability to keep up with me, BUT at $200/mo for a ton of features and almost flawless order management, I have to be fair.
2. What features do you need? Do you need Google Trusted Stores, Google Shopping Integration, eBay Integration, Amazon integration, etc? Or really just order management? If you don't need the bells & whistles, you can probably get away with a cheaper or same-priced platform. If you're a full-fledged web marketer, this could be what you need.
3. Do you need integration with main workflow software? If you're just ecommerce, this doesn't matter. If you're like us and have offline orders too, this can be a problem. Look into it. Ours doesn't integrate so we've custom-built a solution ourselves (Huge pain - still, worth the money saved). There are other, better solutions out there for businesses that are on & offline, but they're costly.
4. How experienced are you with web development? I'm assuming not very if you're looking for shopping cart software. If you have enough understanding to do things yourself though, this software could be frustrating. There are definite limitations when it comes to customization, which is likely on purpose. Their support team could be less knowledgeable than you (though they won't admit it), so you'll spend too much of your time dealing with someone who thinks you're the idiot when really, you actually understand how things work far better than they can rationalize. Basically, they get in the way a lot. So if you need to be cutting edge, have access to integrate on your own, have access to all of your design... look for something that is less rigid and lets you do your own thing.
