Volusion Reviews: What Makes It Stand Out For Online Sellers

Introduce Volusion – a powerhouse solution designed to elevate your ecommerce game. In this in-depth review, we’ll explore how Volusion equips you with the tools you need to compete and conquer the world of online retail.

Key Takeaways

• Volusion is an established e-commerce platform designed to help businesses create and manage online stores.
• It offers a wide range of features, including customizable templates, inventory management tools, payment gateway integration, SEO features, and email marketing capabilities.
• Volusion is best suited for small to midsize businesses aiming to build and grow their online presence. It provides robust e-commerce solutions but may not be the most budget-friendly option.

Volusion An Overview

Founded in 1999 in Texas, Volusion boasts a long-standing presence in the eCommerce builder arena. With the passage of time, this cloud-based platform has evolved and refined its e-commerce software services into a comprehensive package, focusing on the essential features tailored for effective selling. 

Volusion offers a range of incredible selling features, including shopping cart software, ecommerce web design, and processing tools, with a core focus on small to large businesses.

What sets Volusion apart are several key aspects that resonate with potential and current users. Despite the competitive landscape, Volusion’s strength lies in its commitment to the small business sector. With an approximate count of 30,000 active stores, the platform resonates particularly well within this niche.

Volusion recently transitioned to its ‘V2’ version, offering a better user experience. This update presents a clearer inventory management system, simplifying stock tracking. Moreover, it’s enriched with data analytics tools and diverse payment options, showcasing its core strengths. Attempting to rival ecommerce giants like Shopify, Volusion has integrated both business and website creation tools, initiating the user experience in the storefront editor. However, its business tools are quite basic and lack specialized features. It doesn’t support blogging and requires frequent toggling between the site’s front and back ends. It’s better suited for data enthusiasts rather than design lovers.

Pros and Cons of Volusion

Pros: 

• Quite easy to use
• Customizable and responsive themes
• Unlimited product options and variants
• Multiple promotion campaigns
• Strong built-in features (design, marketing, etc.)
• Seamless app integration
• Helpful support

Cons:

• Add-on costs
• No in-house blogging feature
• Limitation revenue on cheap plans
• Restriction on selling digital products
• Slight learning curve compared to other platforms

Who Should Use Volusion?

Its all-encompassing package is pre-loaded with nearly all the essentials required to initiate and manage an online store, all of which can be tailored to your preferences. More specific:

• Growing businesses: Volusion is a solid choice for SMEs seeking scalability, even if plans are a bit pricier. As your business expands, there’s flexibility to upgrade your plan.
• New e-commerce entrants: Despite a slight learning curve, Volusion offers user-friendly navigation without coding requirements. With 24/7 support, challenges are quickly addressed.
• Established brands: Volusion is trusted for established ventures on the market with its long-standing reputation.
• Global sellers: Volusion’s CDN ensures fast, worldwide load times. Multi-payment gateways and native currency support suit international entrepreneurs.
• Multi-channel sellers: Whether transitioning from brick-and-mortar or expanding to platforms like Amazon or eBay, Volusion aids the transition.

Volusion: A Detailed Review

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, Volusion falls short compared to its competitors. While its starting plan begins at $35 per month, both Wix and Shopify offer lower price points at $16 and $39, respectively, already coming with robust features and good usability to build a storefront. However, you would get what you paid for, and Volusion will make the price deserve to its true value. 

While there isn’t a free plan, you can explore Volusion’s eCommerce platform with a 14-day free trial and also save your budget up to 10% with an annual bill. Four pricing packages are offered by Volution, catering to diverse business sizes:

• Personal Plan ($35 per month): Ideal for small online stores and beginners
• Professional Plan ($79 per month): Suitable for medium stores
• Business Plan ($299 per month): Designed for larger stores, international sellers, and major brands
• Prime Plan (Custom pricing): Perfect for giant businesses and reputable brands

Every plan includes an online store, unlimited bandwidth, complimentary themes, site editing tools, drag-and-drop functionality, and integration with social media platforms.

No transaction fee occurs during making transactions. Except for Volution Payments Powered by Stripe, those who opt for other supported payment gateways that are not built-in Volution Payment will be charged gateway maintenance fees per transaction:

• Personal: 1.25%
• Professional: 0.65%
• Business: 0.35%
• Prime: Custom

Ease of use

Interface

Volusion’s interface has undergone significant improvements over the years, and navigating the interface has been made more straightforward. The platform boasts a modern, clean design that aligns well with contemporary e-commerce aesthetics.

The Volution Wizard will be your assistance to make a checklist for setting up a store and ensure that you all go through it.

Our assessment of Volusion’s user interface indicates that it is pretty user-friendly compared to other components like Wix. Specifically, modifying the store’s design could be a bit more complex, a point that will be elaborated on in the following section. While certain content can be directly edited within the site builder, other elements necessitate adjustments through submenus that might not always be intuitively organized.

Themes

Volusion offers a selection of nearly 50 free and paid themes, with an average price of $180 per theme. Crafted by professional e-commerce designers, these themes enable effortless customization to bring a modern look to your online storefront. 

These templates deliver visually appealing and crisp outcomes on high-resolution screens. Regardless of the device used for browsing, these responsive themes seamlessly adjust to provide an optimal viewing experience, whether on a mobile device or desktop.

Customization options

Volusion’s What You See is What You Get editor made it easy to customize every website page, incorporating text testimonials, videos, image galleries, and other content blocks. The consistent concept design across multiple pages maintained a unified look.

Designing category pages is equally seamless with multiple product lines, thanks to various product category tools. Subcategories, product display attributes, and images can all be adjusted. For those without programming knowledge, it might be challenging to make visual edits. You can ask for help from third-party experts or buy a custom design.

If you’re a confident web designer, you can even build a template from scratch by accessing source files, which allows HTML and CSS adjustments for personalized site modifications.

Dashboard management

Volusion’s dashboard presents a distinct approach compared to many other reviewed services, seamlessly merging the site builder and shop management interfaces into a single screen.

Volusion’s dashboard provides a snapshot of your store’s key metrics. Within the storefront dashboard, you’ll find a real-time preview of your online store. Using the convenient sidebar menu, you can effortlessly navigate various store-building aspects. This includes template selection, color and font customization, logo upload, product addition, text adjustment, and central menu arrangement. Basic customization can be made.

Features

Having established that Volusion excels in the realm of product selling, it’s only natural to delve into its impressive array of ecommerce tools.

Inventory

Looking at Volusion’s stock management from a different perspective, it’s evident that this aspect is where the platform truly shines. While its inventory capabilities might be somewhat simpler compared to certain competitors, they represent a significant leap forward from what conventional online stores offer by platforms like Shopify.

The Volusion’s inventory area can manage and handle your goods effectively since adding them to the site. For those embarking on their ecommerce journey and who don’t require perpetual stock management, Volusion might be precisely what you need. 

The software equips you with the tools to craft listings, monitor inventory levels, and tweak pricing in response to customer demand. The ability to establish warehouse locations, allocate stock items accordingly, and calculate shipping rates based on these locations was seamless. The inventory dashboard also offered a comprehensive overview of product status, reorder quantities and quantity verification.

One of the standout features is the automatic creation of purchase orders, a functionality that ensures your stock remains replenished every time an item is sold, streamlining your inventory management in a smart and efficient manner.

Payment processing

Like other currently leading ecommerce platforms, Volusion owns built-in payment providers! Volusion boasts its own pair of integrated payment gateways: EDI transactions and Volusion Payments, an in-house online credit card processing solution. 

Volusion’s in-house credit card processing solution emerges as the favored choice for several compelling reasons. It guarantees the lowest rates available, simplifies setup procedures, and provides rapid assistance from a dedicated support team. his payment processing system is exclusively available to U.S.-based merchants, which could be a drawback for sellers in other countries.

Don’t worry! The platform permits the use of over 30 external payment gateways, allowing you to reach global customers, including two giants, PayPal and Stripe. Especially, Volusion has a great connection with Stripe, giving a lot of interest to users who subscribe to this provider, especially for no required maintenance cost as other types.

Volusion offers a diverse array of payment methods to cater to both merchants and customers. Customers can utilize wallets to facilitate online payments, utilizing saved card information or a balance from their digital wallets, including options like Apple Pay and Google Pay.

SEO

Volusion offers several commendable SEO features. The platform allows you to centralize the information pertaining to your pages, products, and categories, resulting in improved search engine friendliness. Notably, it allows you to manage 301 redirects efficiently, giving you control over the redirection of pages.

Additionally, the ability to create a custom editable robots.txt file adds another layer of SEO control, enabling search engines to navigate through different sections of your site more effectively. While this level of customization might be more suitable for advanced SEO users, it provides flexibility in controlling crawl behavior. 

Volusion further empowers your SEO strategy by enabling the addition of custom HTML tags and the editing of global meta tags. The platform generates a sitemap automatically, streamlining the process of search engine indexing through Google Helps.

Certain aspects of Volusion’s SEO may warrant consideration. Customized URLs, while beneficial, are accompanied by alphanumeric strings that can detract from their elegance and recommended SEO practices. Similarly, the platform’s practice of renaming uploaded images to nonsensical strings poses a challenge to effective image SEO.

Marketing campaign

Social media

An advantageous attribute of Volusion is its automatic integration of your social media accounts with your website. Volusion is capable of linking with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and more.

Users can efficiently engage with their audience, share content, and monitor campaign performance without the hassle of navigating between different tools. This integration streamlines the process and allows users to manage their social marketing efforts directly from the admin dashboard.

Newsletters

Through seamless integration with popular platforms like Mailchimp, users can effectively build and manage their email campaigns. This integration enables leveraging customer data and shopping history to create targeted and personalized emails, such as post-order follow-ups, promotional messages, and reminders.

Moreover, users can sync their Volusion store data with their chosen email marketing platform, automating the process of sending relevant emails to customers. The number of newsletters you can send depends on your subscription package, from 0 to 2,000 emails per month.

In-house marketing services

If you find yourself lacking the time to oversee all your marketing tasks independently, you have the option to enlist the services of a Volusion specialist who can provide support with various aspects, including PPC, SEO, shopping feeds, social media marketing, and other marketing activities with some extra costs.

Third-Party Apps

The Volusion marketplace has a connection with over 80 partner apps, ranging from accounting software to customer support, that you can directly integrate into your e-commerce site.

Zapier, an online automation tool, is a special partner of Volusion, which is available on its marketplace. The app allows users to connect their Volusion store to over 1000 apps through a few clicks. Most manipulations work automatically, so you can easily build a smooth app workflow.

Volusion Customer Support

To meet huge requirements and multiple questions from users during the time of experience, Volusion offers various types of support to optimizely solve the customers’ problems.

• 24/7 Chat Support: You can access this feature through the Merchant Center dashboard, requiring login for connection. The system is staffed by English- and Spanish-speaking representatives.
• 24/7 Email support: If your issue is complex, the response time might be longer. Email assistance is provided in both English and Spanish.
• Phone support: Direct phone support is reserved for Business and Prime plan users, available Monday through Friday between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. CST.
• Help center: Accessible at all times, the comprehensive self-service knowledge base addresses numerous inquiries. It features over 200 articles spanning topics like shipping rates, inventory management, and social media management. 
• Volusion experts: These support services typically cost between $100 and $400, offering expertise in areas such as advertising, SEO, design, and more.
• Training tutorial: Available for users on the higher-tier pricing plans, offering them opportunities to receive priority support and training from a dedicated success team and a traffic generation consultant.

What Do Customers Say About Volusion?

Customer feedback regarding Volusion is mixed, with both positive and negative reviews being highlighted on Capterra. 

Some users appreciate Volusion’s suitability for small businesses entering the online sales arena, praising its user-friendly templates and straightforward setup process. Users have found value in Volusion’s assistance with inventory management and order processing, as well as the responsive and helpful support team. They have optimally utilized the sales tool to sell products effectively.

However, not all experiences have been entirely positive. Criticisms include outdated and limited customization options for website templates requiring technique skills which occasionally encounter glitches. Some users have expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of advanced features, indicating that the platform might not cater well to the needs of larger businesses. There have also been concerns about the complexity and potentially high costs associated with the pricing structure relative to the offered features. 

The Verdict: Is Volusion Worth The Money?

The decision of whether Volusion is worth the investment depends on your specific business priorities. It is not the best platform, but it works well with its responsibilities.

If you’re a small to medium business owner looking for a user-friendly platform to kickstart your online store and manage inventory, Volusion could be a suitable choice. The platform’s comprehensive offering, including selling tools and customer support, can provide a solid foundation for small-scale online ventures.

However, if you’re seeking advanced specific options, scalability for larger businesses, or robust SEO capabilities, you might want to explore other e-commerce solutions. The mixed feedback from users suggests that while Volusion offers some advantages, there are also limitations that could impact your overall online selling experience. 

Before committing, it’s important to evaluate the platform’s pricing structure in relation to the features provided and to consider how well it aligns with your business goals.

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