Volusion Review
Built-in tools to help increase your revenueHuge collection of responsive themes
Full product category customization
State-of-the-art drop shipping available
Powerful SEO & marketing capabilities
Pros & Cons
- All-in-one ecommerce solution
- Free 14-day trial
- Huge collection of responsive themes
- Support for product category pages
- Advanced searching functionality
- No blogging options
- No user forum
Plans & Pricing
Volusion offers the following packages:
- Personal: The personal package costs $26.10 per month when billed annually or $29 per month when billed monthly. It comes with 100 products, online support, secure checkout, and unlimited bandwidth.
- Professional: The professional package is priced at $71.10 per month when billed annually or $79 per month when billed monthly. It comes with 5,000 products, unlimited bandwidth, secure checkout and online + phone support.
- Business: The business package costs $269.10 per month when billed annually or $299 per month when billed monthly. It includes unlimited products, unlimited bandwidth, priority support, and secure checkout.
- Prime: The prime package has unlimited products, unlimited bandwidth, VIP support, and secure checkout. You will receive a custom quote.
Overview
One of the most popular eCommerce website builders in use today, Volusion is a professional platform offering a variety of features, customizable website templates, good payment options, and an advanced inventory management system. If you decide to build your online shop with Volusion, you will also be able to integrate 3rd party tools such as accountancy software, newsletter platforms, or drop shipping apps.
Features & Functionality
Product Categorization and Display
Product customization is a strong Volusion characteristic. You can add images, associate subcategories, manage SEO or all of the above for your products. On the homepage, you can feature a slideshow that highlights discounts by using the free slideshow feature. There are quite a few different navigation styles that you can choose from to create an engaging shopping experience for your customers.
Inventory Management
Although professional and relatively easy-to-use, Volusion’s inventory management system may seem a bit daunting for newbies because of all the different setting options and product information required. However, once you’ve learned the ropes of it, you will see how convenient it is to be able to manage all your inventory, both for orders received online and offline, in one single place.
Marketing Tools
All pricing tiers include search engine optimization tools so that you can easily customize the snippets displayed within search results pages, enabling potential customers to grasp basic information about your products such as the price, previous ratings, and stock. Just like most other eCommerce website builders, Volusion offers easy integration tools so that you can start promoting and selling your products via Facebook, eBay or Amazon, managing the inventory within the same dashboard. This will come handy if you want to expand your business’s horizons as it saves a lot of money, time and effort.
Payment Options
When building your eCommerce website with Volusion, you have a wide range of payment options, including the most popular ones worldwide like the Canadian BeanStream, the European Authorize.net, the Australian SecurePay, but also PayPal, Skrill, and Stripe. Volusion.com has developed also their own payment processing tool, but you will have to be a US resident in order to be allowed to use it. Merchant account owners can also process phone orders within the Volusion platform.
Safety
Volusion offers SSL security package with 128-bit encryption, but this is not included in their pricing plans. If you want to sign up for this, you will have to pay a yearly fee of $89. You have also the option of getting a Semantic SSL certificate. While most eCommerce website building platforms offer these certificates for free, when building your online store with Volusion you will have to pay an annual fee of $399 (US residents) or $499 (outside the US). The advantage with Volusion is that you get a custom SSL certificate for your store, not a shared one as it is the case with most platforms.
Design & Templates
Having a good-looking website is very important when it comes to eCommerce. As always, appearances matter a great deal and an appealing website design is one of your business’s most powerful assets. Volusion offers free responsive templates to create mobile/tablet friendly versions of your store, and, as of recently, a good number of them are free of charge. Using their intuitive Easy Editor tool, you can customize them and provide your online shop with the look you want. Volusion.com also offer full access to the website’s HTML and CSS files, but you will need more advanced web design skills to tweak them.
Ease of Use
An up-to-date eCommerce website building platform, Volusion provides its customers with advanced marketing tools, allowing them to build SEO-friendly sites, to promote and sell their products via retail and social media networks, as well as to stay in touch with their customers. However, if you are only a novice in the field of online commerce, you might find their price tags a bit hefty.
Customer Support
Building a store using Volusion is very easy. The interface is very sleek, neat and user-friendly. If you are an amateur, then you might face a bit of a learning curve in the beginning but once you get a hang of it, within a few hours you should feel like you have known Volusion since your childhood. Navigating between different screens and accessing all the functionalities is very easy.
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Phone Support
Yes, the company does have a landline number which the support staff can be reached at. -
Live Online Chat
Yes, the support team available via chat normally replies in under 20 minutes. -
Email
Yes, the company’s officials can also be reached via email. -
Video Tutorials
Yes, there are plenty of video tutorials available online. -
FAQ
Yes, a comprehensive FAQ section is present on the company website. -
Blog
Yes, a blog is present.
Final Word
An up-to-date eCommerce website building platform, Volusion provides its customers with advanced marketing tools, allowing them to build SEO-friendly sites, to promote and sell their products via retail and social media networks, as well as to stay in touch with their customers. However, if you are only a novice in the field of online commerce, you might find their price tags a bit hefty.
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Do you charge transaction fees?
is there an app so I can edit my site on my phone?
Can I sell gift cards on my Volusion site?