Volusion Review: How Good Is the Ecommerce Software?

Opening an online store isn't rocket science! All you need is a product since everything else is taken care of by convenient ecommerce platforms that don't require a lick of programming or web design knowledge.

Volusion promises "Ecommerce for everyone", however, is the software as a service (SaaS) store builder as universally applicable as its marketing materials claim?

Volusion* is a cloud-based ecommerce platform from Texas that has been around since 1999. It offers access to all of the features needed to create and manage a professional online store - from a site builder to business tools. In this review, we'll explore how well these work together, as well as how easy it makes the store-building process for both beginners and more advanced users.

Registering with Volusion is fairly straightforward. The service offers a free 14-day trial, making it possible to test the service for two weeks without inputting your payment data. You'll only need to enter your name, email address, and location (country) as well as a password. After that, you'll be in Volusion's dashboard.

The clearly arranged dashboard is different than what most of the other services we reviewed offer since Volusion combines the site builder and shop management interfaces in one screen.

The storefront dashboard provides a live preview of your online store. Using the sidebar menu, you can work through most aspects of creating your shop: Select a template, specify its colors and fonts, upload your logo, add some products, change texts, and arrange the main menu.

Of course, you can't do everything here, but basic customization is possible. Some texts can be edited directly in the live preview, whereas others are only modifiable in the admin area.

Your storefront dashboard serves as a simplified site builder for designing and organizing your store. All other settings and features are spread throughout the menu.

We found Volusion easy to use, even if we liked its user interface less the more we used it. Specifically, it complicates the process of modifying your store's design, but more on that in the fourth section. Some content can be edited directly in the site builder, whereas other aspects can only be altered in the slightly-confusing submenus, which don't always make sense.

You'll manage your goods in the Inventory area by clicking on Products. To add a new item to your store, click on Add Product, and then name it, give it an SKU, a price, a description, and a weight. Under Image Management, you can add pictures of the product, however, these need to be individually uploaded.

More features can be found in the Advanced Info area. These include the ability to edit SEO settings, like the product's URL and meta tags, as well as to indicate sales tax or delivery surcharges.

You can further arrange your products using categories and options. In Volusion, categories are little more than menus and submenus that you'll manage and create through Inventory > Categories or directly in the product menu. Each product can be assigned to a specific category to display in the correct submenu.

Under Options, you can create variations of your products, which include categories (such as "size") and various options ("S", "M", "L", etc.).

After you've created product variants, you'll find some additional fields in the product menu. You can link specific product images to individual options in the Color Swatches section. With Inventory Control Grid, it's possible to set the quantity available, price, and SKU for each variant.

Product management is fairly straightforward, even though we started to notice that Volusion overcomplicated some steps. For example, we weren't able to change how product options are arranged in the product menu. Sizes were automatically ordered alphabetically ("L", "M," "S", "XL", "XS") which doesn't make any sense. To rectify this, we had to go into Inventory > Options and set a Display Order for each option in the submenu.

In general, the platform hides many settings and options in submenus that have little connection to the feature. The end result is that creating and managing a shop is far less intuitive than it could be.

Although perhaps not important to a largely American audience, during testing, Volusion had some difficulties displaying non-English characters. For anyone thinking of designing an online store in a language other than English, this might cause unforeseen issues.

Selling digital products is only possible with a fairly complicated workaround. Since a weight must be input for each product, you'll need to set this to 0 (so that your customers aren't charged an automatic delivery surcharge). Then, go to Advanced Info > Misc and select Download Filename. Here, you can upload a file (10 MB max). For larger files, you'll need to use an FTP account.

Customers who purchase a digital article will receive immediate access to it, so long as you've selected the options Automatic Authorize and Capture or Automatic Authorize, Manual Capture under payment settings.

Digital product sales are possible with Volusion, however, other ecommerce platforms have made this much easier with more straightforward solutions.

Volusion definitely covers the most important aspects of creating an online store, however, some of these are more complicated than they need to be. Adding to this were the difficulties we encountered with special characters, which could come as a nasty surprise to anyone planning to set up a store in a language other than English.

Volusion's tools for designing your online store's facade can be found under Design. You'll be given a choice of 45 Templates, of which 11 were free at the time of testing. It's also possible to upload your logo.

Advanced design settings can be found in the Style Editor, which is actually a site builder. These include the ability to edit your store's color scheme and fonts. Themes are designed for specific color combinations, but you can change these in the Custom Styles area.

Should you want complete design freedom, you can take a look at the Advanced CSS Editor.

Adding new content blocks should be possible in any site or store builder. Volusion allows this, but, you'll have to dig a bit to find out how. On the right corner of the screen, you'll see a small blue box with a white arrow. Click on this, and a menu will fold out, which includes content blocks that can be dragged and dropped onto your site.

In addition to simple text blocks, you can also add ready-made elements such as testimonials, maps, or portfolios. The number of available elements is not as impressive as those of other ecommerce platforms.

Unfortunately, we again encountered a few issues: We were unable to open the content block menu in the storefront dashboard and add new content to our site. In the style editor, the blue box disappeared shortly after opening the site. When contacting support, they told us that the blue box isn't designed for the style editor, so, why does it appear at all?

We also needed to get used to how Volusion handles website content. Text or other content is partly edited directly in the live preview of the style editor, but also, if appearing on multiple pages, under Design > Site Content and Design > Page Text.

In the first area, you'll find Articles, which cannot be directly modified in the editor. These include longer texts like Terms & Conditions, but also shorter ones for shopping carts or wish lists. The texts found under the Articles heading are basically the official ones for your store. Other, shorter page texts (buttons, address fields, etc.) can be found under Page Text.

So far as content management is concerned, owing to the unclear structure of the menus and lists, Volusion doesn't make a particularly strong showing. In this aspect, Volusion is more geared towards experienced website operators, who aren't fazed by this lack of intuitive use. Set alongside more streamlined store-building systems, Volusion could definitely overwhelm beginners.

Navigation menus can be modified in two places: Through Inventory > Categories it's possible to add new menus and submenus, as we've described above. You can also easily adjust the arrangement of menu items and subordinate them to one another. Additional changes, relating to the appearance of your menus are accomplished in Design > Navigation Menu. There you can specify how many drop-down levels your menus should have.

Maybe we're accustomed to other website builders, but, designing and editing content with Volusion is too much hassle for our tastes. We liked the templates, and feel that anyone who's satisfied with them, won't have difficulty using the platform.

However, for users who are creating their first online store, or looking for a more intuitive ecommerce platform, there are definitely better solutions out there. Compounding this, the degree of design freedom afforded users lacking programming know-how is extremely limited.

Volusion's payment options are located under Settings > Payment. There, you'll be given a choice between several payment gateways, including Volusion's own "Merchant Services". Other options include Stripe and Skrill, and more that can be manually configured. In addition to credit cards, you can also accept payments through PayPal, bank transfers, or even cash.

Delivery settings can be configured under Settings > Shipping. Here, you can select flat-rate shipping for different regions, or link costs to a product's weight or price. The Live Rates feature is a nice touch, allowing you to add services like DHL, UPS, or FedEx to calculate delivery costs in real time.

In the Dashboard, you can view a number of important statistics, as well as tutorials, and create contact options and to-do lists. There are separate order, customer, inventory, marketing, design, report, and settings areas. The last of these is where you'll find tax settings that are limited to the US market. It is possible to add different tax regions (for example, the EU) and charge prices that include (or exclude) VAT.

Received orders can be viewed under Orders > Process Orders. Orders are listed chronologically and can be searched or filtered according to their status or other criteria.

Clicking on an order number opens a detailed menu, containing lots of additional information. Along with the delivery and invoice address, Volusion also provides you with a Fraud Score, that will alert you to suspicious orders. By comparing common (known) methods of fraud, the provider estimates each order's risk.

Multi-channel sales are also possible in Volusion. You can easily link Amazon, eBay, Google, or Facebook, and manage your inventory on these platforms through Volusion's admin console. This feature is limited to "Business" package subscribers, however.

You can also use Volusion to sell at POS, with support for UPC barcode scanners and card readers offered. Through Orders > Point of Sale it's possible to specify whether a payment was made by cash or card and then accept the order.

If you're a drop shipper, Volusion has got your back. To set this up, simply input your vendor under Inventory > Vendors. You can then create and set guidelines for your products in the product menus, which will be relayed to your vendor.

Volusion is not great for multiple language localizations: You can translate your store into another language, however, it isn't possible to create multiple localizations of a single store. Additional currencies can be added under Settings > Currency, however, you'll need to input a snippet of HTML code to allow your store to display prices in multiple currencies.

For selling, Volusion flexes its muscles, showing that its ecommerce platform can be enjoyable and straightforward to use once you've built a store and filled it with products. We're positive that drop shippers and multi-channel sellers will like the service's capabilities.

In order to help get the most out of your online shop, Volusion offers a lot of marketing support. Many coupon and discount options are provided, visible under Marketing > Coupons/Discounts. Codes for general usage or specific campaigns can be offered.

In total, the service provides five types of discounts: Fixed-sum or percentual, either for a single product, or an entire order, and free shipping. You're able to limit these to specific items or even groups of items. Under Advanced Info, you can set validity periods for each sale, or minimum/maximum amounts for orders or quantities.

The Deal of the Day feature is also worth mentioning. This allows you to select a product (or products) that will be promoted for a day on your store's homepage and offered at a special price. In order for the deal to be displayed, you'll need to click on the three dots at the top right of the menu, and then on Deal of the Day Settings and select Enable Deal of the Day as well as specify the product.

Volusion also offers MyRewards, an integrated loyalty platform that rewards your customers with points. Gift certificates can also be issued, however, this takes a bit of additional effort to set up.

If you're confident in your products and the ordering process, you can enable customer reviews. Under Customers > Customer Reviews it's possible to see what they write, and also delete ratings that don't appear relevant or accurate. A content filter can be added to reviews so that those which use inappropriate language are automatically flagged for admin review prior to publication.

Volusion includes basic email marketing. You'll create campaigns under Marketing > Newsletters, which can then be sent to all your customers or subscribers, or only specific groups. It's possible to gauge the effectiveness of these through tracking reports.

The number of newsletters you can send depends on your subscription package:

Extensive SEO settings are located under Marketing > SEO. These include tags, titles, meta tag descriptions, and keywords for subpages and areas of your website with unique content. Unfortunately, it isn't possible to create user-defined URLs for subpages, however, you can do this for some product pages in the respective product menu. There, you'll find advanced SEO options in the Search Engine Optimization tab under Advanced Info.

Volusion displays all of the most important statistics in the dashboard, including your Top 5 products and categories, sales figures for specific periods of time, and purchase trends. Additional statistics can be found in the Reports area, and if that's not enough, you can create custom reports. Volusion definitely impresses with its wide array of options, however, other ecommerce platforms present these even more clearly.

Google Analytics and other tracking snippets like Facebook Pixel can be integrated, however, this is a bit more difficult to do than with other ecommerce platforms from our sample. You'll need to copy some Javascript Code to that of the template you're using under Design > File Editor.

After a slightly shaky start, Volusion makes up some ground in the later stages of our review, impressing and demonstrating its versatility in marketing and analytics. Our only issue is that other providers make such tools and features slightly more intuitive, however, this doesn't detract too much from what Volusion offers.

Volusion's help center contains around 600 articles, divided into categories like "Get Started", "Grow Your Business", or "Design Your Website". During our review, it was necessary to consult these quite frequently, and they do a good job of explaining pretty much everything. Our only issue is that all of the links should be reviewed since a good number of them have migrated, or following updates to Volusion, the features they explain no longer exist.

It's possible to directly contact Volusion's support by clicking on the chat symbol in the lower right corner of the screen or through Get Help > Message Us in the upper menu. Even though this opens a chat window, don't get your hopes up: Volusion's ticket system only looks like a live chat.

Replies will show in the chat window, and be sent to the email account you used to register. We waited around half an hour for a response, which was friendly and informative. After receiving the first response with an answer, the support staffer followed up a bit later with additional information.

Hotline support is available starting with the Professional package, whereas Business subscribers can take advantage of the service's VIP support.

Volusion offers four different subscription packages: Personal, Professional, Business, and Prime. The differences in these mostly relate to the gross value of your products: $50k, $100k, and $500k, with Prime for everything exceeding that amount. It's possible to pay your subscription either on a monthly or yearly basis, with the latter including a 10% discount.

Each package provides unlimited bandwidth, however, different product limits (100, 5,000, or unlimited, for the two most-expensive packages), varying numbers of user accounts (1, 5, 15, unlimited), or the number of emails that you can send per month using the integrated email marketing tool (0, 200, 1,000, or 2,000).

Features are linked to your subscription package: Product reviews, imports and exports, uncompleted purchase reports, and telephone orders are all available starting with the Professional package. If you're looking for eBay and Amazon integrations, API access, the deal of the day, a loyalty program, advanced reports, live calculation of shipping costs, or additional payment gateways, you'll need to book either a Business or Prime subscription.

Volusion doesn't charge transaction fees, however, the different payment gateways do. The platform's payment gateway will take 2.15% if you use it.

An overview of Volusion's rates can be found here:

The table below shows the annual price for a subscription from each of our sample's providers that includes at least 100 products.

It's hard to give a simple evaluation of Volusion since its performance was so inconsistent during testing. In terms of things like ease of use, we were disappointed. We're fairly certain that the confusing submenus will be nearly impossible for beginners to make sense of. For our taste, certain actions or processes that are easy to do with other ecommerce platforms are unnecessarily complicated in Volusion, requiring odd workarounds.

At the same time, there are some aspects of Volusion that impressed us: Its versatility and numerous selling options, and support for multi-channel sales and dropshipping. The service is also good in terms of marketing options, ranging from the deal of the day to integrated newsletters and emails.

All in all, if you want to sell online, you can rely on Volusion. With that said, you'll need to be able to come to terms with how the service is structured and operates, which for beginners, could be a challenge.

We thoroughly reviewed Volusion, but below, have compiled evaluations from reputable sources to help you in making your decision.

Our biggest critique of Volusion was its user-friendliness. If you're looking for easy-to-use alternatives that offer a wide selection of sales, marketing, and analytic features, Wix and Shopify are worth taking a closer look at.

A selection of popular alternatives to Volusion can be found here: