Volusion Review

Every online store owner wants their eCommerce platform to be easy to use and packed with a ton of features. Volusion delivers exactly that and so much more. They have a ton of useful features, including the ability to manage your product line, a vast suite of security features, tons of customer retention options, and more. What makes all these features so amazing is not only their excellent performance but also the fact that you can easily integrate them into your site even if you have no coding experience. Volusion delivers an incredibly easy-to-use platform for beginners with simple usability in the backend and walkthrough tutorials for most of their main features. Along with making it easy for you to manage your online store, they also help you reach potential customers by making SEO simple. It allows you to easily send out newsletters by making it simple to create discounts and so much more.

Ease of Use

Volusion excels when it comes to usability. Their backend uses very colorful and easy-to-understand icons, making it simple for new merchants to find their way around. You can quickly learn all of the basics even if you’ve never built a website in the past. Large screens appear when you first start to guide you through every step of the way. Plus, their “Get Started” section allows you to easily know which steps to take to launch your online store. Whether you want to manage products, find a customer’s order or even fulfill new orders, Volusion makes everything a breeze.

Functionality

Whether you’re launching a new store from scratch or migrating an existing online store into the Volusion platform, you’ll find all of the features you need to launch or expand your business. Responsive themes, strong SEO tools, secure checkouts, various shipping options, and a barcode generator are just a few of the great features available at Volusion. You will easily manage your products, track inventory, manage customer reviews, manage returns, and so much more. When it comes to similar platforms, Volusion is right on par and even has a few features that their competitors don’t have.

After setting up your theme, you may find that you’re missing out on a few features. This can usually be remedied by using plugins or apps. Plugins allow you to transform your basic website into a professional eCommerce store that feels like it’s a major league business. However, the apps at Volusion lack in all areas, from high pricing all the way to poor performance. There aren’t very many apps to choose from to begin with - just about 70 apps in total. The apps they do have including forums, live chat tools, payment gateways, popup creators, autoresponders, and more. We tested a few of them and found these apps to be much less powerful than we experience on other website builders like Volusion. Most of the apps came with a hefty price tag to make matters worse, with some being as expensive as $50 per month. If you’re looking for a basic online store, Volusion will deliver, but if you’re expecting a ton of perks at an affordable price range, you’ll be out of luck.

Choosing a website builder that offers superior themes is crucial if you want your business to succeed. The theme will become the backbone of your online store, so it’s important that it looks great and has excellent performance. Volusion offers about a dozen free themes and just over 30 premium themes. This is on the low side when compared to similar eCommerce platforms and is actually slightly below average. However, they make up for their small selection by having great themes that look good and function properly. It’s also important to note that each theme can be fully customized, so while the selection may seem small, two themes on two different stores can actually look very different from one another. The premium themes are around $180, which is a little more than most eCommerce platforms, with the average price on other website builders is roughly $140. Nonetheless, you can expect good quality themes and tons of customizable features, allowing you to make it your own easily.

While Volusion offers excellent uptime and few incidents, they don’t quite pan out when it comes to speed. Some optimizations will definitely be required to benefit from a fast online store. Other eCommerce platforms similar to Volusion offer superior speed optimizations out of the box, resulting in better savings. However, when it comes to uptime, Volusion is above average with a nearly perfect score. The same can be said about their incident frequency. Only one major service outage was detected in the past month - some of Volusion’s competitors had as many as 10. Speed is something you can optimize, but you can’t do anything about uptime, so Volusion remains a solid option when searching for a reliable eCommerce platform on the internet.

Uptime

Having an excellent uptime score means your website won’t go down so often. This is crucial for someone trying to run an online business. For example, imagine that you’ve got someone with a bunch of your items in their shopping cart, and just as they arrive to pay for those items, your online store crashes. This could result in a huge loss of sales. Fortunately, Volusion delivers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which is slightly above the industry average. In fact, this means that Volusion websites are implausible to go offline, so you can rest assured that your online store is going to be there when your customers need it.

Incident Frequency

Like uptime, you want to be sure that an eCommerce platform isn’t constantly running into issues. Our incident frequency score allows you to determine how often an eCommerce platform runs into problems, and Volusion scored fairly well with a slightly above average rating. During the past month, they only had to deal with 8 major incidents. These included issues with the PayPal checkout system, email issues such as the inability to log into the webmail area, and some admin slowness, which caused the Volusion backend to run a little slower than usual. Only one outage incident occurred over the past month, which caused some stores to be down for a short while.

Speed

The speed of your website is going to affect sales way more than you may imagine. Unfortunately, new eCommerce owners often overlook the speed of their websites. Still, it can easily make the difference between adding items to their cart and someone actually going through with purchasing the products. Unfortunately, Volusion doesn’t offer the best loading times in the industry. In fact, we found them to be slightly below average. We tested a bunch of websites using the Volusion platform and found that they lacked certain optimizations. This included too many HTTP requests, no expiring headers, a lack of cookie-free domains, and no usage of content delivery networks (CDN). However, experienced web admins should easily be able to resolve these issues.

Volusion provides an excellent support team via various support channels, so you can rest assured that your website will always be up and running smoothly. Their super-fast live chat team can quickly handle small issues. You’ll get connected with an agent within minutes, and they can usually handle most of your basic inquiries. If time is of the essence, or even if you prefer talking to a tech expert directly on the phone, they have telephone support that’s available 24/7. However, it’s not available for their cheapest pricing plan, so if you plan on relying heavily on phone support, you’ll want to consider one of their pricier plans. Overall, the tech support at Volusion is rather friendly and provides excellent answers to help you resolve the issues at hand.

Support Availability

Customer support is vital to the success of any business, but when it comes to eCommerce, it becomes even more important. Websites break, and when they do, you want to be sure that there’s a tech team by your side ready to get you out of a jam. Fortunately, Volusion has an incredibly active support team that can be reached via phone and live chat 24/7. The 24/7 availability is a huge plus because similar platforms like Volusion that we tested only offered support during business hours. However, we noticed that they don’t seem to offer any email support. This shouldn’t be much of an issue since you have a live chat available as an alternative.

Speed of Response

You’ll always want to enjoy short waiting times when contacting the support team, and Volusion delivers. Every attempt we made to contact their support team resulted in short waiting times that only took a matter of minutes. However, online reviews show mixed opinions, with some people stating that they dealt with long waiting periods. This could be due to those people calling during rush periods such as the holidays. The lack of an email support team will definitely cause more people to connect via live chat, but our tests are always connected to an agent in under 15 to 20 minutes. This is about average and is very comparable to other similar eCommerce platforms online.

Friendliness & Helpfulness

The Volusion support staff is very capable of dealing with basic inquiries. They are polite and usually rather friendly, which also makes contacting them more enjoyable. However, when dealing with more technical issues, Volusion doesn’t always deliver. In fact, many user reviews online show that calling after 5 pm results in poor technical support and having to deal with agents who know basically nothing about the platform. Technical issues will usually get escalated for them to be handled by a more qualified staff member. Overall, Volusion is good at answering simple questions but doesn’t expect immediate results for more complicated issues.

Telephone Support

Telephone support is always necessary when running an online business because there will be times when you’ll need immediate support. Nothing compares to actually walking through your issues vocally with an expert on the phone. Volusion offers excellent phone support with 24/7 availability. They even have local phone numbers for the USA, Australia, and the UK. However, one downside to the phone support available at Volusion is that it’s not available for the lowest pricing plan. So if you’re only running a small online business, you will have to live without phone support.

Live Chat Support

Live chat is one of the strongest support channels available at Volusion. You would expect that the live chat agents would be backed up with additional inquiries without email support, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Every time we attempted to contact them, they responded quickly, and they always provided quick answers to our problems. Of course, live chat is never meant for large issues, so don’t expect to solve highly technical problems via this support channel, but if you have simple questions or small problems with your site, live chat should handle the issues without a problem.

When you know exactly what you’ll be paying, running a business seems much simpler. However, Volusion doesn’t always make their fees simple to understand. For instance, they hide their transaction fees by listing them as nonexistent, but they charge you for selling more products and having higher sales volume, which is basically the same thing. Another reason we aren’t entirely satisfied with Volusion’s pricing structure because they don’t offer any free plan. Most of the similar eCommerce platforms allow users to benefit from a free version with limited features, but Volusion does things differently - they offer a free trial.

Plans Pricing

Pricing plans at Volusion are pretty much average and on par with most of their competitors. However, they don’t offer a free plan, which is rare in the eCommerce platforms industry. Most of the similar platforms to Volusion offer free websites with limited features, but Volusion only offers a 14-day free trial. Their cheapest plan is “Personal”, which allows you to list 100 products and lacks phone support. The following plan is “Professional”, which adds phone support and ups the product limit to 5,000. Their largest pricing plan is “Business”, and this one allows you to list an unlimited amount of products, you get priority support and a dedicated success team. You can also choose to contact them directly to come up with a custom plan.

Transaction Fees

One of the fees that many merchants fear the most is transaction fees. To new merchants with little experience, these small fees seem harmless, but as your business grows and you sell more products, transaction fees really start to take a toll on your profits. However, eCommerce platforms that make their transaction fees clear and easy to understand really make it simple for you to know what to expect. This isn’t the case with Volusion. In fact, they state that they have no transaction fees. This isn’t entirely true - instead of charging you transaction fees, they have you upgrade your pricing plan once you start selling too much product. They place limitations on the sales amount and amount of product you can sell, causing you to upgrade your plan and pay more as you sell more. This just confuses and makes it difficult to understand how much you pay for transactions clearly.

Other Fees

Volusion charges you more as you increase your sales. With their sales limit of $50,000 per year and their product limit of 100, the Personal plan quickly becomes too little for most growing businesses. As your sales volume raises and the number of products you hold increases, you’ll need to look into much more expensive pricing plans. Only their most expensive pricing plan allows you to sell an unlimited amount of products. So even if you have small sales, if you need to list thousands of products in your online store, you won’t have any choice but to pay for their expensive plans.

Volusion is an eCommerce platform that was created by Kevin Sproles when he was just 16 years old. The company founded under the same name in 1999 was initially a web design agency, but it merged into an eCommerce solution for business in 2002. They disrupted the industry by offering free trials, which had never been seen before in the eCommerce industry.

In 2010, Kevin Sproles stepped down from his role as CEO to start a family. However, he returned to his CEO position in 2016, where he remains to this day. Volusion is a fast-growing eCommerce solution that allows individuals with no coding skills to build gorgeous websites that look and feel professional. They provide over 30,000 merchants worldwide, and more than 185 million orders have been placed on Volusion stores generating over $28 billion in sales.

While Volusion has a strong focus on ease of use, they also offer great functionality for advanced coders. Users can easily customize their Volusion websites with or without coding, allowing for a ton of freedom and customizability. However, their themes are high quality right out of the box. The themes are Volusion fully responsive. You can easily set up product pages, display related products, manage your inventory, set up shipping costs according to your warehouse’s location, and much more.

Whether you’re drop shipping, selling white-label products, or even handling your very own creations, Volusion makes it simple for you to get your products in front of tons of potential buyers. Their powerful SEO tools allow you to manage all of the metadata with ease. You can send out newsletters with just a few clicks, prevent certain pages from being indexed with their easy-to-edit robots.txt file, and easily manage your sitemap.xml file right from the backend. Volusion’s goal is to simplify every single process so you can focus on what matters, selling products. Plus, Volusion even makes it simple for you to expand your reach by making it easy to sell on third-party platforms, including eBay, Amazon, Facebook, and more.

Volusion is one of the great website builder platforms when you need a simple to use eCommerce solution. They allow you to setup an online store within minutes and with their helpful on-screen tutorials, you’ll be able to easily launch your store even if you know nothing about websites. Volusion offers excellent 24/7 support via phone and live chat, but their lack of email support is a little odd for such a large company. Fortunately, they provide a ton of useful features and their themes are decent. Website loading speed isn’t quite on-par with the competition and neither are their plugins, but most small merchants shouldn’t find this to be much of a problem. The lack of a free version prevents you from being able to launch a tiny online store without having to spend a dime, but free plans are often not enough either way, so this isn’t much of an issue either. Overall, Volusion is a solid eCommerce platform, but their competitors do offer superior perks in some areas such as speed optimization and third-party plugins.