Volusion

Updated! (January 2008)

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/

User Reviews & Feedback

Coming Soon.