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
I’ve been using Volusion for almost a year and there have been minor issues, but nothing like what’s been described here. Customer service has been good – sometimes the wait is long, but they’ve always been friendly. Sometimes individuals know a lot, sometimes not. They’re human beings. For the most part, it’s easy. Employees don’t have to be hardcore developers to adjust products or options. Having to know a lot of PHP for Magento kinda scares me. I’m fine with this system and am comfortable enough with it to know how to do everything necessary for my job. I’ve found the price does fluctuate, but for our business, it more than pays for itself. I get emails whenever the site goes down and I’ve gotten about 5 this year.
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.
Wow! $995 just for website template plus monthly fees. Volusion is expensive.
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.
Be careful. Lot’s of hidden charges, like credit card processing. They illustrate they are cheaper than Paypal card processing, but they are actually twice as high. Around 5% of your sales. Search does not work. You will need to buy a 3rd party package if you need any kind of good search.
02-22-12 Volusion claims a 99.91% uptime ratio, yet were down again today. Wonder if I can bill them for the orders I lost over 45 minutes…their .09% downtime (however the f*** that’s measured) is certainly costing their ecommerce store owners some big bucks. Reviews here are bad, but fairly accurate.
I was getting ready to purchase Volusion for my business, but something told me to research customers reviews first. Wow am I glad I did! not only is this site telling me to stay away from Volusion, but 2 other sites as well. Thank you for sharing your experiences. I will continue to look for alternatives.
For 6 days now, I’ve been waiting for their credit card processing to work. I’m having to send out orders while not capturing my payments. Not sure how long I’ll be staying with them. Will probably be moving on soon.
All I can say is, after reading these I’ve had a lucky escape!!! I had a 14 day trial with Volusion last year and for some reason I felt uncomfortable from the beginning. Needless to say, I didn’t sign up! I keep getting the odd email from them and I can’t wait for the next one, as I’ll just send them a link to this page!!!!! Thanks for all your really helpful advice everyone, but sorry you had to suffer to be able to give it.
Wow. Glad I found this site, as well as several others saying the same thing. I was || this close to signing up with them. Their demo didn’t seem bad, but then I started looking into what people were commenting on, and many (not all) the things people stated were 100% accurate. I’ll just call this a near miss.
Volusion is horrible. I have two sites with them and they broke the payment gateway for over a week on both sites. One site is still down. Support is an F and they really care about nothing but taking your money and providing poor service and support. Hard to believe that anyone could be worse than them.
Agreeing with all the comments. I have been using volusion for about 3 years for my shop. They started off good – seemed like a small company with good customer service, always able to get issues resolved. As of about 2011 this all changed. My site was DOWN FOR CHRISTMAS!! That’s right folks during the most busy time of the year when some e-boutiques make 50% of their sales I was not able to accept credit card payments because the gateway was down. As of Feb 23rd 2012 my shop has been up and down in terms of being able to accept CC payments from clients – they can’t even tell me when it will be fixed and the problem seems to be intermittent so sometimes something WILL go through and sometimes clients tell me that the site just hangs (or better yet tells the clients their card is invalid) – I finally turned off CC payment and am using Paypal only but of course my sales have dropped by 90% since most people feel more comfortable with Credit cards instead of paypal. Terrible experience with volusion (and skipjack). Do not use Volusion if you run a shop that you actually make money on and rely for that money to support your business and family! Yes, they will take your money and never offer refunds and charge you for bandwidth that you use even when that bandwidth will never result in a sale because you cannot take CC payments!
We have a Volusion powered ecommerce retail site. Our experience has been absolutely awful. Our site has been down for as long as two weeks at a time. Then when it is working it is intermitant. You never know when an order can get through. They simply can not handle the traffic. They have constant denial of service of attacks for which they lock everything down so your customers can’t place orders. This can kill a company if your are dependent on your online revenues. Tech support knows less than I do and I am not technically trained if that tell you something. They do not care about their customers at all. It is all about how fast they can grow to go public. I would tell you that any solution would be better than dealing with these guys. I can’t imagine why anyone would consider setting a site with them with all of the bad reviews and continued outages. Don’t let them tell you that we are isolated. This is the norm. Further once you spend the time to get your store set up with them you are trapped and can’t move unless you want to spend all of the time again doing every over again. That’s what we are doing now.
I just register with volusion last week moving from yahoo small business. The only thing they were really interested was to get my credit card number taken. The first problem encountered was that I was unable to log in to my site after I paid them. I sent to customer support 3 emails that until today a week later still pending response. The issue was sorted by the person responsible for selling me the packets, but after been able to log in and started working on setting I realized that none of them work at all. It is like there are default setting that doesn’t change when I saving changes. I was afraid to open any ticket if for the UNABLE TO LOGGIN I was still waiting. I have the impression that they only want a month fee, for people that cannot afford the biggest packet price. Several time I contacted the sales representative “Called Consultant” there was a lot of noise of people talking as in there were a party with laud laughing, always was that noise on the background that make nearly impossible to heard was the sales was told me.
Sincerely it is an assault in first grade for misconduct of business. They are fraudulent, because they do not give customers what was promote in their marketing pages.
The sum of all these email can be a good reason to send watchdogs to investigate, and ended up with these infectious buggies of white collar criminals on Internet. Phones always busy Chat with support 64 peoples waiting. For new people trying to get information about the company DON’T BELIEVE 24/7 BLA, BLA, BLA MAY BE THEY SPECT YOU TO BE 24/7 WAITING FOR THEM IS ALL I HAVE TO SAID.
Teresa Lopez Gonzalez
This is the first time i have ever complained publicly about anything. That should tell you something! Whenever I had a problem which was soething new everyday i got the same response (well it is working on our end). So i ask for a screen shot for proof and they said, (sorry we were mistaken). Last straw is when about 12 of my images disappeared and they told me i would have to reload them. I thought to myself, what if it had been 120 images? Then i tried to cancel and when i clicked on the link that is hidden in the email, my browser directed me to their UK site and my password would not work. I cleared my cookies, cache and rebooted but everytime i typed in their address i got redirected to their UK site and could not cancel. Only when i got on another computer with another isp address could i cancel. Run dont walk!
You’d think spending $700+ a month on hosting with these jackasses would mean something to them. It doesn’t. Between the downtime (front & Back-end), horrible support, crappy templates, and their OVERPRICED shared hosting accounts – We decided to host our own website(s)again. Never, never will I ever recommend these Aholes to anyone.
Hello, can you give us idea where we should build our shop? We are currently with moonfruit.com and this is very bad, our shop is can’t be open in explore, they have bug , but would not admit it…
Does anybody have an answer or work around for inventory problems with volusion? I quit calling tech support because not much ever gets resolved. We have had an issue for a long time with our inventory not adjusting accurately. Also fairly often orders come in without the size extension for the product number resulting in us having to contact the buyer to verify the size they ordered. Over the past year I have been able to search google for some answers and have found some work around ways to take care of some of our issues. If you have had similar problems and have been able to correct them I sure would appreciate a response. My overall rating of volusion is about 5 out of 10 so you could say I am 1/2 satisfied.
I just checked the BBB of Austin, TX and Volusion has 18 complaints filed against them, 10 of which are under the ‘service’ category. If everyone who has posted issues on this site also lodged a complaint, perhaps the company would be forced to take another look at how they define ‘customer service’.
After canceling ALL services with Volusion two months ago, we are still being billed. We followed ALL steps according Volusion’s TOS, however, they keep at it. I spent a total of 11 hours on hold last week to resolve this issue to no avail. According to tech support, customers are not allowed to speak directly with billing. How they get away with this FRAUDULENT activity is beyond me. We’ve had to cancel our business credit cards and file written disputes with our bank. Too bad their located in Texas, as I would have paid them a visit in person. Run, run, run as far as you possibly can from Volusion – By far the WORST experience I’ve had online in the 13 years we’ve been in business.
According to “10 Top Ten Reviews,” Volusion is rated the No. 1 2012 eCommerce software company with glowing reviews. The so-called experts rate Volusion “excellent” in all categories. These reviews can be seen at this Web site:
ecommerce-software-review.toptenreviews.com. Something is seriously wrong their rating giving consideration to all of these complaints. Well, I guess it is back to square one for me.
Cynthia,
There are lots of websites like that one. They all pretend to be rating the best shopping carts, the best hosting companies, and so on. They are all 100% BS. The only carts that they put up as being the “best” are the ones that pay out the highest affiliate commission.
They lie to you simply to get you to click the link on their website and buy the shopping cart (or take the trial and then buy it). When you buy it, a portion of your monthly fee (or one shot fee) goes to the referring website (in this case top 10 reviews).
That’s why you see so many websites saying how “great” Volusion is when in fact it’s as bad as the people are saying on here.
What I’m seeing here are REAL people with REAL businesses who have been burned by Volusion. What you see on those sites are planted, fake reviews just to get you to buy so they make money.
Every time we call for help we hear that there is an “unusual wait time.” It doesn’t matter what day or time I call, I usually have to wait over 30 minutes (one time is was about 45 minutes)! I have a business to run. Seriously, if I had known that their support would be so poor, I wouldn’t have chosen them. Also, you can easily upgrade your eCommerce choice, but no way to downgrade it. We emailed for help but haven’t heard back 2 weeks later. Sometimes, you get people who really know what they’re talking about, and other times, they have to find someone more experienced…very frustrating!
Concerned Many Thanks for your information about this site.
http://www.bbb.org/central-texas/business-reviews/web-design/volusion-in-austin-tx-90090290/complaints#breakdown
I am going to make a formal complaint asking them for my money back and how i can stop them to spam my inbox asking for more money because i cancel my credit card and they get nothing from my account.
I was registered with volusion only 1-week and i did not register with any other services because they were simply rubbish and they said NOW that all additional services still activating.
Like I said before in my previous review, just a bunch of white collar criminals.
DO NOT USE VOLUSION! It is a misleading money grab and a big hassle. I feel like they purposely trap you into it and before you know it you’re in deep enough for them to have your money and when your realize it SUCKS and isn’t just $19 a month – try the $19+$19+$12+$50+$79 in fees I was faced with (conveniently at spaced intervals in the design process) that stopped me from continuing to the next step of opening the store. I got out because I was sick of the misleading surprise fees and who know what was next. Besides the hidden fees, the site itself is not easy to set up and manage. Not user friendly.
What’s another good platform to use? I was going to go with Volusion but obviously not after reading this! I have a small e-commerce store and looking for a drop shipping feature, just need a small $20 a month plan for now, certainly it could expand later on.
All three websites are down (Sunday, March 25 – 2:45 PST). Over a hour wait to speak with support. Volusion sucks big time. 99.99 % uptime is a bunch of bullsh!t. More like 75% throughout the year.
And one more thing. Over the last week, websites on average take more than 20 seconds to load on the front-end. Then another 35+ seconds on the back-end over a broadband connection. And here’s the kicker… Last month I had a $275 in bandwith overages on just one website. All because of a Russian search engine crawling my site 24/7. I’ve tried blocking it, but they change the IP address hourly. Volusion refuses to assist customers with the ongoing problem. But why would they? This is how they grab you by the balls. As for the BBB, I wouldn’t bother wasting your time. As long as they get paid (by Volusion), the complaints get closed.
Last month we had payment problems. This month our store goes down every day. It’s down right now while I’m on hold waiting for support. It just gets worse and worse.
Worst ecommerce service provider. I have had volusion since 2007 and it has gone downhill at a very fast pace. Right now they are too busy advertising and acquiring new customers and have no concern about their service. They are putting constant ads on TV and Adwords while their tech support phone lines always have 1 to 2 hours wait time. My site is super slow. Pages take 20 to 50 seconds to load. Many times the site is down. Its so frustrating.
i have a volosion website and it runs a slow as a snail i have had no orders for 20 days rang up payment providor who tell me volution have changed ip adress no email letting me know so i have contacted them who tell me they have upgraded there system i would advise to stay well clear they simply dont care !!
After spending months and $$$ setting up my website with Volusion, I feel like a fool the way they add more and more fees to my service, now they tell me that the band with usage went from 15.0 GB per month, to 27.6GB GB. That is ridicules, I don’t get hits from search engines, sales haven’t increased much, I have a independent stat counter that doesn’t detect any extra hits. Their own stat counter shows a huge amount of hits and usage. How can I deal with this???? I am willing to move my site to another service but which one???
I would stay away from volusion. As their customer for a while I can say their templates and capabilities are not as advanced as others out there. Most of their stores look like they are stuck somewhere in the early 2000’s which in turn repeal buyers from using the stores.
Their customer service is normally slow and unresponsive and their fees are higher than their competitors.
I recommend to stay away if you want to better succeed in building an online business.
After 18 months on Volusion, my assistant and I are frustrated beyond belief, and our 24-hour call center service curses our name for ever using this system. My online order customers hate it as well. God knows how much business we have lost because of Volusion. Am happily spending the $15,000 to have a custom cart built. Would like to kill the consultant who buried us in this miserable trainwreck and has sent monthly “cart update” bills. Hope he reads this.
Hey guess what? Volusion is down again! I’d would call them, but I don’t have the patience to wait on hold for more than an hour today. And Ralph in sales is a total ass and a liar too.
I left a comment about volusion a month ago with inventory issues. After sending a ticket in and referencing my earliest ticket about the same problem which was 620 days ago I finally got a response. Unfortunately I can not get excited about one of my issues being resolved as many new problems have happened since. I am sure that anyone considering volusion that has read this far down has already decided to stay away from them. We have a developer working on designing our own site from scratch and I can’t wait to be done with volusion forever. Wise decision to stay away from volusion. They have caused us to lose a lot of business over the past 4 years and have disappointed many of our customers, who many times struggle just to get an order placed. That is what bothers me the most. Good luck to all locating the right working partner online (at least you have a chance to avoid this company).
Thanks to everyone for their comments! I was looking for an alternative to ebay, but now know that Volusion isnt the answer! Thanks!
And again…. Our website was down for most of weekend. Maybe its time to bite the bullet so to speak and move our website.
Has anyone made a successful switch to another ecommerce package and if so which one. In the process of evaluation a couple of clearly based on the comments here Volusion will be taken out of the group.
thanks for any info …
I am so glad that I found this website. I was about to sign up with the website when I thought that I should do a background check on the company ( I had a previous bad experience with GreenGeeks and I swore to do background checks on every company in future). I can overlook 1-2 bad complaints because you can’t make everyone happy but the fact that there is a whole long list of 50 over complaints in this website really means that Volusion is BAD, BAD, BAD.
I will be considering Shopify instead but i hate their transaction fee rules. Anyone have any suggestions?
Volusion down again 04/18/2012. It’s been down for about 2 1/2 hours now. I don’t feel like waiting on hold for an hour just to hear some lame excuse about how they are working on it. Stay away, i am onboard with these other companies and going to eat the cost of having a custom site built. This is just not acceptable to have the site down for days at a time every a month.
4/18/12:
Volusion down again today..here’s their official post:
UPDATE: The team has been able to isolate the issue and full functionality has been returned to nearly all stores.
UPDATE: Engineers are currently working to restore service to those stores that are still impacted. We will continue to work this incident as our top priority until this issue is resolved.
We are aware that some customers are experiencing interruptions with storefront functionality. We recognize the urgency of this issue and are dedicated to delivering a fast resolution. Engineers have been notified and are working to resolve. We will update this page as we learn more details.
Stay away from this company. They lure you in and then treat you like garbage.
Customers who buy products can’t even log in to check on the staus of their Orders….everything is “processing”. HELLO…it’s freeking 2012!
Confirm the above info. Problems continue 4/19/12. The “processing” issue has been going on for a very long time. Almost daily we get emails and phone calls from customers saying the same thing. The consumer has to really struggle just to check their order out. Helpppppppppppppppppppppp!!!!!!!!!!!! Still stuck with volusion for a while.
I have been with Volusion for a number of years, have multiple site with them and have to say if you want to stay in business give them a wide berth. We have worked very hard to build our business only to see it eroded by a service provider that just does not care.
Their servers are a so unreliable that they are nothing short of a joke. We estimate losing up to $3-$5000 a month just due to technical issues. Ongoing dog slow or no go servers, Payment Gateways that don’t work, then existing customers cannot log in, then Paypal customers cannot pay I could go on all day. We have lost countless long standing, repeat customers due to an array of technical issues. We had one customer try no less that 19 times to place an order at which point he gave up and headed off to one of our competitors.
They do a great job of attracting new customers and an even better job of hiding the truth. I wish I had their SEO guys working for me. If only the prospective buyer had access to their user forum then maybe they would start to feel that pain that their smaller customers are feeling. Many customers are jumping ship but it costs a lot to move. Talk about being trapped! Its a numbers game for them so they don’t really care. Call their support line but take the morning off work, you will need some spare time while you wait in line to get through.
I have no idea why someone has not issued a class action against these guys… they are literally putting their customers out of business, maybe its time every one should get together and tell the real truth. 99.9% up time guarantee… what a joke! They just bleed you till you are trapped and have little or no choice but to hang in with you fingers crossed that they will fix the issues before its too late. Can anyone recommend a solid reputable alternative… we need one, and fast!
It’s been many years ago that volusion kicked me out. Yes, they kicked me out as I was making too much “noise” making constructive criticisms, trying to help them improve their cart, which they used many of my suggestions to improve their store and then kicked me out giving me 2 months to move out, but only with a condition that I will hand to them a volusion yahoo group’s ownership. They told me if I won’t do that I will be kicked out instantly. After they took over “ownership” of volusion yahoo group they closed it or they made it inactive. They did everything to not receive criticism in public. The guys should not be in business, they should steal cars instead. I am so glad they kicked me out. After I got kicked out they started spamming my email address. Oh well. What a bunch of amateurs….
I HAVE JUST CALLED IN TO CLOSE MY VOLUSION ACCOUNT.
Waiting 35 minutes on hold for technical support is NOT what I expect for paying $150 a month.
Not being able to upload products without endless errors is NOT what I expect for my business.
DO NO USE VOLUSION. IT SUCKS.
THANK YOU TO EVERYONE FOR THE HEADS UP. LOOKS LIKE YOU GUYS SAVED ME FROM A MISTAKE. IT WOULD BE HELPFUL TO KNOW WHAT OTHER CARTS ANYONE HAS FOUND TO BE DECENT. I WAS ALMOST SOLD ON VOLUSION BUT NOW I AM EXTREMELY CONFUSED OR PARANOID ABOUT THE OTHER CHOICES.
Yes, Volusion sucks big time. Our store is NOT processing credit card orders this morning. Over a hour wait for tech support. Just problem after problem with them with no end in sight. Any e-commerce solution is better than what Volusion has to offer.
Guess what? ALL Volusion websites are down, including their own. In addition to the websites being offline, their phone system is too. How convenient! You’d have to be a sucker to sign up with company after reading these reviews….
And our website is down again. Good thing we have a business phone to capture some of our lost orders.
I wish I had read these comments before I signed up with Volusion. As soon as I signed up I got a call telling me i could get online coaching for building my site, so I got the gold package. Well the main online coaching I got was links to the tutorials. They helped very little and I am not satisfied with waiting long periods on the phone for support. I canceled whether they reimburse me for a site i never published remains to be seen. Chat support told me they had no written policy. Hmmmm! either they are not well trained or have sorry customer service.
hello and thank you guys for not signing in. you know why . even before reading these commments . one of their customer support insisted on taking my credit card . and talk me through it easily to have one of their plans and very agressive and imposing this tell you something.
Not to beat a dead horse, but volusion is a dead horse. Could be the best, but they have no follow through on ideas. They have a$$ new features and never revisit them. Downtime is horrible. it’s a shame, the basics of it are really good. Not worth the money thought, not at all.
We have been with Volusion for almost 8 years. They have gotten worse and worse over the years as they have moved to a recruiting model – not ecommerce. All they care about is recruiting new accounts that are green and have no expectations. Those of us who have been around a while are just an annoyance to them as we actually expect the software to perform to some measurable standard.
I have wanted to leave Volusion for years, but as others have stated, it is not easy and is just plain scary. We have been seeing sky high abandoned carts from our Volusion site here lately due to their inability to fix the awful software. Tickets with IT are ignored for the most part, so we now have nothing to lose. Everyone has their limits and Volusion just pushed us too far this time.
I will not say which cart we are moving to as I don’t want to look like I’m pumping other companies, but just suffice it to say we found one that looks really good, is packed with many more features, and will ultimately cost us less since we will not be looking at the ridiculous bandwidth overages on our billing each month. I am more pumped about this change than you can imagine. I have felt trapped by Volusion for years, but that will soon be at an end.
Anyway, please please please take my advice. If you have any sanity at all, please stay as far away from Volusion as you can. They will keep you up late at night counting the financial losses. I have never seen a company so poorly run and that just didn’t seem to care at all.
As a former developer at Volusion, I can tell you first hand that Volusion has one of the absolute worst codebases I have seen in over 15 years of professional web development.
For one, it’s built on classic ASP – an absolutely horrible platform by any stretch of the imagination. They’re currently working on a .NET MVC implementation, but that’s basically a word-for-word rip off of Ruby on Rails, which isn’t a whole lot better.
The code couldn’t be more inefficient, bloated and non search engine friendly than if your 5 year old had coded your site. It’s simply chock full of horrendous bugs, from the templating layer all the way to the database.
To make matters worse, they hired a bunch of people from Dell in the Austin office, and if anyone has seen the decline in quality of Dell’s website over the years, you’ll know why Volusion hasn’t done themselves any favors.
As you’ve read, their customer service is absolutely awful, their infrastructure is a joke, their platform is 10 years old and full of holes – why would you give this company any money?
I’ll be switching from Volusion just as soon as they provide the option for drop-shipping from multiple warehouses. I’m tired of dealing with crappy service and antequated software.
I wish I had read this prior to starting my Volusion store. I’m cancelling it today after 6 months of hard work setting up my shop, listing products, promoting, etc. None of my products were showing up in either google regular search, google picture search or google shopping. My SEO was relevant for titles, descriptions and tags but my products were no where to be seen(even though my products show up on page 1 of google search with all other sites I’ve used). I would also notice odd things when searching for my items, such as my site product map or category page popping up, but never the specific product page. No help from support at all on this issue! Out $299.50…
Volusion is terrible we are in the process of leaving
Did anybody notice all the new fake Volusion reviews websites out there? Looks like all of them “Reviewing” Volusion are written by Volusion themselves. No doubt, Kevin and Clay are reading this and are simply shameless. I feel sorry for people that fall into the Volusion pit.
I noticed it. Instead of actually fixing the problem, it looks like they are doing what’s called “search engine reputation management”. Basically, a bunch of websites were launched that make it look like independent, glorious reviews are being written about Volusion. The goal is to drown out real reviews (actually, this website just might be the only one out there that doesn’t have affiliate links to their site), so that when you search for “Volusion” or “Volusion Reviews” you get those sites and this website gets pushed down.
It’s sad. Rather than fix the problem, they try to cover it up.
Wow – I’m so glad I found this site. I was just about to switch my website to Volusion – Thanks GOD I found you! I’m going to stick with Cubecart and Upgrade to Cubecart 5. I have never had any of this such problems you guys mentioned with CC. So I’m just gonna stay where I’m at. I’m appauled by the over 100+ complaints. At first I found only 28 on another website and was seriously considering still using them. But after finding all these complaints…NO WAY!!! I value my business too much. Funny because when you tell them about all these complaints oh everyone is a liar! Everyone wants them not to succeed! Really 100+ people are just gonna take the time to trash Volusion for no good reason?! Really? I think NOT! I have not read not 1 good review! I know I won’t be using them. Thanks for some REAL REVIEWS!
I’m saddled with Volusion for business reasons, and I can’t get out of it. I’ve been bringing home so many frustrations that my wife suggested I start a blog to vent, so I did. Visit FunWithVolusion.Blogspot.com. Or don’t. It’s more for my own therapy than anything else. Just thought I’d share some of the pain…
Guess what? Volusion is down again and has been for more than hour. Can’t ship any orders out today – so more pissed off customers. If you call Volusion, they’re working on it but NO details or time frame as to when our websites will be back online. Also, staff is getting very rude lately. Must be because of all the pissed-off customers bitching about Volusion’s lousy service.
07/09/12
Website down again at approx 3:30 pm pst. LOL…not only is the Site dowm, the Admin side of our Site is down, as is the volusion forum-which they also recently obliterated to start a new on without all the history because of all the groups being formed to complain about Volusion. Do not use Volusion. All Volusion users need to voice their complaints publicly and to the BBB. I will write back when my Site goes back up. This is at least the 4th or 5th time THIS YEAR our Site has crashed.
Also forgot to mention, we’ve had 2 Big Commerce Sites for over a year as tester Sites before leaving Volusion and we’ve never had any down time.
official response:
“We are aware that some customers are experiencing interruptions with storefront functionality. We recognize the urgency of this issue and are dedicated to delivering a fast resolution. Engineers have been notified and are working to resolve. We will update this page as we learn more details.”
7/9/12 Crash Update:
UPDATE: The connectivity issue we are currently experiencing is due to a power outage at our data center in which the automatic transfer switch (ATS) malfunctioned. This in turn prevented the redundant generators from restoring power. Once power is returned to the datacenter, restoring full functionality can take 2-4 hrs. We are working closely with our upstream provider to remedy the issue as quickly as possible. As always, further updates will be provided as they become available.
so where to go ? anyone recommend ANY system?
OMG – my site is down AGAIN! We’ve gone through slow servers for over two years. Tested other carts but Volusion does have the slickest admin area. But, if our site doesn’t show on the web – nothing else matters. This is really ridiculous. If they just focus on actually solving the server problem I think most customers would be happy. They seem focused on getting new customers, period – not on retaining the “old” ones.
Thanks everyone – so glad I found this, as I too was thinking of switching to Volusion to save on on monthly fees….guess we’ll just pass on THAT idea!
As for alternatives – move from a Prostore to BigCommerce as PS just wasn’t getting any attention. BC also has its own growing pains and while customer service is super they are expensive (but just went to unlimited bandwidth).
They are behind in implementing Google Trusted Stores; site search is very frustrating; and my google feeds haven’t worked for the past 3 months forcing me to have to do them manually. And yes, I do see outages. Nothing to get hysterical over – but they occur – 5 minutes here and there monthly.
Yes, I love this website as well! It inspired me.
GOD LORD…
My feelings were kind of right. After reading all of these comments, I feel like a fool. I already paid Volusion a one-time $3,995 plus $90/month in fees…this is to be considered a gold member and have a web designer to help build my site.
My first problem occurred yesterday trying to set up a log-in and password so that customers can access my wholesale catalogs only after password has been approved by the website admin. It sounds simple right? Well….software appears not be flexible enough we are now trying to find a work around.
I am scared. I am not an expert on this stuff…and i am already having nightmares about integrating credit cards, merchant service with my Intuit QuickBooks accounting software.
Jeez…why did I sign up with these guys? If Volusion is not good, who should I work with?
NEVER GOT OUT THE GATE! Volusion has the most cumbersome backend I’ve ever seen, and I’m a really smart, experienced guy 🙂
We gave Volusion a couple months of effort and it was virtually impossible to modify look and feel, but comes Out of the BOX with the worst look and feel imaginable. The available templates look like they were made by 10 years olds in 1980.
We only had about 25,000 products to put up AFTER we got the site working, which never happened. They want $499-$999 for a basic template that still looks terrible. We could not find a single template that looked good for our business so we just left after a month or so of trying.
VOLUSION JUST DOESN’T CUT IT, I don’t know what business could succeed on this system, maybe one with only 50 products and who doesn’t care about design – SORRY!!
Im so grateful to te people who shared thier horror stories here. Volusion? Hell no. I’m avoiding it like the plague
Hi
I am not a Volusion user but discovered Volusion through another online store. The store was so badly designed, including integration with FB, that I just had to find out what Volusion is.
Not surprise by the comments found here. I only have a lot of sympathy for the store owner.
Since so many have asked, I have done a ton of research on shopping carts and have tried almost all of them. While it is true that they all have their pluses and minuses, the best three I know of at this point for the money are BigCommerce, CoreCommerce and Americommerce – all for different reasons. Everyone of them has a ton of features that many other carts don’t have. And it would take me forever to list them all.
BigCommerce has been around for a long time and they have nearly 20,000 websites. Although I’ve heard the occasional complaint about service, mostly it is people whining about things that they want added as new features and the developers aren’t responding to their wishes as fast as they would like (as if these people are entitled to have things developed for them for free at their whim). I have called them three times and have always gotten an extremely helpful person on the other end of the phone within a minute or two. If they don’t know the answer, they tell you that and they escalate the problem to a higher level. I certainly have never heard “everything’s working fine here.”
CoreCommerce has not been around quite as long as BigCommerce and doesn’t have nearly the customer base. Their training modules are superior to the other two and their cart is pretty darned easy to work with. They use RackSpace servers, so you know they have decent uptime. They have a few extra goodies the other two do not have built in at no extra charge – an onsite blog, an affiliate program and a customer reward program.
Also on RackSpace servers, Americommerce is the newest kid on the block and they are owned and run by engineers – not ecommerce people. Because of that, they have a feature available that no other cart except the Enterprise level Magento has (and the Magento version is several thousand dollars per month!). You can run multiple websites or microstores from one Admin panel. This allows you to share inventory amongst multiple websites but still have completely unique content showing on each of them. Great for keeping inventory up to date when you have built different stores in the same marjet around different keywords! Even for unrelated websites, nothing is more convenient than signing into one Admin panel and seeing all of your orders from multiple websites in one organized place. They have very few templates to choose from, although they have a very easy interface that allows you to click on pretty much anything on your website and change its size, color, font, etc.
I can’t really decide which of those three is the best. It all depends on your situation. Bottom line: they all blow away Volusion!
I have never dealt with a worse company in my life. Volusion essentially took almost $500, for which I got nothing. I truly wish I had found this site and all of these comments before I signed up with them. The Onboarding Coach you get with the Gold plan is a major scam – it’s a one-time, one-hour session with the coach. Mine was good, but not worth $99 – and forget about a refund. I had my credit card company reverse the charges and am actively disputing my two months with Volusion.
Please stay away from Volusion. I want my horrible experience and the money I lost to be worth something. If it keeps you from them, it will have bought something.
Thank you all from Australia!!!
I was really close to opening a store with Volusion…
I feel like I owe you guys money that you have saved me from not using these idiots.
I feel really bad for all of you.
If anyone has any recommendations AT ALL for a host that functions without downtime please let us (me) know.
All the best to all the hard working guys and girls out there getting ripped off.
Terrible Experience
1. Don’t get trapped by their first conversation, whatever they will promise will not going to happened.
2. They never respond to email conversation or phone message.
3. Any small change is worth hundreds of dollars
4. They will charge you wrong and to correct your billing you have to wait 30min on phone with some stupid music on and then they will talk like they are doing some favor to you.
5. Very unprofessional and hard to communicate.
6. They talk in rush like you have hours to waste to wait for their conversation.
7. Even closing account also have process and if any refunds you need to get then forget about it.
8. Your months of time will get wasted just to figure it out what they are…. after you realize you will lose money, time, and patience.
I think these points enough to avoid this site for your shop solution. After bad experience I went with Big-Commerce and I like their service and within a month I am all done with my site and selling stuff. I wish I were read all comments before going to Volusion, I might save three months time and money.
Yikes….we were about to sign up today, and then stumbled onto this site. Reading through some of these stories then prompted us to do more research…the internet is full of negative reviews on Volusion.
We are probably going to go with Shopify.
Thank you everyone for sharing your nightmare stories.
I would not recommend Volusion to anyone. We have had a terrible experience with their company. We built a custom site and they took it down twice for no reason and without consulting us. After requesting them to restore our site, they didn’t restore it to its original condition and we had to pay our own designers to redo the site. We have wasted countless hours and tons of money because of them. I would not recommend them to anyone. Be careful if you are considering using them.
Should have done my homework before signing up. Yesterday had a most unhelpful agent on helpline, just referred me to videos. I upgraded my plan to get personal assistance because I don’t have technical knowledge. After reading these reviews, will cancel. Glad I’m not too invested yet. Sad to say, this is becoming the norm in American business-profits ahead of expertise and service.
Volusion Merchant account is a fraud! Beware of buying this program, Volusion will take your payment before they deliver and then do not deliver anything they promise.
DO NOT BUY VOLUSION!!!!
My site never got launched.
VOLUSION are thieves. I was talked into the GOld Plan for $99 a month. They did not deliver what is promised on the plan.
They are currently taking my money directly from my account through direct debit which i was not informed of nor did I give permission to do.
After over 15 emails to all departements, NONE have been answered only ignored. I have now lodged a complaint with the Office of Fair trade. I have also tried calling VOlusion but the number is no longer in service.
I suspect they are fraudulent. KEEP Blogging and posting the truth about this company they do not deserve to be in business and honest people are being robbed.
BE WARNED.
Quickbooks simply does not work. They will charge you for overages associated with the setup, they do not disclose these charges and they do NOT offer phone support for the billing department for when they overcharge you. I had to go to my credit card company because of how difficult it is to speak with someone about billing problems.
When a company says “email only” in a department they are basically saying they dont want to help, they want you to go away and forget about what you owe.
I have spent almost 20 hours on hold to discuss an unjust charge and now they are offering me a small percentage of the fee off. I still owe $150+ for absolutely nothing! My website is shut off and my company is suffering greatly.
There are several different companies available that offer this service. I suggest finding one that does not hide their billing department behind an “Email Only” curtiain. Save yourself some heartache.
Please trust the reviews they are all true. It has been a horrible experience and they are thieves. They are extorting us now after charging us 99 instead of 9.99 like our plan said the bank credited us 90 and they shut our store down til we give them back there 90 and pay there penalties……extortion!!!!!!
I could explode….and there is nothing I can do! Criminals own my store!
I’ve been working with Volusion for about a year now and have come to the conclusion that people should not be using them. My client has needs like sales (buy 3 get 1 free) and various other ideas like layaway that can’t be done with Volusion. I was on with them and their support has gotten better; however, when I asked about some of these special needs all I got was crickets on the other end and a link to their “request a feature” page. Their pages are built through ASP (I like PHP better but it’s a personal preference 🙂 and tries to behave like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or other CMSs out there but a big difference is you can’t actually USE ASP, every page i’ve tried to include ASP code on just renders out the code and doesn’t process it, from the template page, “category” pages and product page…nada. the only up side is they do include jQuery which works if you get it in the exact right spot on the page. There are also rendering issues that add extra space to the page spreading things out with only heavy jQuery hacking to get most of them to go away. Another major problem is the way they render the pages, doing different things like adding a sale price will change the CSS and class names and that different browsers will use different CSS names so doing things like using jQuery to delete an empty DIV with a certain name won’t work cross browser (oversimplification but the basic idea)…thinking it was just the way the previous designer set up the CSS I looked and the naming problem is with Volusion’s coded thing and not the CSS you can set up in your template.
Once you get things working it tends to work, there have been backend slowups even with the higher packages, where it’s taken up to 5 minutes to refresh a product page or save a change (not an exaggeration). A conclusion to Volusion…it is meant for tiny businesses with no knowledge of web but have a few products they would like to sell online.
Recommendation: the money you’re wasting on Volusion could be spent on a web designer/programmer and a real hosting service (e-com for less than $300 including 99.9% uptime, dedicated IP and SSL cert a year is common). Ideally keep working with that designer/programmer; however, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and the like (there are a bunch out there but my personal favorite is Drupal) could easily be set up to give you the same thing you’re looking for through Volusion without all the headaches. Again I’d recommend using a real web designer/programmer to set things up initially.
I design and code so get the privilege of working with different systems including some I’ve coded and have to say that, although they aren’t the worst, Volusion is definitely on the bottom of the barrel.
EXPENSIVE LESSON: I am looking at my 19 days with Volusion as an expensive learning lesson. Great sales! Nice user interface to start building up your store. Friendly on-boarding coach. And then the fees start nickel & dime-ing you. Yes, I should’ve done at least 3 more DAYS of research.
How to get the store to look like my existing website for seamless integration? “easy” … NOT! But I could pay $1000-$1400.
Volusion to get a specific design quote for my site….still waiting.
How do I get rid of all those ‘copy templates’ I created to practice with store layouts? Oh, you’ll need to set up an FTP account and get …..( Don’t know if that would’ve led to more fees but I can guess.)
Oh, and the merchant account services are at least an EXTRA $30 a month. Even though Brent in Sales told me minimal….$30/mo is NOT minimal to my business. And NO MICROPAYMENT options for digital content.
Then I get an email about a tax/fee increase that Volusion will be passing through to store owners. Not to me though. I’m gone!
Volusion is pathetic. Their aim is to sign you up and forget you. I have a sneaky tactic before I sign up with anyone and that is to call and select customer/technical support and test their customer service. Volusion each time estimated under 4 minutes wait time. I hung up at 15 mins 3 times and 45mins once. 0 calls answered although Ive spoken to the sales rep several times as he persistently calls me. Also, when asked a technical question the tech department just ignores you. If this is the service they give to a POTENTIAL customer I cant imagine what you poor customers have had to endure. It seems to me all they are worried about is slandering the competition and getting rave reviews from affiliate websites.
I asked about specific features and was reassured by sales and tech several times that the software would be perfect for my needs only to find out later that they dont even know what I am talking about.
Volusion is the absolutely worst solution when it comes to customized store layouts. Not only do they lock up their code (no one except their design team can edit) it but also make the navigation of the store functionality really difficult. DO NOT USE THIS if you are creating a customized look for your store — it is a total nightmare.
STAY AWAY. Servers are down frequently and when I tried to cancel, they kept billing me. Took months to get fixed. Ridiculous company.
I have a question to all the people that have been screwed by Volusion. Why not do a class action lawsuit and get even with these ‘corporate dolts’? Then they can go back to flipping burgers.
My site went live in November of 2011. This year the site is beginning to take off but their bandwidth overage charges are criminal! 2 months ago I agreed to increase my acct. from the legacy Gold Plan to the new Gold Plan which would of increased my allowed bandwidth from 15 GB to 25GB but as they consider it a downgrade so wouldn’t do it until the next billing period! How is an increase in cost and an increase in bandwidth considered a downgrade?? Then I get my most recent bill and they didn’t upgrade me. Now I have 34GB of overage at 7.00 GB. I am looking into changing while I still can.
PLEASE DO NOT GO WITH VOLUSION!!
Everyone here are right. I have been a customer for years but most of those years I was on a hibernation plan as I closed down my site. I recently called in as I figured I would not reopen to ask for a backup of my database (which is basically just a spreadsheet with text) and they told me they could not give it to me because they don’t have access to it which is ridiculous. I have been a customer for years and they didn’t even try to make this happen. They told me to upgrade to the mini plan where I could then login and export my info. I upgraded and had no access to export. When I called back I had no access to phone support as it does not come with the miniplan (but did with hibernation??). I got through to sales and demanded to be transferred to a manager. This manager showed no concern for my issue and told me I had to sign u for the silver plan in order to export which is $65.- that they would not refund. He told them this is the worst customer service I have ever seen and I submitted a ticket to close down my account immediately and refund me the $15.- I had paid for the miniplan since I could not get what they promised, I got a generic message back sending me to a webpage to close my account and it also said they do no give refunds. Note that I only upgraded to get my export which I couldn’t get. I figured I’d cut my loses and get out of there asap. From reading the previous postings here I closed down my credit card so they could not charge me anymore and luckily charge had still not gone through.
I feel bad for the people who spent a lot of money with them.
Please use another service that values their customers.
I really appreciate these comments. I am in the process of creating an e-commerce store, and I was going to use Volusion; however, after reading these comments, I have decided not use Volusion. what I don’t understand is why are they touted as being rank #1? Does these mean that the other sites such as Shopify are even worse? I am going to investigate Bigcommerce now.
Good I was thinking of using Volution, but not anymore!
I’m confused… I don’t understand all these bad reviews and complaints about Volusion when I visit your websites I find that most are still using volusion. Why is that if they are so terrible? So please, those of you who have left, who have you chosen instead? I’m seeking honest answers and suggestions for other, better shopping cart solutions – NOT just people venting. Thank you.
When I was using Volusion (I only used them for a few months, got terrified and went with another cart) in addition to other issues and problems, my product data wouldn’t stick. I would enter like 5000 different goods into my cart, make sure I sabve it, then later on I would find half of the data gone… all my work for several months – gone. Volusion did not resolve this problem yet. Also they got the wrong attitudes and are kicking their customers out, the ones that submit constructive criticism as I’ve heard. Servers are down very often, sometimes for days at a time, with no prior notice. Support is a joke. Not recommended.
I have attempted to post my web site with volusion.
I spent about 2500 dollars to get set, not one rep was able
to explain how to drop my products into my web page, therefore
it was a total loss for me, I wasted about a month of my time,
as of now I am searching for a new support team, I feel my money
was taken for nothing, they are as bad as Bankunited.
Thanks
Thomas Ranno
Wow. Was going to use these will not be now. They sound terrible .
VOLUSION SALES = LIE
VOLUSION SUPPORT = JOKE
BUSINESS WITH VOLUSION = HUGE MISTAKE
I have been a volusion customer for over 7 years now. They were decent in the beginning but have gone way down hill. I have built some successful sites on the platform in the millions of dollars, but we are in the process of migrating all 12 of our sites OFF of volusion. The bandwidth overages are complete fraud now and I have been approached by a law firm that is organizing a class action suit. Our bandwidth overages on half of our sites doubled over the last 2 months while sales were flat. Total fraud. There customer service has always been and remains terrible. We have always just figured most things out on our own. Quite frustrating at times. They also have not added many new important features at all in 7 years that ecomm companies need to be successful. The sooner we get off this platform, the better.
While the Volusion site worked below the average shopping cart solution, I’m writing to let you all know to Beware of Volusion Merchant Services. I signed up thinking it was a convenient way to accept credit cards. I should have stayed with BOA procesding because Voludion had so many hidden fees. I was getting charged $65.00/month for their merchant services alone without making a single transaction. Then they had a hidden 3 year contract with an early termination fee $99. I hate when companies hide all of those fees so I cancelled the merchant services as well as the Volusion site all together and moved to storenvy.com which does all that i needed it to and is totally free and no hidden fees. Hope this helps.
Boy, I was just ready to use this company. I’m glad I read these reviews.
Mirna
I am also frustrated. There are many problems with my Volusion shopping cart. I cannot have invoicing and am limited only to use SKRILL for my site to process CC payments. Customers always get order confirmations if they backout of the SKRILL payment gateway page. This causes confusion for my team because we always have to check in admin if an order actually happened or not. Customers who have accounts cannot login and checkout with Paypal since the Paypal integration is sooo bad. Its just a mess. The backend is soooo slow – its just so frustrating. I am considering transferring over to a new host after the holiday season.
Eric, good to hear that not only me had problem with bandwidth! After being overcharge twice in last 2 months i questioned the fact and checked my stats i found that since beginning of my Volusion experience 11 IP addresses where topping up my bandwidth and since 14/08 it went from $20 to $50, i had no sales at the time so i was a bit lost why they saying there is incresed traffic on my website. this are IP which are bombarding my website so Volusion can charge me more…
178.255.152.2 austria
208.64.28.194 las vegas USA
69.59.28.19 charlote USA
70.32.40.2 san jose california
76.72.167.90 philadelphia USA
85.25.176.167 germany
67.228.213.178 dallas USA
85.17.156.76 holland
184.75.210.90 toronto CANADA
173.204.85.217 San Fran USA
46.20.45.18 germany
I am based in UK and I have no overseas customers. Just a big joke!!!! Sound fraudlent to me!
Gawd! I’ve been working with the Demo because my boss thinks this is the way to go. It is the most un-user friendly and unnecessarily bloated program I have ever worked with in my life. If I have to set up the company store in this, I’m walking.
I have an online store with Volusion. The hold times for tech support is unbearable. Trying to get any support through tickets via email is worse than pulling teeth, there is 2 to 3 day wait times between questions. They make it where you just about have to buy there services. I already had a SSL certificate, they wanted $99.00 for me to use it and a ten day wait time or pay them $79.00 for their certificate with a 2 day wait time. I wanted to compare merchant accounts, they make it very difficult to to use anybody but them. You have to sign a 3 year contract and they lied to me about all of the fees. I had a fraudulent transaction from a s stolen credit card, I caught it the same day. Authorize.net (the gateway)did not charge me any transaction fees because it was a stolen credit card and I acted immediately. Volusion charged me over $440.00 in fees and diverted all transactions to their bank account for one month while they investigated. Yes, they held all transactions for one month! There is no way I could ever recommend Volusion to anyone, thank god I own my domain name. I am in the process of moving to another host.
I really wish I had seen this page before signing on with volusion a couple of months ago. These guys are fraudsters and I don’t advice anyone to go with them. I presently have 2 stores and they make nothing less than $200 monthly from my company.
1. They have the worst customer service I’ve ever seen. Sometimes I have tickets waiting for over a week before someone deems it proper to post a reply. And you won’t believe the kind of wait times I have to go through, when trying to speak with their so-called “priority call” agents. I usually end up cutting the line eventually after waiting for 15 minutes on a long distance call from Nigeria without any response, or get really nasty with whichever agent is unlucky enough to pick my call.
2. They constantly charge for bandwidth overages that don’t even add up. For crying out loud, if I’m using 10 additional GB over the allotted 5GB, shouldn’t I see an increase in sales or abandoned carts? And then, going through their usage stats, you realise you can’t make head or tail of the plethora of irrelevant information that don’t sum up.
3. They have hidden charges and fees for every tiny little change you want on your site. I was recently advised by a sales agent to move to a new plan, but he conveniently didn’t mention that there were fees for mirroring and domain name change, yet sold me a “better plan” and insisted I pay immediately. Silly me….
I signed up for Volusion’s “free trial” offer, and was denied a refund after I asked to cancel during the free trial period. I decided to cancel because I found the software to be difficult to use. Very deceptive trade practices.
I choose Volusion over another site because of their “Amazon” linking capability. Unfortunately it has not worked. Volusion states they are working on the issue and they cannot supply an ETA (it has been a month now).
I asked for a credit for my first month because it did not work. After 2 weeks, their billing department answered and staid “No”, no explanation or anything. Upper management does not respond to emails.
I am moving at the end of the month. I wasted a month on these guys.
wish i had read this i havent seen any bandwidth charges but i can confirm support is useless i dont know what im doing but strangely i know more than support do I have spent the best part of the last month on calls live chat and emailing if you are looking for a solution move on to the next choice you can not do worse than this i am now faced with starting again or hope they will sort themselves out but after scanning through some random comments im leaning towards the difficult decision of starting over
I used to use freewebstore on a subscription and to be honest even this was better the only thing i like is the free email and hosting my blogger blog and to be honest the template
my biggest issue was the inability to add h1 tags and was told that this is not needed due to google changing algorithms and this was left out due to the increase in coding which would make page speed worse but i dont know whether i can believe a word that i have been told
also sage pay integration has been problamatic and still can not take payments
and just remember support is useless expect tot be lied to and treated like a nugget
DO NOT USE VOLUSION!!!
Switching to Volusion 1 1/2 years ago was a huge mistake. We’d been using ZenCart, so we thought Volusion would be better. The site was down for the 1st 3 weeks after we switched. Our sales have not increased at all. We paid a SEO consultant & found that the Volusion design has many SEO problems.We are a very small business ( my husband & I run it from home) & we cannot afford to hire programmers. 1 of the things we did like was their Easy Editor program.
Out of the blue, with no warning & without asking input from store owners, they replaced their old Easy editor last month. The new version absolutely sucks & is making our life hell. It doesn’t do half what the old editor did & when we complain they tell us how to do what we want using html. We don’t know or want to know & weren’t supposed to have to know html.
If we could afford the time & $$ (which we cannot as our sales suck) we’d switch to another shopping cart.
Have been a customer of Volusion for about 18 months. After my most recent experience with Volusion’s customer service policies I am actively looking to move off the Volusion website. Here are a few of my most recent experiences with Volusion –
1. For 48 hours on this important holiday weekend, we repeatedly had customers call us stating that they couldn’t process their order on our website. It has been 48 hours since I notified Volusion of the problem and I have yet to receive a response.
2. We signed up for a three month shopping feed service from Volusion. After receiving a notice from Google that 55% of my feed was being rejected, I contacted Volusion and they claimed that the rejections were a surprise to them and that it was not their job to have the products actually accepted by the shopping feed. Interesting, I thought that is what we paid them more than $1,100 to do.
3. We use Wells Fargo as our Merchant Account Provider. WF customers are required to use Trustwave to scan for PCI compliance, and Trustwave (as well as other scanning companies) are coming up with high level security fails when it comes to Volusion. This is despite the fact that we pay an extra fee for PCI compliance each month. So we pay an extra fee yet fail the PCI compliance tests.
4. When we developed our site, we had some custom development work done. We wanted to make a simple change to the site relating to a link. Unfortunately Volusion place the link in a part of the code that was difficult for someone who isn’t a programmer to change. Volusion’s technical help desk told me that I’d have to contact Volusion’s development team and sign a new development contract to make the change. The change was so simple it took a third party 5 minutes to make the change – said it was so simple he wouldn’t even charge me for the work.
There are certainly some things that Volusion does well. However in our experience, Volusion does not treat you like a partner. It seems they constantly have their hand out looking for money. Even when they actually fail to deliver the service they were contracted to provide.
My recommendation is to look elsewhere.
DO NOT USE VOLUSION!!!
Everything in the last few posts are true with out exception.
I have had my site with Volution 4 years to long.
DO NOT CHOOSE VOLUSION!!!
They promise the world during the sales process but they do not deliver. It has been repeated battles just to get what we paid for from their idiot design team, and we gave them completed designs that only needed to be coded!!! Idiots!!! Their employees don’t know what they are doing and their strategy is avoidance and delay. Unprofessional.
Originally quoted a 3-4 week turnaround, we are now going into week 8, the whole time being charged expensive monthly hosting fees. When we said we expected a partial credit due to their failures we were snottily told that we were offered a “rush fee” that would have guaranteed our original time guarantee. What!?! Why pay them additional money for what was originally promised.
They claim they record all calls so they could review and verify them. Then, magically, all of our calls were not available for review. Hmmm. DO NOT TRUST THESE IDIOTS!!!
Save yourself the customer non-service nightmare and choose a professional platform – NOT VOLUSION.
So glad I found this, for now I am going to demand that they meaning my initial third party who sold me this shit service.. Glad to know I am not the only one out there with these issues…
We all should get together and help one another!
We use quick shopping cart and sales are average I feel but we are looking for a switch. We’ve been looking at getting the most for under $100/month and have been researching big commerce and volusion but now are unsure. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Volusion is the worst mistake you could ever make for your e-commerce business. I know, I have been with them for nearly 4 years and we are moving to Magento to save our business.
They have a 10 year old platform that does not conform to modern coding standards. They unleash beta test updates on their merchants and then perform endless reactive maintenance. The, even though they are costing you money, ranking and downtime – they lie about it because they control the server and the error logs and will never turn them over to you.
You can’t access most the websites code because they own that too.
They are a joke, stay far away.
I have an Ecrater store and decided to give Volusion a try. I started setting everything up, then my son got sick to the point to where we were in and out of the hospital for a couple of weeks.
I called Volusion to ask if they could extend my 2 week “Trial” (I put the TRIAL in quotes, because the only thing you can do with the trial is upload your merchandize and browse, you can’t actually sell anything).
When I called, I explained my situation and they had ZERO empathy, they basically told me they could only extend my “trial” a few more days and that I should just switch to a paid plan, because it would be easier to upload my products. I explained that because I had everything in eCrater, I would have to manually put all the items in. They didn’t care, just wanted me to start paying immediately. I told them, you know what? If you guys are going to be SO inflexible from the word GO, why should I even bother doing any business with you. I’m sure I could find another solution, have a good day!
I mean can you believe that, do they really think they can win over more customers with this kind of service? The worst part is that I was planning on going with their Pro service at 80 bucks a month… I would have ended up paying them $900.00 a year, and they could cut me a small break to set everything up?
TERRIBLE SUPPORT!
Submitted a ticket for a major issue and six months later they still have not fixed it. When I ask for updates I get the response that they are “working on it”.
The issue involves a custom text field that is optional. If the user orders on a mobile device, the website adds a comma where it should be blank and charges the customer for custom text. If they enter text, it garbles and doubles it, making is difficult to understand what the customer has ordered.
I was told to disable the mobile feature of my store (an awful “fix”, since I pay for that feature) but unfortunately, that did not solve the problem.
I paid for a premium template and custom design services less than one year ago. I have a Platinum account. They are quick to take your money but if you have a real problem, they do not care.
I am a Volusion customer and have been on hold for over two hours waiting for a customer service rep. I called them on another line to see if their sales department picked up and they answered immediately.
We have their premium service, but so far we have been unable to get any service at all. We have been trying to launch our store for two days, and no one has answered our questions on how to do that. These guys suck.
I currently work with 5 different CMS shopping carts with various clients. I reviewed Volusion and toyed with the idea of trying them out for a year – I was actually excited to try it. Not any more.
Sure the cart functions, and the admin area is “pretty” but cart additions are complicated and clunky – and unless you pay for more than their basic package (up to 500 items) you have NO way to upload or DOWNLOAD your cart information data once it’s in there.
If you want support or static pages on the site adding, finding, and editing them through their ‘article’ system is like finding a needle in a haystack – nearly impossible for computer challenged clients to update (which is the whole point of going with a cms system) and their tinymce page editors are too simplistic and limited in features. What’s worse is if you choose to code back and forth between the html and txt tags it looses or rewrites the hand code.
The don’t give you any access to your root ftp or sql areas for additional program installs.
I also just discovered tonight that their 301 redirect system doesn’t allow for query string URLs which is what my old card was built in – destroying the QR code functionality on all of the product packaging we have.
Their help and training pages are what I would call “fluffy” and a good number of the videos are outdated to the content they are referring to – including reviewing features that are no longer available to some users.
If you have the base packages you are only allowed to use the email and chat features, and that takes me 45min on average and the support people pretty much just turn around and send you to a help page URL. The can’t/won’t help with any design issues as well refering you to one of their design associates who are basically doing the same job I am capable of – if I could just get a straight answer.
NEVER again will I recommend this platform to a client.
Well since most of what I’ve read here has turned me off going with Volusion, whose got some alternative recommendations? Please share!
I have just signed with Volusion on 25-4-14 I have just been feeling my way around having had several sites in the past, so far I am unable to load any logos, I am unable to load any images of any kind, setup FTP (experienced with FTP) will not connect to their server, had a chat on line with a techie for about an hour agrees there is a problem with software straight out of the box, have submitted a repair ticket x 2 no answers from either, I haven’t been able to do anything with it at all, hoping to spend this weekend getting familiar with it no chance of that, after reading these reviews and my experience so far I will be cancelling, if there is a problem I expect an immediate fix, if this site was live I would be losing money.
On top of that my email address would not pick up the emails they sent welcoming me with detailed info, the problem was not my end, but their’s
WARNING!!!!
To all those who are looking to open an online store stay clear away from VOLUSION. My experience with them has been horrific to say the least….
I opened my store with Volusion approx. 1 year ago as they had great templates and looked like an easy way to build your own site without paying $$$$$$$
For the first 6 months as my online clothing store was new and had little traffic I had a great experience with Volusion bills approx. $150 per month never dropping out or anything.
Approx. 12 months later I had grown my online stores branding and name to a new level having higher traffic with my bills going from approx. $500 per month to $1,500.
Although I had started experiencing success with my online store the $1,500 bill per month did not reflect this. I tried making my images as minimal as possible, nothing fancy, no flash or slider. Pretty boring for an online store which this should be your stores front selling point. Just a basic template store I had built myself.
I tried contacting them multiple times and they claimed I had a large amount of visitors.
Eventually I decided enough was enough and I would contact someone to built a new online store and host for me.
My bills being approx. $1,500 for the past 4 months I decided to really find out what was happening. I set up Google Analytics.
To my surprise I was getting approx. 1,000-2,000 visitors per day while Volusion was claiming I was receiving 4,500-6,000 per day.
I tried contacting them multiple times regarding this but they had a new excuse everytime which never made any sense and there was never the right person to speak to me about this issue.
VOLUSION HAS SERVER ISSUES WITH VISTOR COUNTS BEING EXTREMELY INCORRECT LEADING TO MASSSIVE BILLS!!!! If you plan on having visitors to your store do not join with VOLUSION
They have ripped me off BIG time and are LIARS. They have huge issues with their server system which capture the analytics for billing.
I recommend joining Big commerce for example which was capped billing with no server overages.
DO NOT JOIN VOLUSION!!!!! You will get slaughtered with the billing overages which are not even measured correctly.
I would like everyone to know that volusion does check your credit without your permission. The company is the most useless ecommerce i have ever seen. How do you run a credit without the permission? Who knows what else they may try to do with your information? I would highly recommend squarespace the best on ecommerce and cheaper $30 for unlimited
I joined up with Volusion in the 3Q of 2013. My store, in its 4 incarnation, was moved over from Prestashop and it took nearly 6 weeks to get it to resemble functional. I found more solutions to problems than they had answers for themselves and the support ticket list is long enough to fill a book. Like previous commentators say, most of the answers come in the form of a link to a help file or outdated or incomplete video. Magento was a pain in the ass for a non-techie, but this platform is much more complicated and unconventional when you get into it.
Issues still unresolved since day 1:
Emailed pdf’s do not show amount paid as part of the total as requested. The customer is suppose to refer to their paypal notification to confirm the amount they paid.
Connection wait for admin is VERY slow. I don’t know if this is because I am in Australia but they haven’t been able to improve this. The website loads slow too.
Cannot set up a total price with tax (10%) deducted from this. Only allows for cost + tax and will not round the price. Other carts, even the basic free ones have the ability to set up prices in a variety of ways.
The customer built-in CRM will only work with Volusion’s internal email, any external email servers, such as Google email that I use, cannot be used with this system.
The order notification emails stopped working 3 weeks ago and I have not been given a time-frame to fix this. In fact they say they don’t know how to fix it. I suggested changing the code to send from the store email address but Volusion believe it might break something (seriously, how much more broken could it be?) Volusion support claims it is the fault of Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc changing their spam filtering and rejecting Volusion order emails (because Volusion send emails as from the customer’s email address from their server). This is the last straw for me as the site is useless without notifications.
A previous site I had on another platform was broken in many parts, yet the traffic, SEO and conversion performed much better. I’m down to about 80% less business than any previous sites. Volusion claimed it was due to the limitations of their free template and sold me the premium one for just under $600. I knew it was a rip-off but I was desperate. The integration sucks because it requires manually coding for changes to be made with content and images – no significant improvement since installing this template.
Volusion provides plenty of promotion but little in the way of technical updates. Many times when reporting faults, I have been asked to leave the suggestion on their feature request site, but this does not do anything but thank you for your input.
The Volusion users forum took 3 months to join before I was accepted. Then they unaccepted me for no reason.
Conclusion: A highly polished platform that quickly loses its shine.
I totally agree with everything said before, do not buy this system. My problem is they promise the moon, from easy imports to get your site up to help getting your site up. Posh, my site would not import in.
Had to build everything by hand, then they started charging for things I never ordered. While talking with representatives, the shopping cart you originally thing you are talking about, becomes the premium shopping cart and unless you catch this you get charged for the cart. Then when you cancel they say it can’t be done until the beginning of the month.
Next issue has to do with the Payment system, they stress Authorize Net, but their fees are outrageous, Volusion gets their commission, and guess what, even if you do get them to cancel, they keep charging you every month, saying they are running through old credit cards. I don’t know how it takes them 10 days to process a card, but it is enough to demand payment the following month.
Their chat group is great, but their sales and support sucks, and unless you have big buck to be swindled out of, don’t go with this site.
While the site looks good, the backside sucks.
With all of the do not use Volusion post, no one has yet to respond to the several request for other options. It is one thing to say stay away, but it is another thing to kindly pass on some helpful options. I was about to lay down some of my clients money as well as start my own reseller account. Now I am stuck wondering if no solution is provided and we are only hearing from the victim, what is Volusions side of the story?
Fredric
The Web Design Guy
I contacted Volusion regarding migration of our website, walked them around our current WP based site, showed them how to use previewers we needed to migrate, all product option (there were many) and discussed in detail what was needed. I was told if I purchased today the migration would start immediately. Migration started a few days later, they initially said that everything, including previewers could be migrated over and that all product options would be handled by the migrations team. I provided everything needed in detail and was also told that the slider and additional category images could be added at no cost.
The only catch, I need to splurge on a premium template. At first I was told to select one for $595 or more, then $895. I selected and purchased a template for $895. Then they wanted to charge me $495 for the sliders and $300 for addition of the two additional category images. I disagreed, but finally relented and agreed to a discounted rate. They still overcharged what they stated and forgot to mention the $495 only included really crappy basic sliders. They agreed to refund for the slider since I could create a better one in my sleep, but they never did.
Then the real issues started. They could not transfer my previewers and I was told to find a company that could build them for me or find software that was compatible with their platform. Hardly anyone wanted to touch the Volusion platform and kept recommending Magento.
I finally found and made an agreement for several hundred bucks a month and a profit share (3% of all sales using previewers) with a company to do the custom previewers. This did not include the custom design setup required to get the templates ready for the new platform or anything- that was an addition $900+ just to get the first two and we have about 25.
Then the issue with the available options Volusion has arose. Volusion is so basic that it wouldn’t allow me to even create a pricing variation and make a specific color for a product only available on certain sizes. We were initially told they could. Also, we asked if Volusion was capable of making automatic price changes (dynamic) based on options selected and we were told “yes”.
However, this was also a lie. We actually ended up needing to search for a custom programmer who not only would be willing to work on the very basic platform Volusion is, but also custom code these options. The cost to this, nearly $2500.
After we spent between 3-4 weeks getting shipping set up, products in and waiting on Volusion to complete their end of the deal and all the while having to do the legwork in finding several outside companies to do what Volusion said their software could do out of the box, Volusion decides it is too much work for them and they are no longer willing to adhere to the agreement they made. They wasted nearly a month of my time after leaving me to find workarounds for their inept platform.
I highly suggest looking elsewhere than Volusion if you are looking for an ecommerce platform that is capable of truly growing with you and working for anything other than an extremely basic website.
Volusion not only misrepresented their company and their platforms ability, but they also defamed BigCommerce by stating that I should not go with BigCommerce because they don’t have nearly the features or ability because “BigCommerce has not been around nearly as long. BigCommerce is like that annoying little brother that copies everything you do”, stating they have all the features and then some. This was a lie because after checking in with BigCommerce, we found BigCommerce has tons more features out of the box without need for custom coding that Volusion lacked.
I would recommend BigCommerce over Volusion any day since not only is BigCommerce a fair enough company not to put Volusion down as Volusion did to them, but their features are ALL there and from what I see so far, they do not lie like Volusion seems to constantly do.
Please comment if you have had similar issues with Volusion as we are trying to see if this is a repetitive issue with Volusion and we have consulted with a legal firm.
WOW.
You’d think Volusion should leave town by the sound of these reviews. I didn;t even get past the initial call to ask Querstions about the product. There was no way to get ahold of anyone besides a sales rep. I tried to contact a Tech support person first, since I had technical Q’s about the software.
What did I learn? The Sales agenda was so thick I could cut it with a spatula and I was unable to have all of my questions answered before I was pressured to begin forking out all my contact info to this twerp.
He of course got the fuzzy end of the deal and I got away with my life…
TRUE STORY.
All in All, I am surprised I do not see anyone here recommending 1ShoppingCart.com. I was able to go RIGHT TO a tech support representative and have all of my technical questions answered before ever having to step foot in a “high stakes” sales team foot mess.
Been with Volusion for awhile ( approx 6 yrs. ). in the beging, imprssed with the many features offered. I though WOW!, all these free templates etc., and 24/7 cust. suppt. YES!. Still a fair price ( sort of ). here’s some of my experience:
1. sluggish tech support ( varies big time, who u might get to answer, one who knows nothing, or one who kns alot. I’ve called right back in hopes of better support.
2. awhile back , they a downtime problem,kept happening. all good lately.
3. not happy with this bandwidth– extra charges. not sure if this fairly new charge is fair or not!
4. I gave up on trying to bridge my accting data from Vol. site to my quickbooks— it never worked because no one there at Vol. good assist in setting this important tool up. just kept telling me, that they’ll put in a ”ticket”. I GAVE UP! ridiculous.
5. quite frequently, tech supp. puts tickets in, and someone gets back with you. you the problem fixed! not have to wait around.
All companies have problems, not trying to bad-mouth VOL, but other than their website pkg’es they offr, all other svc’es are outrageously expensive!
They should discontin. that phrase ”one of the most brillant companies. ” or ”out of this world tech support” unless they truly are.
They keep on bugging me about signing up for their SEO svc’es, but I’m just too afraid of the cost they’ll want to charge!
Have a good day.
Joe Petucci Jr.
Do not use Volusion. They sold me the wrong package choosing my 4 times what it should have and after nearly 30 days their incompetent support staff could not even transfer my SSL. They refused to refund my money on a service they were unable to complete. I never do reviews, but my experience is this is not a trustworthy company. Avoid Volusion.
This is crazy to read. I run about 8 eCommerce stores. 3 of which are on Volusion and the other 4 on two different platforms. For me and my team, Volusion has been the absolute best to work with. However, I have a huge technical background and can pretty much figure out anything. I think that is the problem. Volusion is set up to be handled by a technical team and if you don’t have one or can’t pay for one, you better be a very technical person in terms of coding, even sql server database knowledge will help along with htlm, javascript, css, and asp or asp.net to understand what is actually happening. You also need to be very much so up to speed on SEO. If you have all of those, Volusion is an outstanding tool for you. If you don’t, you should go with another company such as BigCommerce which we also use. BigCommerce requires very little coding knowledge (still helpful) and they rely more on add in or plug in features which you often have to pay for. We have not seen a high success from BigCommerce and their customer support is the worst in the business out of the solution we have experience with. With Volusion, we pay for premium service and usually have a human in less than 1 minute during normal mon-fri 9-5 business hours. I can see why a call after 5 PM would take longer, probably less support on staff.
Volusion also uses a caching company that utilizes servers all over the country (and probably world). I know that was a recent additoon in the past year, so I am not sure why others have claimed slow server times. Caching pulls from the closest server to the physical location querying the server. Essentially it is mirrored servers. That brings up another point, the slow admin, we have seen, but only with IE. It works very fast in FireFox and Chrome.
As far as data imports and data manipulation in bulk, very easy if you know how to understand where the data is going, how it needs to go in, etc. We have to seriously manipulate data offline first before we dump it in. It can all be done, but I agree, that is not easy. I don’t know of a platform where data imports are easy though. Once the data is into Volusion, it is very easy to mass update (again, if you have a clue).
For those that say Volusion is not for serious companies and only small businesses, that is a joke. It is actually the opposite. I feel the above is full of customers that probably can’t get around on their own and don’t have the money to fund an operation.
Magento is way worse on a technical scale and is not a do it yourself. There are only two remaining versions of Magento, which one requires a 3rd party to host it for you and the other is enterprise which requires your own server and much more techical expertise to make it all work and keep it up and running in-house. Plus Ebay owns Magento and they are not to be trusted as they shut down Magento Go already.
The Volusion sales team will lie and promise the world. Just know, Volusion cannot do sh!t for you technically other than “design”. They will not build anything else without compensation such as SEO work.
There are many successful big companies on Volusion. It seems to be the best solution out there from past “real” experience. Google bad reviews on any platform and you will read negative reviews by those that cannot make it in the harsh eCommerce world. If anyone could throw up a website and be successful, nobody would work 9-5 anymore. So it’s a good thing so many of you haters are out there. Go back to work and keep our economy going. It’s life.
We had purchased a template design package from Volusion which cost $4995, and we had also paid for a year of their “Plus” hosting service which was $35 x 12mo = $420.
We feel that the quality of the template that they made was very amateurish and had many visible mistakes due to sloppiness. We did finally get them to fix it the best they could, but the template was no where near what we envisioned for our new site. We were going to accept it as is and hire a 3rd party designer to make the necessary changes.
However, we started to notice monthly debit card charges which raised some red flags, because we paid for a 1 year plan, and specifically told the salesperson to charge everything all at once so no reoccurring charges happen every month.
I had complained to their billing support, and after many days they responded and basically said there was nothing they can do, told me even though there’s yearly plans, they still like to bill the user’s debit/credit cards monthly. I think this totally defeats the purpose of a “yearly plan”.
I removed the debit card info from our account, and thought it was over, but it happened again 2 more times, this time with overage fees from our debit card company.
I again complained to billing support, I asked for them to cancel service and refund us for all the unused services remaining.
They responded after many days and offered a free $1.83 a month service for the remainder of the year, in hopes to entice us to stay.
The worst thing is, we’re in limbo right now, between websites, and Volusion is taking their time. This is still not resolved and we’re just kind of sitting here waiting on them.
We just want to move on and forget about all this…
Needless to say, I do not recommend Volusion.
Their fraudulently advertise their capabilities. They claim to be integrated with Amazon, but they are not and they confirmed on a call with us that they know this but don’t expect a solution. This is on top of many other issues with the solution that we had to create workarounds.
**DO NOT USE!!** Had the WORST experience using Volusion over the last year. The interface is extremely confusing, the wait times for tech support is consistently poor to the point where they say you have to hang up and call back another time, and if you try to quit your service before 3 years they charge you AN ADDITIONAL $100 just to close your own store! Consider yourself warned. Go with someone else. You won’t regret it.
Volusion support is the worst, and for what you pay for we don’t get much for features.
We’re migrating away in a couple weeks…can’t wait!
I agree with most comments here. I help people ( Individuals/ SMB) setup and manage eCommerce stores and 90% people with existing Volusion come to me asking to migrate their store to better provider ( which is different for people with different needs)
When few ask me to set up Google Rich Snippet or Retargetting on Volusion I am forced to charge them almost double what I charge for other platforms due to horrible framework Volusion has.
The volusion templates are rigid and have not evolved to provide responsive design and it is simply impossible to create good responsive template for volusion. They do have separate mobile specific template but drawback is any customisation done to main store has to be redone for mobile store.
It is simply not worth to stick with this platform that will soon find no relevance.
If you have employees watch out. Volusion does not limit access for refunds. If they can process a transaction via credit card, they can refund it. A disgruntled employee could refund thousands and thousands of dollars to random customers for Months after the sale has taken place. Too much liability if you are not doing it all yourself. They should include permissions to charge and refund cards separately so some rogue employee does not create a mess refunding people at random.
Volusion is a scam. They charge these made up fees for overages in bandwidth and cover it up with nice technical support staff. They have billed me 3X my monthly in overages which makes up about 50% of my monthly sales on the site. They must pay for good reviews because I have nothing good to say about them and will be moving to bigcommerce this month. I have filed a request for a class action lawsuit under classaction.org. If you feel like joining me, maybe we can get some interest in this. It is such a scam.
Hi
I signed up last night to Volusion. Have not selected a template. I’m i’m scared now after reading all your comments. Can you please suggest an alternative to use.
*****WILL SOMEBODY PLEEEEAAAASE OFFER THE NAME(S) OF ALTERNATIVE OPTIONS!!!****
VOLUSION SUCKS!!! They have all sorts of hidden charges and WILL lie to you about it! I paid to build my website for 2 months and never went live because I saw this $65 merchant fee charge debited from my bank account. You can’t find this charge anywhere online at all until the bill comes in the mail after you already have your money taken out. So I canceled my account because I felt like it is shady to hide that big of a charge from their customers and I still got charged the $65 fee after my account was cancelled for a month! They said I had to send and email and call…WTF?! Calling isn’t good enough? It would have been nice of them to tell me when I was on the phone with them but NO they wanted my money so they charged me another month even thought I never even used my merchant account. When I called in to get a refund today they wouldn’t issue me one even though they took the payment out today. So in total I spent $373 for 2 months of volusion account on top of a $175 merchant fee which I never used, That’s $548 for 2 months not to mention all the time it took to build my website only to cancel it and have to go to a new platform and start all over again. DON’T GET RIPPED OFF!!! I switched to Shopify and am very happy there.
stay away from volution – unethical, way too cumbersome, they do all they can to keep you from finding out how to cancel service so they can keep charging outrageous fees that are not fully and clearly disclosed at the time a new merchant signs up for a plan.
I use GoDaddy to park my domain/website and I’m extremely pleased with 3dcart providing my web store/transactions.
Merchant Beware! Volusion Merchant Services is the worst. They have poor customer service. You are going to pay no less than $63/ month for credit card processing. Meaning even if you are just setting up shop and no transactions are being processed your bill will be at least $63/ month. Also, they do not list their $99 penalty fee for closing your merchant account in their list of fees. It is buried in the fine print close to the end of the contract document you will sign. I do not recommend them. They are the worst and you can find a cheaper service.
We’ve been an online store for going on 7 years now, the 1st 3 years we were a CD/DVD duplication service, the last 4 years we were/are a lighting fixture company
Our business has grown a lot over the last 2 years, so much that we needed to upgrade our web hosting to a platform that can handle a lot of traffic.
We decided to give Volusion a try. We also hired them to make us a custom template so we could have a unique website that stands out from the other generic templates.
This was the biggest mistake we made as a business to date.
Not only do they have hidden fees that they charge monthly, regardless if you get a yearly plan or not, the $4995 template was extremely generic, something I could have done myself with about 2 hours of work.
We had read their terms of service and it didn’t say anything about monthly reoccurring fees, it actually said quite the opposite. We do not keep funds on our debit card unless we need it, and because we weren’t expecting any hidden fees, we didn’t have sufficient funds for them to steal from us, which caused multiple overdraft fees.
Needless to say, after this happened 3 times, we needed to cancel service to protect our money.
We had tried to work with them on the $4995 template, we wanted either a partial-full refund, or the files and psd files. They told us NO for both choices. They kept our template and our $4995, and still had sales people from Volusion contact us and try to sell us $1000’s worth of SEO ($1995 a month for 12 months!!) I told this same sales guy multiple times that we don’t want it, leave us alone, and he’ll still come at us with sales pitches.
Now we’ve been trying to get our $4995 back for more than 2 months, the same “April S” keeps responding and saying the same exact thing, which boils down to “NO”. April S is very condescending. Shawn Kholi the SEO salesman was also very rude. He in my opinion he basically called me a stupid business person because I won’t use their SEO services.
STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM VOLUSION AS YOU CAN. THEY WILL STEAL MONEY FROM YOU. Then they will still try to sell you their junk.
I wish I’d read these reviews first. I got suckered into using Volusion and now I’m out a small fortune. It took them two weeks to transfer and setup my DNS and then it still didn’t work. They claimed to have a 30 day money back guarantee and only refunded $10 stating the rest is for other services like the SSL which was supposed to be a free add on. None of the features of their software worked and the site was always down. When talking to customer service they blame the other departments and tell you to wait a few more days for it to be fixed. It never gets fixed. All they ever do is ask for more money to add this and that. A TOTAL SCAM!
Okay, we get it. VOLUSION SUCKS!
So who are you using now?
What shopping cart did you switch to?
I must warn people that Volusion does not deliver what they promise at the time of sale and refuse to refund when you point this out. Volusion employs a salesman called Brinder in the UK that promises a Volusion site can do all sorts of things that when you get to the design stages it just cannot. Then when you complain the thing just drags on and on, finally with much arguing, I was offered a 50% refund.
I want people to know that Volusion don’t deliver what they promise. I warned Volusion that I was going to post some truthful blogs if they didn’t refund in full, but obviously they don’t mind upsetting customers and not fulfilling promises. Instead they hide behind nonsensical red tape, pretending that within their company it is made up of departments where the customer service doesn’t have an ability to fix up a full refund.
So I intend to post a lot of blogs to warn other unsuspecting customers. I am extremely disgusted at the lack of professionalism.
AVOID!!!!!
it’s all been said
Hi everyone!
I am currently with Volusion but looking to get out. Can anyone suggest an alternate ecommerce company to use? Any info would help. Thanks!
Worst customer service ever. They Ripped me off from the monthly merchant credit card service. I requested a cancellation on July 1 but nobody was able to take care the request til the end of the month. I ended up got charged over $100 for something I did not use. The worst part was they told me there was five transactions during the month so they had to charge it.
Like may here i also considered Shopify, but, went with ShopSnap and am very happy with my choice. about three months now. no downtime and really fast.
We are dumping Volusion after more than 15 months using them. We’ve had it. They screw you left and right, and their customer service is very poor.
The Affilaite Program reporting leaves lots to be desired. Much of our business is generated from affiliate referrals. IN order to determine what to pay our affiliates, we have to run the report (canned and unmodifiable) for 24 results per page, and depending how many sales the affiliate generated, to get one report, we may have to run the affiliate report 20 or 30 times and compile pagfe results into one report. We have experienced lots of other trouble such as excessive billing for bandwidth. Trust everyone who says this happens, because it does and they keep turning up the usage despite having no reporting to justify where the usage is coming from. We are in the process of moving our site to Big Commerce.
By the way our plan is $200 per month, and with their unjustified bandwidth “overage” charges we are paying $650-700 per month.
YEP…. Worst company I have ever dealt with. DO NOT BUY A PREMIUM TEMPLATE OR HAVE ONE BUILT> THEY ARE SO UNPROFESSIONAL AND HAVE THE WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE EVER…. IT WILL BE MONEY YOU”LL NEVER GET BACK.
I wish I had come across this before I wasted my money and time with them!! two weeks in (not including the two I spent setting up) I am already having nothing but trouble with them. In the process of figuring out how I can get out.
VOLUSION…HA ! Where to start ?I have a list of complaints as long as my arm. The SSL certificate did not renew automatically as it should have done hence a big warning to any potential customer landing on the home page to AVOID my site….unable to buy another SSL….Customer support = Zero. Want another one ? Volusion slashed the price of their packages by HALF (yep, 50% !) but they still charged me the original amount. After big shout, they agreed to bring the price down but refused to reimburse 6 months of overpaying. And the platform is not flexible enough to offer attractive “multiple product buy” discount to customers unless you enter the multiple buy yourself as one product…which is close to impossible if one wants to offer this across all products…. I CANNOT WAIT TO LEAVE VOLUSION !!! AND I DON’t RECOMMEND IT AT ALL…..they don’t care one bit, all they want is your money.
All I saw was made up volusion 5 star reviews on paid search. This site is pretty much hidden unless you dig.They claimed a great pkg. I have had nothing but, problems with them since day one. Their importing/exporting tool simply won’t handle large files. They claim to be willing to help and all they do is send you instructions that won’t fix the issues. They over billed me once I upgraded to pro and screwed up my web master tools coding amonth after i went live. 24/7 support just sends cookie cutter responses and then closes tickets. I feel 100% ripped off and will be relocating my url as at least that is mine to another provider. Worst support ever!Shame on me. I should have known better. I over see 17 sites that are 10 times the size of my small biz site and these guys suck.
I just find it bizarre that if you do a google search for support for any issues with your Volusion site, the only things that show up are help articles from their own site. There aren’t any developer forums out there. To me that, that tells me one of two things. A: Volusion isn’t popular enough for people to start forum threads for support. or B: Volusion shuts down any forums that mention their products. Either way, it’s bizarre. I’ve always said if you can’t find any forums about the product, and the only support and positive reviews you can find online come from their own website, then it’s a scam. Volusion would be great if I were a teenager selling some art prints on my little home made website. For everyone else, there’s Magento and Shopify.
We are so unhappy with Volusion. We are literally losing thousands of dollars a day in transaction fees because they can’t get there act together with bugs in their system that do not allow some transactions to be processed. Additionally, like the other commenter stated, when you call in or use chat with one of their “professional techs”, you actually end up teaching them about their software since they will just give you answers to try to end the conversation without having any actual solution, nothing ever gets solved. It is a true nightmare. There is nobody higher up to talk to…if you have concerns and complaints you get to send an email to “talk to clay” and “talk to bob or somebody else that I can’t remember..and like the rest of the crew…YOU WILL NEVER GET A RESPONSE. Do not….I repeat…Do not use volusion. I’m hoping I can help to save someone else the immense trouble that we are going through.
My company has been with Volusion for 10+ years using their Enterprise plan ($450+/month). We have been with them since their early start. It WAS good, especially you get support from the owner who wrote the program. However as Volusion expanded, moved to Texas, and moved their hosting from Rackspace, the company becomes horrible. Volusion is now an awful and horrible company to host your business store. We have truly horrible experience this past 5+ years. Their support team is one of the worst. Their software is full of bugs. Their server is down many times, especially during peak time such as Black Friday and 1 week before Christmas. They usually are down not just minutes, but hours to days. In addition, there will always be stupid things that their team does that cause problems with the programs.
Just recently, they had to remove all links and images on all checkout process of their customer’s website for unknown reason. The only reason they give is that the update their security software and links and images that are not from Volusion are not allowed because it causes the customer not able to check out. Yes, for almost one whole day, our customers could not check out and make any purchase. Not sure what kind of security scrip they have, but that is just plain stupid. Crazy and horrible software company.
Most of their support team do not care about their customer and do not know what they are doing, e.g. Peter. Their supervisor just talk but cannot do the walk. For example, recently I submit request to renew SSL. I called in and submit ticket EVERYDAY to ensure that it is renewed on time. Guess what… they were super slow and late on their timeline. Tried to ensure that it was on time, but tech support, Peter, just closed my tickets ( Not just 1 ticket, but 2 tickets) with a statement that it will done automatically. There is no way to speed up. Everything is automatic. Yeah, sure. If I have an employee like him, I will fire him and make sure that future employee knows that Peter is lazy and do not care about the customers.
What supposed to be 24-48 hours for me to approve my request to renew the SSL, it took more than 72 hours. Then, the weekend cause more trouble because the billing dept does not work on the weekend. ONLY the billing department can install the SSL even though the delay is from them. The manager or supervisor cannot do it. Imagine that you paid an Enterprise Plan that cost around $500/month and they do not have an Enterprise support team. We had to wait 3 days (Friday, Saturday, and Monday) until the billing team return to work on Monday for it to get resolved. What kind of support is that? Just for a simple SSL renewal/installation?
There are more crazy things that happened at Volusion during my 10+ years hosting with them. Many times, they tried to hide it and blame it to the web store owners. At one point, they deleted comments/reviews on Facebook because customer complained there. Now, they do not display the customer reviews because almost ALL the customer reviews are negative. If you have time, browse their Facebook page.
There are tons of bugs such as affiliates. Somehow, people can just join your affiliate program without our approval using link they found on Google and we, the website owner, don’t even know about it. How crazy is that? Overall, the software is full of bugs. When they release updates, they do not tested. Their method of testing is for the customers (web store owners) to test it and, of course, it breaks and causes problem.
Overall, Volusion is horrible. It was good at the early stage when the owners are the one running it and they hosted their software at RackSpace. Now, they are just …. horrible… horrible… horrible.
***ALTERNATIVES*** for payment processing
For Anne C
Shopify
Intuit Payments
Paypal(for small transactions)
Google WALLET
Hello,
Not all, but a number of customers call up and say the shopping cart crashes. Explicitly, ”Unable to Process Your Order at this time ”
Called tech. supp., they told me, to when a customer calls up to report problem to us, for me to tell them(customer ) to clear their cookies or if that doesn’t work consider changing browsers. REALLY?????
To their credit, I thought they fixed with whatever they did, until this morning: customer tried to order but cart crashed.
Sounds like they’re just sweeping the issue under the rug, hoping it will go away I guess.
So, still having problems as we speak.
Anyone else having this problem?
Volusion has been the WORST experience I’ve ever had with a templates site.
They are NOT what they say they are.
All right already, we get it… Volusion sucks. This horse has been beat to death and then some. Maybe it’s me – because I do know quite a bit about web development, but I’m just not seeing at least 80% of the complaints against Volusion. My company is running four web sites currently using Volusion. Ok, we use one as a test site to try out new features on the other three, so we actually have three live web sites. We use the highest priced template on our “premier” site and never questioned if it was worth it. We made quite a few in-house modifications to the template ourselves without contracting with a Volusion third-party developer. We’ve found Volusion to be clunky in some areas and fine in other areas. Overall, I wouldn’t hit the panic button and wish I never had chosen Volusion.
Quite simply, we did trials with Shopify, BigCommerce, Pinnacle – even Joomla. To me they’re all half a dozen of one and half a dozen of another. No one company was the end all be all – and that includes Volusion. What I DO find interesting and each one of these companies seem to have their own following of negative reviews – just like what we’re seeing here about Volusion.
I’m not being a Volusion fanboy, I’m just saying it is what it is – no worse or no better than all the rest.
David is totally right about the “bugs.” I experienced the same thing. I’m not sure what software Volusion was having us use, but it seemed to just get worse. After 3 years with them, I just cancelled and went with SetMySite – more modern, more stable, plus they set everything up for me. Volusion could offer me a decade for free or even pay me and I wouldn’t go back. The Big V is just not worth the time or money anymore.
I googled to see if other people had a poor consumer experience with Volusion and here I am. From my experience they offer VERY POOR customer service. If you do not upgrade they will not even answer a question and then you are automatically disconnected. When I joined I was not impressed there was no follow up emails or calls about promotions. When I tried to use the chat option the rep did not understand my issue and disconnected. I set up a phone consult at a specific time to go over Volusions features vs a competitor after I inquired about an upgrade. He did not call back. Nearly a month later another rep called to tell me they had a month long promotion that was ending in a few hours??? I can call ANY other hosting company and I WILL get customer service. NOT HERE! They LACK SO VERY BADLY in this area. It’s like the only have a dozen employees and are trying to make it self service. I don’t mind upgrading…I would just like to go over the pros and cons with a live person like most other companies offer. Volusion is completely overrated and underwhelming. I’m leaving tonight. Today I tried to transfer a domain , paid $19 and later received a message that the transfer failed. I called to get a refund on charges… again I was prompted to upgrade and was promptly disconnected. I am done.
Seriously one of the worst customer service experiences that I’ve had with any company or entity for whatever capacity. They truly just don’t care about anything but the money that they charge on your card. I’m looking to migrate to Shopify.
I’ve been on Volusion for almost 5 years. And, I hate it. While I have not experienced the downtime, I’m disappointed in the product itself. Compared to eBay (of all sites), Volusion lacks inventory management, marketing controls, flexibility to run sales, and the worst is a very inflexible shipping module. It’s impossible to have a per product shipping policy. Just pain stupid.
I often wonder whether software developers actually *use* their own software? If they did, I believe they’d make it easier to use and add needed features..
Has anyone had problems with “lack of sales”. I’m getting a lot of adwords pay per clicks, watch the people come and go to different parts of the site and DO NOT buy.
Repeat customers disappeared.
Volusion has no answers. Tells me “site working fine”.
Is this a problem others are having?
Gotta agree, volusion is seriously lacking. You can’t even name product images, they are automatically named after the product code.
There is also an issue with anonymous checkout. A customer cannot check out anonymously if their email has been used before.
Volusion is a dishonest company, they add services without your consent, they lie about giving you free upgraded service and then charge you extra. The person supposed to help me set up the website admitted never having taken a look at the site. When you cancel services, each service must be cancelled separately but they never tell you that and keep quietly charging you for months, knowing you are not using their services, and when you finally cancel it all they still charge you a termination fee. They are scammers, a TRAP, KEEP OUT.
All the tech help does is refer me to their and Google’s help articles. No one seems to want to actually help me and get something done like feeding my data to Google Merchants.
Volusion will ask you for a 14 day trial and you set everything up,you need put in a store name.While your doing this they see your STORE NAME and buy all the domains for this. Later after you 14 day trial you go to buy your domain but you see it has been taken< NOW they sell it to you NOT fot $11.99 a year but for lots more like 11,000.
Volusion dont do it forget it.
I have had a fairly good experience with Volusion for the past two years. I’ve not experienced downtime when I’ve used my site. I’ve had no customer complaints with downtime. The SEO ability isn’t the greatest. I did add h1 tags to my product descriptions and I’m getting high generic placement in the search engines. I am switching to Bigcommerce, though. There’s more to their software as far as naming images, the user experience, and so on. I know “those who have been hosed” are motivated to post their bad experiences but overall Volusion worked quite well for me. Also Support was quick and knowledgeable and helpful.
Volusion might be a good platform but I didn’t get that far. After comparing platforms I thought I would give them a try based upon their pricing that is on their sales page. What I ended up with felt like I had been bait and switched! Pricing for the plan that I was after ended up being 33% more than quoted. They charged me a bs “PCI service fee” plus sale tax. I am in a totally different state! There is no need to collect sales tax for stated you do not have brick and mortar stores in (at least not yet)! The last straw was that I had to pay extra for a single email account. You can’t have a webstore without a functioning email! I felt that if I had been taken for so much at the beginning what was next….well I found out what was nest. Even though I had canceled long ago, they are still trying to bill my credit card! No way! I am happy with the platform I have now and my bill is actually the same as what is stated on their sale page.
SCAM ALERT – Stay away from this bait-and-switch company that’s riddled with HIDDEN FEES!!! Yes it looks like a great deal – that’s because basically everything on the Volusion website and everything the sales people tell you is inaccurate and intentionally misleading. Absolutely do NOT sign up for their Merchant Account – it looks like a feature of their monthly plan but it isn’t! You’re actually signing up for a 3-YEAR contract that’s at least $33.50 per month, with a $99 cancellation fee! The term is not in the contract anywhere, it’s on a separate page on their website that you will never find until you get the contract. Who reads contract terms, especially when they link to additional terms? No one, and that’s what they’re counting on. Don’t pay them for a website that looks like garbage to start with, and definitely stay away from any contracts with them. They will intentionally mislead you – even if you ask questions about their services, the sales reps know how to avoid giving direct answers.
I can’t stand Volusion anymore. Over the last 4 weeks over 60% of our orders (the ones I actually know about) could not be completed. Our customers get to the final step and click ‘place order’ and they just get ‘looped’ back to our homepage – like no order was ever placed. Support is awful… Their finial verdict: “Our customers must be doing something wrong on their end”. Everything was going fine prior to this issue, so I never had the displeasure of dealing with their support team. Now I know and can’t wait to move platforms.
I am a freelance e-commerce solution provider. I have years of experiencing migrating data from one platform to another via CSVs. But Volusion spreadsheet import system is really awful – I havn’t seen in recent history.
First of all you cannot upload product pictures via spreadsheets. If you want, you have to upload them in the backend via FTP. There are strict rules that you should follow regarding picture naming and sizing. So to avoid renaming and resizing thousands of product pictures I took a long route i.e. putting items ONE BY ONE. Throwing aside the option of spreadsheets I started to add products manually. But what a ***! You cannot select multiple pictures simultaneously. So I just have to upload one picture, wait for few seconds, then again I click ‘browse’ then select second picture then wait. This way I have to upload 5-6 pictures per item. It looks like the internet is in early evolution periods when you use their system.
If you want to assign categories to your items it is again fairly difficult.
If your items has size / color variations god help you.
I won’t recommend this platform to any of my future clients.
I would give a 0 star but not the facility.
I have been with Volusion for 5 years, constantly they have fallen behind other providers and not done anything to help bring stores up to what is expected in todays ecommerce world
Recently I was informed by customers no payments were going through. I queried with Volusion and was told there was an integration issue with them and Sagepay. No timescale provided I thought it would be a week max which would have been bad enough but understand issues can happen. 2 months later, still can’t take payments, Volusion refuse to provide more information or care. This is my small company’s busiest period (Halloween and Christmas – Party Business) and I am left dangling. Volusion offer to refund 1 month hosting – complete joke this company – avoid. Im leaving, no doubt this will be difficult as well.
My company has had its difficulties with Volusion from time to time, but their recent “upgrade” has been a disaster for us. It’s supposed to provide a modern look, but it’s so graphics-heavy that the system is dramatically slower than it used to be, and some features that we used for phone orders are now gone. The result is that it takes longer to do everything. Tech support can’t do anything to help because the old, streamlined view is gone, and this new, clunky, slow view is all that’s available. It’s a real handicap to our business. I couldn’t be more frustrated with it.
The state of ecommerce platform has always been pathetic. I can’t believe my eyes about so many bad comments about volusion. We initially thought only shopify support is arrogant, but found this to across all the so called big platforms today like bigcommerce, volusion, and shopify.
We are attempting to solve three big industry problem today:
1. Provide great technical support when needed the most (most platforms don’t have it)
2. Category hierarchy & with faceted search (Shopify and volusion lacks this feature big time)
3. Mobile shopping app: we are the first in the industry to launch mobile shopping app for store owners, most platform have ignored it
4. 100% flexible template engine (shopify has it, big commerce and volusion lacks this big time)
5. No commision on sale (We will not take cut of sale, shopify charges on commision, whereas volusion charges on bandwidth)
anyone interested in trying our beta service, reach us out, we will give you free online store for life. Cheers.
I agree with everyone. We switched a responsive site and paid Volusion to customize and move everything over. Our bandwidth now is 10 times the normal even in the slow season. Also customer service is the worst. They don’t know what they are talking about and give a generic answer to every question and most of the time don’t answer the question. Looking to go elsewhere. We have been with them for over 5 years and are done. They don’t care.
We have been with Volusion for quite some time now, and there have definitely been problems with the whole company. Over the past few months, it has gotten much worse. Something has gone haywire with the program. Google shopping feeds not working, site maps a disaster, and so many other issues. For those of you who have had serious issues, please post on Facebook with hashtag #VOLUSIONSUCKS as we are looking to gather everyone for a lawsuit against this terrible company.