Volusion

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.

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.

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.