Volusion Review: Is the Hosted Platform Worth the Cost?

Volusion is a fully cloud-based, hosted eCommerce solution. It’s one of the oldest online store builders, working since 1999. Volusion has received negative feedback in the past due to its limited functions. But the company has leveled up its game and upgraded its software platform version in 2017.

Volusion is now a leading all-in-one website builder for retailers and brands. As the company claims, the platform took inspiration from 180,000 entrepreneurs globally.

The company caters to small and medium businesses. Sproles, the company’s founder, said SMBs also deserve robust website features and the level of service big enterprises get.

In this review, we will walk you through Volusion’s features to see if their goals match your business needs.

Let’s get started!

Table of Contents

How Does Volusion Work?

Kevin Sproles founded Volusion in 1999 in Austin, Texas. Driven by the founder and returning CEO then, the company has re-’volusion’ized its platform in 2017. Version 2 came with a new and completed website, a new logo, improved UI, and developed branding.

Volusion works as an all-in-one eCommerce solution that allows you to create your store from scratch.

It has a solid website builder with essential features not limited to drag-and-drop, in-page editing, and site search. Its product management features include variant pricing and rich text product descriptions.

Unfortunately, the platform doesn’t offer a free plan. You can try it for 14 days for free with no credit card required.

What Is Volusion Pricing Like?

Volusion provided six premium pricing plans before. After its restructuring, the business simplified its prices in 2018. It has four premium plans now, starting at $29 monthly for the personal plan. You can save up to 10% more if you want to stick with it by paying annually. Volusion provides a 14-day free trial to help you get started.

• Personal: This is the cheapest of all plans starting at $29 per month. You’ll have access to all the essential features like social media integrations. This is ideal for small online stores, as it’s limited to 100 listed products only with up to $50,000 sales per year.

• Professional: You might observe the gap in the price from the previous plan. But at $79, this plan provides you with more significant features. You can have access to its advanced features, including phone orders and a CRM system.

  Another worth–mentioning is its abandoned cart reports. This live cart feature gives you an overview of your clients completing or abandoning their carts. For the ones who abandoned, you can send them emails to follow up.

  Newsletters and a review section for your social proof needs are also available in this feature. You can sell up to 5,000 products with up to $100,000 sales per year.

• Business: Starting at $299 per month, this plan supports big businesses that earn up to $500,000 per year in online sales. This strategy comes with an unlimited number of products and bandwidth. You’ll also receive great priority support and more features from third-party gateways.

• Prime: Prime has only been available since the launching of Volusion 2. Looking for real VIP Support and help from experts to advance your business? This plan provides you all that.

  This comes with custom pricing depending on your online sales. You’ll pay for the privileges and various unlimited features and upgrades. Some are shopping site restores and site speed server resources.

  You’ll receive VIP support that is not offered by other competitors. This comes with a dedicated manager and unlimited staff accounts.

  What’s more impressive is its Sandbox developer and editing features. With this, you can have a preview of your changes before publishing them on your eCommerce site.

What Features Does Volusion Provide?

What makes Volusion remarkable? It’s quite practical: features are built directly to the dashboard. This saves you from the tedious and costly work of purchasing add-ons from separate app stores to change your website. Aside from basic features like variant pricing, built-in features include advanced options, such as SEO, Amazon, and eBay Marketplace Integrations.

Here are the other important features Volution provides:

Order and Inventory Management

Adding new physical products is quite basic. You only have to enter four important details: Name, Price, Weight, and Code. For the code, assign each product with a unique combination of letters, numbers, and symbols. These are hyphens, underscores, and periods.

Also, Volusion’s unique identifier codes (SKU) make it easier to manage inventory. Assigning SKUs to products help you track inventory numbers and sales easily.

In processing orders, go to your Admin Area, choose Orders and then Process Orders. You’ll see details: open orders, pending shipments, shipped orders, and all orders. You can also initiate a product return and refund through Volusion’s dashboard using the Orders features.

In processing orders, you need to do the following steps:

• Lock the order. Only you, the merchant, can manually change details like the amount charged for shipping (especially if you are outside the US). The customer can only change the payment method.
• Collect payment
• Print shipping label
• Send a confirmation email

You don’t have to go through all the confusion about taxes because these are auto-generated for all inventory. You don’t have to calculate them manually with its convenient tax calculator. However, if you’re outside the US, you can edit it manually.

Additionally, if you have Amazon and eBay stores, your inventory will reflect directly on your Volusion dashboard.

Payment Gateways

Volusion has a variety of options for Sale, Authorize, Capture, Credit, and Void. It offers over 30 providers for credit card payment, but only Authorize.Net is fully supported. Stripe and PayPal are the only third-party gateways that are built-in directly, so it’s better to stick with them.

Other manual payment options are available too. They also have used modern payment methods like Google Pay and Apple Pay.

Unlike Shopify, Volusion doesn’t charge you transaction fees. But there’s a credit card processing fee from the payment gateway you choose for transactions, not Volusion. Its own Volusion payments gateway charges around 2.15% on transactions.

Security and Performance

Volusion uses the same data encryption algorithms used by the US government to store data securely. In sending data over the internet, it supports the use of TLS v1.2 for data to arrive securely.

It uses a web application firewall (WAF) and intrusion prevention system (IPS) to inspect network traffic. It also monitors changes in critical files with a file integrity monitoring (FIM) solution. These systems send logs to their centralized solution and monitor suspicious or malicious activity. The platform also supports an account lockdown policy if someone logs into your store by using the wrong passwords in many attempts.

As for the Secure Socket Layers (SSL), Volusion provides a free SSL. SSL protects sensitive information such as customers’ credit card information. However, free SSLs are shared SSLs and the customers are redirected to a separate domain when they checkout.

Another good thing about Volusion is that it’s PCI-certified. This ensures customers’ data, like credit card transactions, are stored using military-grade encryption. But as an eCommerce store, it’s ideal to get a custom SSL certificate.

Custom SSL certificates increase your customers’ trust. This is because they’re kept on your domain for checkout and not redirected somewhere else.

Volusion offers Norton DigiCert, GeoTrust, and Thawte SSL Certificates. Prices depend on the package starting from $199 to $995.

Fraud protection is also available when you buy its Fraud Score 101, it’s Volusion’s comprehensive risk analysis. Prices range from a basic plan at $12.95 per month, a standard plan at $29.95 per month, and a deluxe level at $49.95 per month.

SEO

To reach the highest potential of your online store, a good SEO strategy is crucial. To date, Google remains undefeated as the most used search engine. It accounts for over 70% of all global desktop search traffic in the world. It is followed by Baidu that only accounts for 13%. Google search algorithm is believed to have over 200 factors to rank websites.

Basically, search engines like Google seem to go along with websites containing SEO features. This includes meta tags, title tags, customized page URLs, meta descriptions, and alt texts for images.

Here’s the catch: Volusion pages have these features, except for URL customization on its regular pages and add alt text for images on category and homepages.

It supports Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Potential customers can see your important details easily by looking at the search engine results. These are your star ratings, stock status, and product pricing as part of your marketing strategy. This allows you to sell your products even on your personalized Facebook store.

Volusion also auto-creates sitemaps of your online store for customers. This speeds up the scanning or crawling process of search engines like Google.

So all in all, it’s a good option if you want to rank high in search engines.

Blogging

One thing that Volusion lacks is native blogging functionality. Users considered this as a shortcoming, especially for the ones highly depending on blogs for inbound marketing.

Blogging is essential to help increase traffic to your online store, which can turn into leads. Hubspot reported a study based on real results from its own 7,000+ customers, which shows the connection between blogging frequency and sales. Companies that increased blogging frequency from 3-5 times per month to 6-8 times per month nearly doubled their sales leads.

You can’t install Blogger or WordPress directly on your Volusion store because it doesn’t support integration with the two. If you want to add a blog to your store, you’ll need to connect a subdomain with a CMS like WordPress through its API. However, this is no easy task because you have to deal with managing your DNS settings.

Although some plugins can make the process possible, building credibility and authority on a site (especially if you are just starting from scratch) will take time.

POS System

Volusion’s Point of Sale System allows you to scan products and credit cards to complete orders directly from your Admin Area even if you are selling in person. It leverages your online store setup to check out customers at your physical storefront, just like how a cash register works.

This convenient feature is ideal if you operate a retail establishment or sell products or services in person. But take note, if your store uses SSL certificates, you’ll need to enable a specific configuration variable first for the system to work.

The only downside here is that you’re going to need a computer to process orders. No app is dedicated yet for Volusion’s POS to work from a tablet or phone device.

Are There Quality Themes and Designs?

Had you been using the older version, you would have cursed the outdated templates. Yet, Volusion has revamped its themes, giving you good quality, modernized, and responsive themes. It now offers 11 free and 34 premium themes at $180 for a one-time fee.

The free themes look stunning and surprisingly identical to some of their expensive themes. This gives your website a stylish look at par with other leading stores without cost.

The themes consist of essential features: homepage slideshows, social sharing, newsletter sign-up forms, homepage builders, and infinite scroll. These themes, both free and premium, were designed to be responsive to optimize performance on mobile and tablet screens.

With the visuals of its product and category pages, you can edit much of it if you’re a coder. Before, you could only edit the themes through HTML/CSS and a basic visual designer, but the revamp gives you the ability to make more changes. Now, the source files are easy to access, so you can tweak the HTML and CSS. If you’re an expert, you can even make yours from square one.

Notably, the update comes with a drag-and-drop editor. This feature isn’t available natively on other platforms like Shopify. Unfortunately, if you don’t know how to code, you can’t change much. Still, you can purchase a custom design either directly from Volusion or from third-party experts at a customized price.

How Easy is Volusion to Use?

Volusion’s dashboard is minimalistic. The interface is clean, organized, and easy to navigate. Users are guided every step in setting up their stores with its recently launched video series.

Aside from the videos, the primary steps like choosing a design and uploading a logo are also highlighted in the main area. Several reports are available right on the dashboard to keep you updated about the status of your sales.

However, some factors can overwhelm beginners, such as creating non-eCommerce content that will take a lot of steps. Adding videos directly to your products is also not available. Instead, you need to add YouTube options after you uploaded the product on Volusion.

Does Volusion Have Apps and Integrations

There are over a hundred applications and third-party integrations available on Volusion. Here are the different categories for apps along with a few popular examples:

Accounting

• My Corporation
• Vextras
• Unify Online

Business Resources

• AccesiBe
• Rocket Lawyer
• 1800 Accountant

Channel Management

• SellerExpress
• Datafeed Watch
• Solid Commerce

Customer Management

• Answerbase
• SnapEngage
• Comments by Powr

Design

• Popups by Powr
• Logojoy
• Pixc

Domain Registration

• Domain.com
• Hover
• Namecheap

Dropshipping

• Doba
• Kole Imports

Email Marketing

• Mailchimp
• Vextras
• Constant Contact

Fulfillment

• GlobalShopex
• Shipwire
• eFulfillment Service

International

• PayPal
• Beanstream
• Shipwire

Live Chat

• SnapEngage
• Facebook Chat by Powr
• LiveChat

Marketing

• Fomo
• Justuno
• TargetBay

Media

• Famebit
• TrusSPot
• Vzaar

Mobile

• Paypal
• Unbound Commerce

Order Management

• Shipstation
• eChannelHub
• SkuVault

Payment Processing

• Stripe
• SecurePay
• Amazon Pay

Security

• buySAFE
• Norton
• GeoTrust

Shipping

• GlobalShopex ReadyCloud
• ShippingEasy

Shopping feeds

• DataFeed Watch
• GoDataFeed

Social

• Social Feed by Powr
• Yotpo

Tools

• Incfile
• MyCorporation
• SnapEngage

How Is Volusion Customer Support?

As mentioned earlier, Volusion provides real VIP support to its VIP Customers Pro and Platinum members. It also provides 24/7 live support through phone, chat, and email to all customers, but it excludes the mini-plan which comes with 24/7 online support only.

Videos, articles, and tutorials are provided on the dashboard to keep you on track. You can also subscribe to their Youtube channel to get notified of their latest videos. They also handle a community forum where you can join the discussions.

Dropshipping on Volusion: How it Works

Volusion V2 has nailed its dropshipping integration system. It provides everything you need from setting up your store to following up your sales. Its interface has already been simplified for your comfort.

With over 80,000 dropshipping products, you can sell in numerous categories. The products are also curated by the company for you.

What’s more practical is that all their products are shipped from the US decreasing shipping time.

Its US dropshipping suppliers are:

• eSolutions by UNFI
• BeWicked
• USA Inksewn
• Wholesale Clothing Deals
• Bradley Coldwell
• Sportsman’s Supply Inc.
• FragranceX
• D&H
• Discount Skate Shop
• 365 in Love

What’s more impressive? Their dropshipping app is free.

What are Some Volusion Alternatives?

You are in charge of the steering wheel when it comes to choosing an eCommerce platform. The best choice all depends on your business needs and goals.

Volusion is a great competitive platform on par with other leading companies. However, unlike Volusion that has limits on products and sales, there are alternatives you can try:

Volusion vs Shopify

It depends on the factors you use as a basis. If you’re looking for a platform that doesn’t limit products and sales and supports blogging out of the box, then Shopify has the upper hand. It works as the best all-around eCommerce platform.

But if you will pay the price of upgrading your store, then Volusion provides you with more advanced features.

Volusion vs BigCommerce

Volusion and BigCommerce as platforms have similar features. Both have built-in features that don’t require additional plug-ins and cost. However, unlike Volusion that has a different set of features depending on its priced plans, BigCommerce provides almost the same features in all its plans. Reviewers found BigCommerce easier to use.

Volusion vs WooCommerce

The major difference between WooCommerce and Volusion is that the former is a free eCommerce platform. WooCommerce allows you to set up your store in minutes without paying anything. The WordPress CMS is also free.

WooCommerce has more to offer with unlimited customization. It comes with countless themes and plugins to choose from rather than Volusion.

WooCommerce can be easier to navigate but you’ll have to set up your own web hosting. It’s one of the best eCommerce platforms for SEO.

Volusion FAQs

How much does Volusion cost?

Volusion has four price plans:

• Personal: $29/month
• Professional: $79/month
• Business: $299/month
• Prime: Custom

Is Volusion legit?

Yes. Volusion is an established company founded by Kevin Sproles in 1999. Its present CEO is Bardia Dejban. Volusion runs over 40,000 online stores.

Is Volusion better than Shopify?

If you don’t mind spending on advanced features to upgrade your store, Volusion is a better option than Shopify. However, if you’re looking for an all-around eCommerce platform where you can blog and have no limit on products and sales, go for Shopify.

Who uses Volusion?

Most of the merchants and companies are often based in the United States. Most of them are in the retail industry. Famous companies using Volusion include MSLGroup, Slickwraps, Intel, and 3M.

Volusion Review Summary

Volusion has added numerous useful features with its Version 2 to help improve your online store performance. They also enhanced the customer’s overall experience, allowing you to create a search engine optimized online store. Overall, we believe this hosted platform is worth the cost.

But as no platform can cater to all business needs, Volusion has its pros and cons too. Here’s the list:

Volusion Advantages

• Powerful apps integrations such as MailChimp and PayPal
• Various payment gateways
• Commendable customer support
• POS system integration
• No transaction fees
• Modern and stylish templates
• Secured hosting
• API to build your own integrations
• Easy editor
• US-based dropshipping

Volusion Disadvantages

• No blog feature
• More expensive in general
• Not beginner-friendly
• Limited templates
• Difficulty in creating non-eCommerce content
• Doesn’t feature an app store