Volusion
The Volusion shopping cart and e-commerce product was developed by Volusion, Inc. a company based in California and Texas.
Highlights
The Volusion shopping cart offers a number of features that are of interest to businesses looking for an “optimizable” shopping cart. First, it allows users to customizer meta tags, titles and alt tags easily through the use of form fields in the back-end. As such, you just have to type in the keywords and sentences you want on a per-item basis which saves you time.
Next, Volusion offers breadcrumb trails which are displayed using the categories and subcategories that you set-up as you build the cart with your products.
A very useful and frequently under-used feature is the ability to write text on category pages. For example, if you sell mobile phones, you can write a paragraph of text above the product listings on the Nokia main category page. That makes it a lot easier to differentiate your site from others and gives the search engines some “meat” to consider as they rank your category page for a keyword term such as “Nokia cell phones.”
The reason this feature tends to be under-used in Volusion and all other shopping carts that offer it, is basically threefold: First, most people aren’t good writers and so they become lazy when it comes to generating original content. (Easier to copy the manufacturer’s description, right? That won’t help much.). Second, most people don’t know to do it, or third, they don’t know how to do it.
Unfortunately, since many Volusion store owners use this feature, the “H1″ tags are nowhere to be found on their product pages. (For more, see limitations below).
On another front, many people will opt for the Volusion demo to see how it functions. The software is automated such that in the demo it instantly creates a store template design to test. This design can be modified to look more attractive with the help of a web design professional. As with other demos, it is suggested that you try out as many features as possible before making the decision of whether or not to purchase the product. Just because a few features seem “nice” you have to consider the full package and how it accounts for your needs..
Although the reviews on this website are geared toward search engine optimization, once in a while certain features are highlighted. One nice feature of this shopping cart is the ability to sort the products on the page. Potential website visitors sort by can manufacturer, pricing, newest products, and other options. Additionally, there’s a “my recent history” feature which users of Amazon.com have come to love. Thess can potentially increase sales by making it easy for website visitors to find what they want.
Limitations
While many people are looking for an HTML-based shopping cart, Volusion comes close with their pages being built in ASP. Also, users have some, limited FTP access to the store portion of the website. You can however make the homepage HTML instead of ASP and upload your own customized page.
Next, In order to name pages, the software takes your dynamic ASP page (for example: www.companystore.com/search.asp?cat=8) and changes it to look like a static HTML page. The transformation of the URL makes it look like this: www.companystore.com/the_product/8.htm. The use of numbers rather than words is considered by many SEO experts to be a deficient area of the software.
Volusion does offer the ability to create custom HTML pages (such as “landing pages”) but they are also somewhat limited in the area of page naming. For example, www.yourcompany.com/keyword1_keyword2_s/52.htm. Moreover, these pages are a little more difficult to link into the rest of the site. To overcome this, on one site we worked on, links were placed in the footer of the page.
Nonetheless, at least the ability to insert keywords into the url was possible, albeit in a limited manner as compared to many other shopping carts that have recently modified their code. For instance, having hyphens between keywords as opposed to underscores (which Volusion offers) has long been considered by the experts to be a major bonus for search engine optimization.
Another area that SEO shopping carts tend to have but is found lacking in Volusion is the absence of the “H1″ tag as an automatic insertion. Many SEO carts offer some way to automatically insert a header tag, usually using the product’s name. Volusion users must manually insert the header tags in the proper form field. As noted above, few people will actually do so, thereby not taking full advantage of an optimizable feature.
Once your company gets more traffic by using this cart, you may find that your bandwidth costs increase due to the relatively low levels allowed in the lower-end package. As such, you may be forced to upgrade to a larger package, especially if you have many products and a lot of visitors to the site.
Finally, each page of your website must have a link back to volusion.com which is irritating to many website owners who are paying for the system. For a fee of $20/month, you can have the link removed.
Overall
Volusion has several features that are attractive to potential users of the software. It offers search engine friendly and marketable points that are sure to please some businesses in search of an SEO shopping cart. With several changes to its offering, it could be a powerful competitor in the SEO e-commerce world.
Visit the site: http://www.volusion.com/
DO NOT USE VOLUSION. Volusion Sucks! They moved away from Rackspace and have had major issues ever since (10 months into it). Store owners are bailing as their sales dry up due to poorly managed volusion servers and incorrectly set traffic filters. All this while Volusion support continues to deny there is an issue. Despite dozens of store owners complaints and hundreds of customer complaints, they claim that there is no problem
I couldn’t agree more with the last comment by jim jones. I have a successful website which means I pay RIDICULOUS overage fees on bandwidth, and their customer support philosophy is: “we don’t care, we have you by balls”.
I’m switching to Magento as soon as I have it all figured out!
I’m still using Volusion but in the process of switching. They have the worst customer service. I have very limited technical knowledge, but it seems every time I call after 5 pm I end up teaching their own staff how to use their software. If I call before 5pm for a support question there’s always a 10-15 min hold time.
I have not had good experiences with Volusion. They are not very accommodating. They charged a company I work with $100 per month, even though they only do about $1,000 per month in business. then they called her and said she had to spend $50 per month for their credit card processing software, even though she was under the impression she could just get the orders online and process her own cards. She is paying nearly $2,000 per year for this solution even though here sales are around $12,000.
I don’t know if the others are good or not, but I would not recommend Volusion.
Volusion is a fraud! Beware of buying this program, Volusion will take your payment and not deliver anything they promise.
DO NOT BUY VOLUSION!!!!
Volusions sucks. H1 Tags are a huge issue…so is the factthat all ROders are marked “pricessing” and CUstomers logging into their accounts can’t tell if an Order has shipped or is on backoreder etc. They claim their Customers like the “feature”. Our experience has been we get tons of calls wondering what “processing” really means.
Overall, I agree with Jim Jones. Volusion has been performing poorly. Email problems for years until they found out that they are not good enough to handle and manage email server. Finally, they outsource it to RackSpace and now it runs well. Server has been having problems since they moved out from RackSpace. Now it is getting worse. Admin backend is SUPER slow. And when they do not clean the cache on their server, my customers are getting errors. For FYI, I have the $350 plan (Semi Dedicated Server) and speed is just like a slug.
As of Jan 4,2011, my store could not accept order because they are having problem with their software intergration with USPS Live Rates. They have been trying to resolve this for the past 3 days with no luck. They are just killing my business and their customers. I am currently exporting my data to get ready to move. AVOID Volusion at all cause. Check their facebook for complaints. Overall, google other business using Volusion and ask them what they think of Volusion. I am sure many will say they are stuck since most of their data is online already like me. However, I will put that extra hours just to move out. To Volusion – you guys just does not cut it nor know how ecommerce business works. If you do not have the skill nor the expertise, hire somebody who knows instead of ruining other people lives (your customers).
Volusion is OK, beu BE PREPARED to be frustrated from time to time. Random problems develop, and they NEVER notify you of issues. You’ll find it yourself, or a customer will let you know.
Well, another year has passed and still more of the same from Volusion. CONSTANT downtime and bugs which are major enough to significantly hurt sales. It started when volusion tried to implement a major upgrade 2 days before Black Friday. They failed and many Volusion stores were completely down on Black Friday weekend. The trouble continued through the holiday season with an uptime rate of only about 95% (less than 99.9% is considered substandard). Fast forward to New Years eve when volusion stores again went down for 2 days. Now, its Jan 15th and yet another bout of downtime, this one for 8 hours and affecting the ENTIRE volusion customer base.
Caveat Emptor, you have been warned
I’ve been using Volusion for one of my ecommerce sites (www.breathalyzersusa.com)for about two years now. It seemed they had much more down time in 2009 than 2010. For me the down time issue has improved. The real problem has been the half hour wait to get a support rep. They say they are now hiring more people to help with that issue. We’ll see.
Hi my name is Miranda. have been using volusion for over 5 years with several of my websites and have to say I have had my ups and downs but over the last 9 months major downs!! They have completely wipped out my store 3 times in the last 4 months and wanted me to pay $199 for a restore! R U kidding me, all I did was sign in and found my site was wipped out!! nada gone!! Additionally every time I sign in to my admin area something has gone array! And to do anything on the admin end is nearly impossible with the sluggish loading, constant errors and loss of inputed info. IT SUCKS!! Tech is hit or miss i find myself hanging up and calling back to get a new person and when u write a ticket it is often a one word answer email match. Sometimes the answers have no relevance to the issues and each and everytime you have multiple issue on the same ticket they only tend to one.The most troublesome basic things I find with them is there is no .html file, they wont tell you where in the css files or articles relates to the sections of your template. I could go on and on and on,,,I am looking for a new provider so any suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated!
The downtime at Volusion has been a huge problem and is not acceptable.
Cheers guys, I was about to sign up today but thought I’d read some reviews first – glad I did, back to square 1!!
or the most part I really like the Volusion platform, it wasn’t till lately that I needed tech help, baboom 28 days later and not one support ticket has been answered, multiple days with the phone on Speaker waiting for the next available assistant to take the call…………….. yea…………… Iam a littel !#!@ed!
Sorry, got a little carried away there, Does anybody out there have a good suggestion for a replacement to my Volusion plan, I have both a brick & mortar and online store that I would like to manage with the same Quick Books Company file
Volusion’s lack of caring for their Customer’s is horrific. NONE of their features work 100%. They lie about their features and what they do, most features create more work instead of making our lives easier and more efficient. They have a complete lack of ability to solve problems. Most problems have a better chance of getting solved in their forums (if they don’t censure you)than with their Tech Dept.
I just had this conversation with Volusion…wow.
Thank you for choosing Volusion! Please wait to be connected to a live chat support representative.
Sarah: Hello! I have a question. Are you guys online?
There is 1 person in queue ahead of you. Thank you for your patience.
There is 1 person in queue ahead of you. Thank you for your patience.
Colby E.: Hello, thanks for choosing Volusion. What kind of sales related questions can I assist you with today?
Sarah: I am in love with the Elizabeth Carmel site in your gallery. Did you guys design that or did “Endo Creations” as the site specifies?
Colby E.: I’m really not sure as to who did what with the site.
Sarah: oooo k…
Colby E.: Theres just no way for us to tell who designed it. You could perhaps speak with a design rep tomorrow when they are in.
Sarah: Well, this conversation doesn’t do much for me wanting entrust Volusion with the creation of my website, if you can’t answer a simple question about one of the featued websites in your own gallery. But thanks anyway.
DO NOT EVER USE VOLUSION – EVER! I simply wanted to open an ecommerce store and I can NOT believe how RUDE,Combative, disrespectful the sales people were. Aaron Harzog and George Kinard. Both were EXTREMELY RUDE. First of all they try to push you into this high plan which costs $99 a month and tell you that its the “best value” but how is it the best value for MY business? I don’t have a store with 5000 products! I just have a few items to sell! That was when I pulled the plug.
THEN
I was on hold with the technical department for 25 minutes EXACTLY. Don’t believe me? Go call yourself at around 7pm EST and see for yourself. When they did finally get on the phone don’t even think you’re going to get some smart tech guy. Oh no. They no NOTHING about their own software!!???
I have been using volusion for the past 5 years and I have 2 stores. Each new version keeps getting better and more user friendly. I do call into support from time to time and I have always had great service. Resolution to support ticket inquiries are always answered in a reasonable time. I love Volusion! I give them a lot of credit for helping my online businesses succeed!
Not recommended, everything that’s noted in the above posts, have nothing else to add. Their attitudes are “if you don’t like it then get lost” instead of trying to fix things.
people need to file at ripoffreport.com too.
1) volusion’s credit card merchant account is a fraud. sure it is 2.21% plus another 1.50% that you don’t pay attention too due to confusing bills. go to fee fighters and get a real processor – do not use volusion
2) customer service is awful. and any reply is just to complete and finish the ticket. no real help.
3) they will do everything they can to keep you. they will deny and delay anything related to leaving. do not register your name with them…..we finally had to just keep with volusion and change the nameservers.
4) anything that relates to changing from volusion will be delayed. first, service is slow. but anything related to a change away will be super slow.
customers should also write the BBB in TX and complain.
5) the backend of volusion is incredibly slow. i am also on the $350 plan and don’t see any increase in my backend performance.
—volusion is a great idea run by a management team that only cares about increasing revenue and selling extra services – versus taking care of the customer base. why risk your successful business to a company that doesn’t care?
if you do under $100k a year, maybe consider them. but if you plan to feed your family and really build a website business, don’t start with volusion.
After reading all the comments about the Volusion Shopping Cart, I had to my advice to any Business Owner (Small or Large) to take time to do as much research about the Shopping Cart or E-Commerce (E-store) program which you are considering.
As a Freelance Web Developer, (Foxx Multimedia) I have many (and I very much mean many!) clients which have similar stories to what I am reading from the reviews above. I have also been on other Review sites to find the same and even worse reviews and problems which people have encountered with this store. I also found these problems have been ongoing for many years.
This store is not the only one with these problems; there are many others which have come on the market which sell you their product which they claim you can “do it yourself”, only to find out you can do a bit of set up, however you reach a point of where you must reply on their designers to finish the site for you. You end up spending thousands to fix your store and you haven’t even begun to optimize it for the Search Engines!!
I have worked with many of these stores in the past to try to help clients “salvage” all the hard work and money which they have put into their start up business and I have found that even though I do have the knowledge to build a “custom” coded site or add code only to find out there isn’t an option to do so and moving the store and rebuilding it is the only option.
With people wanting to work more at home and in this economy, I feel it is so very important to find a “trustworthy” Website Developer which has a program which you can also trust! This is much easier than said, I know. Recently, I wrote an Article for Small Business on AOL to address this very issue along with talking about the options most of the stores offer their customers for SEO purposes and I was “bombarded” with emails from people with “horror” stories! They had spent money and time, again only to find they “had been taken to the cleaners”!
Please research, research, and more research before you spend your money. Get references from existing businesses with online stores so that you may move forward successfully with your E-Store.
If you are in need of a very successful store I have built many stores (including excellent SEO) with very happy clients and references available for you. I work with new clients by doing a “walk through” of the back end of the Store along with the front end. Our stores are very “user-friendly” and I provide my clients with training so they may add or change products to their stores or add pages if they so desire.
I bought a Volusion store a couple of months ago and my experience has been great. They had an onboarding coach reach out to me to make sure i had everything i needed to launch my site. also the interface was very intuitive and easy to use.
i called into support about 3-4 times when setting up my store (mostly because i wanted to talk to a real person) and never sat on hold for more than 5 minutes.
I have not had any downtime for my store, nor have I expereinced any other issues. In fact they just released some cool new social features i cant wait to use!
We used to have Volusion and they were horrible. At the time they claimed no hidden fees. BS!
We got hit with bandwidth overages and had to pay about $20/month just to have their own name taken off of our website…even though we were paying about $200 per month for their highest plan.
The worst part was when our local computer crashed and we needed to download our backup files off the volusion servers…they charged us a couple hundred dollars…I’ve never had to pay an extra fee to Godaddy to transfer files from their server to our local machines.
Con artists they are!
I just stumbled across this thread. I wish I had seen it before migrating to Volusion. My site is having performance problems so I called support. The agent said they don’t have enough servers for everybody. They just move sites around to less busy servers when there are complaints. He would look at my site to evaluate if it qualified for a move. I called back today. It still hasn’t been moved and I’m still slow. I’m taking my business elsewhere.
I purchased Volusion several months ago and decided it was not for me. They have made it extremely difficult to cancel my subscription and they wouldn’t let me talk to billing to resolve issues. Everything is by ticket which they do not mail to my email address but send the ticket within Volusion. I thought I had canceled more than a month ago so imagine my surprise when I was billed again. I will never use them again nor would I recommend them to anyone. I only want to work with people who value customer service just as I give excellent service to my customers.
Same story, different day. Volusion suck, move ASAP, don’t delay. We’ve been delaying and building for literally years and have been stuck with this shoddy Volusion service.
Don’t do it, move along.
Wow. I’m thankful that I found this thread, because I was considering Volusion, because I have seen their ads everywhere recently and their themes ARE nice.
On this page, it seems that the only positive review comments are fake!
I spent about 2 hours in chat with Volusion Tech Support, Sales, and Merchant Accounts. They were all pretty terrible. I have no idea why they claim great service as a selling point, since even just looking into the company was a pain in the ass!
Thanks all for the warning.
Wow, our company has just signed up to Volusion! I will be warning my employer. The last thing we need in this economy is to have our website down and be ripped off! Thanks to all who took the time to leave comments.
We have been on Volusion for a year and a half. Our site has had issues from the beginning which they were never able to resolve – so we NEVER know if our inventory is tracking correctly – the system periodically adds or subtracts inventory randomly. Now the site is so slow I am losing business and they will not even respond to the support ticket. I think smaller businesses are just out of luck when using Volusion.
I would LOVE to hear suggestions for another platform. I am so ready to move!!
Stay Away is my main comment.
There are so many issues that after spending weeks designing a shop for my client, I’ve decided to start again with a new supplier.
1) Archaic system which claims to be flexible but is anything but! There are so many design flaws its not funny. It’s a system which was written by IT guys with no understanding of business or any awareness of a good user experience. I had to hack out every element to even make a halfway decent shopfront – but even for a skilled designer making anything which even looks like it came from this decade is nigh on impossible.
2) PayPal and Google Checkout integration sucks! Paypal standard can’t even accept credit cards!
3) If you’re selling services rather than actual products – forget it – shoot yourself in the head first!
4) Slowest servers I’ve ever seen – even on a high speed connection it can be minutes to change a single element, and the FTP servers are a joke – average download speed 0.5-1kb/s (i’m not kidding!).
5) Pages frequently slow and time out for customers.
6) Support is truly 24-7 which is great, on the downside half of the support staff haven’t got a clue and “Working as intended” seems to be the stock phrase. It’s like the Captain of the Titanic saying that to his passengers as the ship goes down!
7) They all but force you to buy a Volusion SSL (which takes 10 working days to register) because transferring your existing one costs £99!!!
I’ve wasted weeks on this system – I hope I can save someone else the same…
they claim great service so you’ll join. They love new cliemts, but if you’ve been with them awhile forget it. They are usually about a year behind in providing features or “tools” to help you compete aganst other Sites. the positive reviews are from resellers who make a living getting people to sign up for Volusion.
If you run a Site for fun or as a hobby, Volusion may be a nice option. If you run a real business and your livelihood is at stake then use somebody else. Horrific company to deal with.
We all search for a forum/review for a reason. We have been with Volusion for 2 years, we have 2500 products.
I started complaining about the slow speed of the back end immediately upon subscribing. They offered useless advice that never fixed the problem. Now, as I want to add even more items, I question whether it is worth the huge amount of time. It takes over 2 minutes to connect to the server at times. Sometimes it is only 5 seconds. But the bottom line is that it takes 1 hour to perform 15 minutes of work. Who has that kind of time to waste.
Their customer service is like everyplace else on earth. Call during business hours, wait, and you might get somebody who has some experience. I have spoken to some good and some bad.
My gut tells me it is time to leave, but the amount of time invested has been enormous. I think it would take close to a full year to get a new site up and running and full of inventory, and that is if I paid someone full time to handle it. That is an extra employee that I can not afford right now. In retrospect, I would have been better off finding a custom developer.
The below is copied / pasted today exactly from status.volusion.com. This is the latest in a steady stream of weekly problems. Every time they blame it on someone else. The real problem is their own cheap hardware and old software. I called support several times until I found a rep who would answer my questions. I learned that Volusion’s servers are in a single data center in California with no redundancy. I learned the servers and storage are old and over taxed. I learned that the IT staff is in Austin and has frequent problems getting quick access to the servers. I learned that software is updated every week with little to no tested. They depend on customers calling support with problems to find the bugs.
Intermittent Storefront Functionality Interuption [sic] for Some Merchants
Earlier this evening (Oct 11th) we were alerted to an issue which our IT Engineers quickly diagnosed as a hardware problem with a Dell/Compellent Storage Area Network (SAN). This issue lead to intermittent downtime for some of our merchants while our Engineers partnered with engineers from Dell/Compellent to resolve the issue. As we are not fully satisfied with the hardware’s performance, we are continuing to work with Dell/Compellent to ensure that we do not experience a re-occurrence of this nature.
Looking for a shopping cart to sell online / ecommerce??
… then AVOID Volusion!!!!! Here’s why…
In our experience ABSOLUTE WORST COMPANY we’ve EVER dealt with! A million headaches from the start. Hmm, where to begin… We were totally fooled by the online cart comparison technical reviews. DO NOT BE FOOLED. Their coding is IMPOSSIBLE compared to other carts. Need to customize your cart? Yeah, right. Good luck!!! But worst than any of the coding nonsense is their COMPLETE & UTTER arrogance with customers, treating customers like garbage. And I’m not just talking one person, one ticket, one day, one week. I’m talking thru & thru. One thing’s for sure: they’re consistent! This may be why?
Customer service is really just a shell (bogus) department that’s actually just sales. You’re there for THEM, they’re not there for you. Your problems? Their “opportunities”! Cart not working? Oh, “sorry, that’s customized. Contact our coders for a price!” Of course, they make sure to carefully hide their shopping cart code in .asp so you can’t do SIMPLE tweaks like moving a box to the left or right without a ridiculous amount effort. Their excuse? They actually wrote something like “We don’t make it available to customers or employees so they don’t break it.” Even more pitiful, we’re convinced that it’s the same 1 or 2 persons handling all of customer service (the same arrogant tone & writing is always the same) BUT they keep making up bogus names & never have the same person responding to their own thread. It’s so funny, because they think they’re clever “avoiding responsibility” by changing names each time, so that no “one person” is actually responsible for the ticket. What a joke. To top it off, they also assault you with a lot of junk mail, sending emails to you from “Chief Customer Officer” (CCO) and “Customer Experience Manager” (CEM) and a hundred other silly self-appointed names to give the ILLUSION that they give a s—), providing links to surveys you KNOW they don’t read because if they actually cared, they’d be reading the tickets or the forums, both a wealth of information. Survey links (in this case) are just a bogus way to “allow the customer to blow off steam” lol. That’s our opinion. You see these companies everywhere. They think that customer service is going to cost a lot, so they spend a lot MORE money, time, effort, setting the company up so that it LOOKS like customer service is their thing, when, in reality, they’re only fooling themselves (& robbing you in the process).
Think you’ll “try’em out and see what happens”? That’s what we thought too! And no sooner had we done the online chats etc and registered…than their whole tone changed. Online chat support is suddenly unavailable. “Tickets” system is completely bogus attempt to LOOK like they care, but try asking for customer support, and every answer is basically “sorry, that’s customized”. Huh?
Don’t be fooled by the message they make you listen to OVER & OVER ad nauseum when you call for support, the one that says “received this (blah blah) award”.
We wondered where the “Wizard of Oz” was hiding throughout this whole experience…was anybody really overseeing these power-hungry employees? We figured it’s one of 2 things: either owner/CEO is off in Tahiti somewhere sipping his favorite cocktail, or the more likely one, that, as they say, “The fish rots from the head down”. That’s our opinions and how our customer experience was. You’ll laugh too because they send these joke emails to you after a problem from “Chief Customer Officer” or “Customer Experience Manager” giving you a “chance” to fill out a survey (like they even look at those obviously), and we told them, if they really want to know more and are “Chief Customer Officer” or “Customer Experience Manager” (and the 10 other bogus titles they created to give the ILLUSION of customer service), they should read the actual tickets and oversee their employees, or read the forums or the suggestions. Reviewing those forums you see like 90% of them aren’t even answered, and if they are, it’s not by their admin, nor their” CCO” or “CEM” yada.
One thing’s for sure, don’t judge a cart by ratings in technical magazines etc. They just write those off the trials/demo. They don’t actually interact with Customer Service on a daily basis. In the end, what you’re ultimately buying and what you have to deal with- on a daily basis- is Customer Service…or in this case, the shell of Customer Svc.
It’s like the biggest SCAM too: they put so much energy into PRETENDING to emphasize customer support, but none into ACTUAL customer service. It’s the strangest thing we’ve ever seen.
When you put yourselves ahead of your customers, you may win the battle, but you lose the war, ie you come out the wrong end every time.
In our opinions, from having dealt with them for months, with MASSIVE DAILY HEADACHES, THIS IS one of the ALL-TIME WORST COMPANIES we’ve ever dealt with.
Karma B., CIK
Customer Is King
I’m screwed. My store went down for the third week in a row, right at my busiest time of day. Volusion support is yet again moving me to a different server they say isn’t as busy. They’ve done the same thing before. It gets better for a little while then the problems return. I can’t survive the holiday’s like this.
I am in the process of purchasing 2 stores and I have had difficulty with the reps at volusion and them not being truthful about their competitors. I feel like they will do and say anything to get your business.
The choices are few for us. We are now undecided between Magento Go and Network Solutions. Magento Go has some advantages however, they do not want you to talk to anyone so making a connection is near impossible. they say they provide a support phone number if you purchase the plan, but they would not give me the number( for time tests) until I gave them the money. I like their software, just not being able to talk to someone doesn’t sit well with me.
Network solutions is solid. Their templates suck and we are not going to pay a developer $10K for a design.
It has been rough finding the right cart.
what did everyone move to? Input would be great.
Volusion is a high volume pump and dump operation. Kind of like a boiler room stock operation where they hype the value of the product then once they have your money they couldn’t care less.
They do not want highly successful businesses who need functionality beyond their templates because they don’t have the technical or business skills to support them. Their business model clearly shows that they want small websites with non-technical users who only use their templates, ssl’s and merchant accounts. They would much rather have 10,000 low volume websites paying the minimum than they would 500 highly successful ones who pay the max.
They are with out any doubt the slumlords of hosted websites. And I’m being nice
Wow, this is really scary. I just moved my online store from OSC
to Volusion last week. I had only heard good things about Volusion up until now. We have not had any problems yet. I didn’t know they charge you for a file back up. Im going to contact them now. I hope my site doesn’t go down. I have had to call them a few times, the wait time was short and they were helpful…but all this is alarming
What would be the best e commece site?
Volusion is only in it to take your money!! Good luck trying to get any help from support. I was forced to purchase the $99 plan and told to start with this plan because you can get help setting up your site as I wanted to know if their platform would work for my site. After I paid the money never heard anything and they mentioned that they couldn’t do what I needed their site to perform what I needed. They only communicate by email and I asked for a refund after a week of headaches and they say no they can’t. Stay away from the poorest customer service ever. Just their to take your money.
what other e-commerce you suggest or recommend other than Volusion. I’ve heard a lot about Shopify but I did not read any reviews until now. Honestly, all the reviews her scared me of the idea to start an online business
I am a web developer, but I won’t plug in my company because I do not want to lessen my comment by making it appear as a sales pitch.
Some tips:
A) Stay away from pre-packaged online services, They ALL suck because the ALL are trying to be an “online solution” for a market that is way too varied to be one-fits-all. You will pay less, but you will get this sort of crap.
B) LOOK at the companies and find out if they are connected IN ANY FORM OR SHAPE with Intuit. If they are…..RUN!!! People make the mistake of listening to their accountants because they love Quickbooks, but accountants are just that…..accountants. To build your business around a piece of software simply because the accountant likes it better or makes his/her life easier is the biggest mistake ever.
C) Stay away from anything ASP-driven. ANYTHING. That is the FIRST sign you are dealing with corporate dolts. ALWAYS.
D) Pool your resources: I develop a lot in Drupal and Ubercart/Drupal Commerce. Drupal has the ability to deploy multiple sites from one install. I had a few clients in the past that could not afford my costs for a single site, so about 6 of them got together and pitched in to build a “master install” and then within that install I deployed each of their sites. After paying me, their only fees were the SSL cert and hosting fees.
I will tell you, it is getting very difficult for small online retailers to put on their own shops. Between the stricter PCI compliance and the complexity of the new online systems, it is becoming a problem. If you make SMALL SALES….I say stick with eBay and stop dreaming of your own shop: IT IS SIMPLY NOT WORTH IT. Period.
If you are looking for a good ecommerce software solution do not try Volusion. You will put tickets in about their constant DNS server errors and I do mean constant and they will tell you it has been fixed. Then when you try to do anything BAM there it is another server error. The website is actually down right now as I am writing this. For the price and limit on amount of products unless purchasing the largest package, Volusion is worthless.
What a joke. I bought a canned store front after I asked what I could do with it. Once I had it and found out I could not do anything they said I could with it I tried to get a refund but they would not give it to me. I called AmEx and it is taken care of but they would rather hold on to my $995.00 then get the % from my merch account….. pathetic and horrible business.
On another note they are the slowest I have ever experienced. It takes 24-48 hours to add a logo with some of the templates.
Do Not Use Them!
hi – i have used Volusion and find them amazing – have allowed me to get my small biz off the ground. i have always been pretty happy with it & their support – surprised to see so many people not happy with them.
So glad I read this… I’m definitely not going to sign with Volusion. Thanks all.
Volusion is SUCKS!!!!!! beware of overage fees on bandwidth!! got all useless traffic with no IP address!!!
Whatever you do, stay away from this company. I just spent the last 96 hours without sleeping, since early Black Friday until now just, trying to keep my store running. It keeps going down without warning. I’ve called Volusion support at least a dozen times waiting 30 minutes to two hours each time. They moved my store to different servers three times but it never got any better. I had a lot of problems last year as well that Volusion promised to fix. So much for promises. Fool me once shame on you, Fool me twice shame on me.
This company has nearly put me out of business. My store front was up and down almost the entire Black Friday through Cyber Monday rush. I lost thousands in sales. My support calls were worthless mostly waiting on hold. When I finally got through they said nothing was wrong. Right. Today my site is working. Slow, but working. Now my e-mail doesn’t work and I can’t confirm orders. Here’s what status.volusion.com has said for hours except for one little problem. The “still accessible” URL doesn’t work either.
“We are aware that some customers are experiencing intermittent functionality when attempting to access their email from mail.volusion.com. Our I.T. engineers are aware of the issue and are actively working to correct the issue. During this time, your email is still accessible from webmail.emailsrvr.com. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
THIS COMPANY IS BAD, VERY BAD….
Just signed up ON THEIR FREE TRIAL, CANCEL LESS THAN 48HRS AND GET CHARGED $19.00!! ASK FOR A REFUND AFTER WAITING 30 MINUTES TO GET SOMEONE FROM THEIR VERY BAD CUSTOMER “SERVICE” AND HAVE TOLD THAT REFUND CANNOT BE MADE.
DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY OR YOU WILL BE SORRY.
THIERRY
My store is an online toy store. Volusion was good a few years ago but this past two years they are very bad. They have problems all the time. I cannot move my store right now but I move it right after the holidays. Too many problems. Too much wasted time.
Building sites for 16 years:
my last 6 years experience on Volusion:
NEVER! NEVER! NERVER! sign up for Volusion. Find an altrenative!
I don’t want to advertise for others, but you will never have these problem with a different company!
Volusion:
1. constant outages and downtime.
2. poor-to-no customer service, they actually play distorted music while you are on hold waiting for agent – their cheap psychology hoping you’ll get tired of listening to it and hang up. See for yourself – dial 800-646-3517 and press 1 for support.
3. hidden cost – bandwith overage cost and lots of hidden charges with their merchant accounts.
4. Although they offer 100′s of so-called templates, both free and pay-for-templates, that is just for the homepage, all the category and product pages are the same no matter which template you choose.
5. WARNING WARNING WARNING for those in the web business and build sites for clients – Volusion actually pulled a site from my account and gave it to my client! I’ll never get it back! The client simply called Volusion and told them it was their site! It is impossible to contact Volusion Legal – they do not give out a phone number and all correspondence is by email! Guess what – they don’t have to respond to your email!
So while all the Volusion marketing promises to get you up and running – just RUN NOW! DON’T LOOK BACK! Find another way!
wow – was going to sign up for this but actually cant even get past the 14 day sign up trial button as errors keep coming up. Glad I didnt and found these reviews describing how bad Volusion is. I called their customer service line but gave up after 15 minutes of holding. They sound like a nightmare!
Their credit card processing went out on Thursday December 22, 2011, which means my Volusion store can NOT process credit cards during the Holiday season!
Right now it is December 24, 2011 and our store still can NOT process credit cards. Their support does not provide any answers or solutions, the problem has NOT been fixed, and Volusion does not any plan in site to fix the problem. They blame it on someone else of course, but I hold the person who sends me my merchant services bill responsible, which is Volusion.
Their support is horrible, and does seem like a bunch of high school kids who try to give you some IT dribble that offers nothing in the form of support or problem solving. They used to be good, I don’t know if they had some personnel cutbacks in the last two years or what, but I would not reccommend Volusion any more.
My New Years resolution is to find a new web hosting company for my e-commerce store.
I have simple needs, an e-commerce provider whose Credit Card servers don’t go down, and allow my customers to buy things. Imagine your store can’t run credit cards, and the people in charge of support do nothing about it.
Happy Holidays everyone!
So glad I read all of these reviews…was considering Volusion – great looking online sales materials, very slick…but it seem too wonderful. Now I am definitely not going to sign with Volusion. Thanks to all of the reviewers.
I am lucky to ready all of these reviews (The FAKE one makes me believe that others said the truth). Thanks a lot for all reviews. Here is my questions, would any one recommend shopif, or bigcommerce? I would like to start a service website ASAP.
Any helps are highly appreciated.
WOW – I am SHOCKED at these posts, all I can think is that only the ones who either didn’t know or appreciate the complexities of what they were getting into posted here.
That being said, I am new, I dont have massive volume and I never intend on using them for actual ecommerce transactions,
I’ll admit its MUCH MORE CLUNKIER than I had hoped for, and the manuals/documentation although thorough in many cases, it’s all over the place, a jumbled mess,
if you don’t know HTML, how CSS works, or don’t have the patience or desire to LEARN their system, then you will have a terrible experience for sure, but when you consider the hosting is included you get a pretty good deal here,
i will admit their is NO SUPPORT unless its a system issue, if you can’t design a webpage, dont’ bother or you’ll just be hiring someone to do it anyway,
but I think if you find a Volusion person you can have a decent experience at a pretty good price, from what I’ve seen so far anyway,
I am so glad I found this website. Was going to go with Volusion but the reviews above has changed my mind. Has anyone used another better shopping cart software? Thanks to all the reviewers.
I’ve been using Volusion for about 8 months now and it’s really not as bad as these folks have made it out to be- for me. I haven’t found my site intermittently down. I don’t think people should be scared to try this service. I am small (about 140 products) and just starting and I have found Volusion software to be very user friendly and flexible. After reading all these reviews, my opinion is that Volusion is probably great for smaller operations, not so great for big ones. I’m not a reseller; I have no affiliation with them other than being a customer.
I can confirm some of the comments here. The bandwidth offered is not sufficient, but it can be managed. Volusion hasn’t cost me over 80 a month yet. The customer service people don’t seem to be very technically savvy but I’ve only had to contact them twice for minor problems. They did try to get me to use their credit card processing and but I chose not to because it wasn’t the cheapest as they claimed. My complaints are few and far between. I plan on researching other companies to see if there is really anything better, because that’s just good business, but Volusion has worked just fine for me.
Was seriously considering Volusion until reading comments here, so THANK YOU to all!!!
Worst choice you ever make in a shopping sytem is volusion. There is so much I could write. Their service is aweful and their servers are so slow that it was impossible to shop.
Does anyone have a recommendation for someone other than Volusion. I need to get off of their service fast! The system is so unreliable that I am constantly losing sales, which I may never have known about if I hadn’t started receiving emails from people stating they wanted to purchase but the system wouldn’t let them for reasons (a,b, or c)—the problems ran the gammit from trying to require a user account and then the account couldn’t log in (verified this nightmare myself), credit card issues and more. Simply awful service!
As a web designer I have tried all the big hosted carts. Without a doubt, Volusion is at the bottom of the barrel for a few reasons:
1. Support – It takes forever to get through to anyone, and then when you do, the support people are hostile, combative and completely unwilling to provide useful information to help solve even the simplest of problems. It actually feels as though they are deliberately going out of their way to be unhelpful. Never a good thing in the service industry.
2. Because they themselves sell design and templating services, the templates they do offer free are pretty awful. They literally refuse to answer any template or design questions. They have even go so far as to tell me that they refuse to answer on the grounds that they would be helping me and hurting themselves…. Really?!?
3. Slowest servers on the planet. Frequent downtime. No feeling of urgency by support to do a blessed thing about it. I once had emergency-level ticket can go unanswered for more than a week.
4. Billing and cancellation – watch very carefully when you submit ticket to cancel (no, you cannot cancel by phone) – the response you get appears to be a confirmation but it’s not. It’s a notification that if you REALLY want to cancel, you need to click on a link (a non-linked link so it’s not at all obvious that it’s even a link) and THEN click cancel. Because submitting a cancellation form isn’t enough. I missed this step, got billed, and got a “tough luck” response back when I complained
If I ever have a potential client approach me for help with a Volusion store I send them on their way. Who needs the aggravation?
A few people have asked for alternatives. There is no perfect hosted solution because they are only customizable to a certain degree, and none of them does everything well.