Volusion Review
Detailed Reviews
Volusion was founded in 1999. A one man operation initially, Kevin Sproles developed the service in his bedroom. The company is headquartered in Texas and now has over 400 employees and has acquired over $150 million in funding with the most recent round just recently in January 2015. The company is also planning for an IPO very soon.
Core Features
At first glance, Volusion does not seem to offer anything that makes it stands out from its competitors. For the most part, this is true. However, there are a few features provided that you find useful, which gives it a major competitive advantage.
Volusion has over 100+ themes to choose from, which includes premium themes, which may seem a little pricey. In addition, their custom theme building service is exorbitant to say the least with prices up to $7000.
Volusion comes to integration and compatibility with a variety of shopping carts and other popular services you will require to run an e-commerce website effectively. Ample information about products can be included with any number of videos and pictures.
Adding Products and Management
The app allows creating a small store of 80 products and even a big store with an unlimited inventory. Adding content to the portal is also quick and simple. With the freedom of unlimited content, you can add articles with different sections by using the editing tools.
When it comes to managing your online storefront, you can monitor the whole inventory, receive low inventory alerts, and generate reports to explore statistics for progress. Interestingly, the software also allows building custom reports for viewing statistics regarding a few site aspects.
Deal of the Day
This simple yet highly effective feature allows you to offer special offers and display a “deal of the day” in a prominent location of your website to boost sales and keep your customers coming back for more offers. You can also promote these offers via your email marketing campaigns to entice more sales revenue.
Marketing
Volusion has also bundled some useful marketing features to help turbo charge your initial and overall stages of running your shopping cart. Volusion has incorporated key on-page SEO elements, including an auto-generated sitemap and automatic completion of recommended meta tags by Google giving you the best shot at gaining high organic rankings.
In addition, you can easily integrate with online brands that have an audience or community such as Ebay and Amazon. To add a sense of community to your website, you can include a rating system as well as reviews allowing your users to voice their opinion.
Design
Volusion tends to continually stress the importance and their focus on design yet still somehow falls short in terms of what they have to offer. Volusion offers over a 100 themes, but the better options will cost you quite a bit. The free options, while they do their job may be considered mediocre to put it lightly.
A major loophole is the absence of a themed mobile version. Volusion offers a very basic mobile version. Additionally, the mobile version does not have its own check out page. So if a user decides to make a purchase via mobile, you will be redirected to the desktop version which is certainly a red flag which you may need to reconsider.
Mobile purchases have exponentially grown and in some industries has surpassed purchases from a personal computer.
Affiliate Marketing System
This is a powerful feature that gives little to no prominence by Volusion. With Volusion, you can create your own affiliate program and give commission to partners to promote your products. With the proper connections, you should be able to have a virtual sales team that promoted your products! While you do lose out on revenue, it will certainly keep your sales growing.
Abandoned Shopping Cart Report
Volusion offers all the useful metrics you will need to grow your shopping cart business and get an idea of what areas need to be addressed, but one metric that is particularly unique and can be put to good use is details of abandoned shopping cart. A large amount of revenue leaks out when customers fill in their details and then do not go through with the purchase at the last moment and with this report you have the opportunity to identify loopholes and patterns and act accordingly.
Payment Features
There are around 30 payment gateways to quickly integrate Volusion platform for payment procession. There is also an option to choose in-house processing offered by them. Apart from this it offers advanced tax features such as tax by zip code and tax-exempt calculations. The app facilitates even one-page checkout format, a feature that many other shopping carts do not offer.
Security
In case of security, the software gets the highest score. The app includes PCI and CISP protection for securing credit cards, IP-block feature for aggressive customers, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption, multiple administrator logins, members-only site capabilities, automatic crash protection, fraud score to identify fraudulents, and CAPTCHA-like validation.
Volusion offers their own SSL certificate with SHA-2, 256-bit encryption. They also resell SSL from other leading players like Thawte, Norton and GeoTrust. However, all these certificates are costly compared to what you can find for very cheaper rates like $10-50 on dedicated SSL retailers.
Social Commerce
Volusion offers a social store builder tool that allows showing products on Facebook. You can even post information directly to social sites from the site and demo your items on YouTube. The tool allows various advanced features like rewarding users for liking their product on social store.
Apart from selling on Facebook it also allows pushing products to leading online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. Although these features are unlocked for higher priced plans only.
Conclusion
Volusion is one of the better known brands in the online shopping cart industry that is worth short listing considering their competitive features and pricing.