Volusion Website Builder Review

What is Volusion? Developed by Sproles in 1999, Volusion appears to be one of the veterans among eCommerce software companies. Up till now, the company has led the market, providing numerous features in one solution merchants look for worldwide. It has hosted around 50k online stores and helped generate around $18 billion! Volusion still runs strong, with thousands of users trying the service daily.

Whether planning to set up a small or a big business, Volusion can suit you perfectly. It enables people to set up virtual stores and sell physical or digital products without any tech knowledge or experience! The software includes advanced shopping cart software, social media integration, and several other perks in its packages. Let us have an in-depth look at the overall Volusion functionality.

Great for eCommerce projects. Fits small and medium business needs. Good for non-technicians and pros.

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Pros and Cons

Volusion features one of the best tailor-made eCommerce solutions to help a merchant revolutionize their brick-and-mortar business by creating an effective virtual presence. Volusion has become a favorite for millions of vendors. And yet, it has certain features that you may find inconvenient as an online merchant. See the main pros and cons of the solution to know for sure if it’s the platform you are looking for.

Volusion Setup

Setting up a website with Volusion is easy even for non-techie people, thanks to the user-friendly dashboard, flexible editor, high functionality, and practical templates. After creating an account (the company offers a 14-day trial period to test the service without submitting credit card information), you can access the dashboard. Just remember to complete the registration form correctly.

After creating your account, launch the Site Designer. Your next step will be catching clients’ eyes with a correctly chosen theme. Volusion has a generous selection of themes to meet any business niche. Remember that a professional-looking site will invite more customers. You can either customize the site to your liking or entrust the task to the professional team of Volusion. The company features an in-house digital agency Studio which offers crafting a unique, individual design thoroughly tailored to a client’s requirements and help scale the business.

Not less important is the setup of your company’s logo. The latter will demonstrate your store’s identity from the best slide. Once you have styled your site, you can already start adding products. Note that the first impression a customer gets is from the shop images. Volusion allows adding multiple photos for every product, so make use of this feature. Write a description, and connect to secure payment gateways (the available options are Stripe, PayPal, and the brand Volusion Payments). You can sync your social accounts to your Volusion site to boost your sales. If you don’t have time for this or are unsure how to make the most of the business, the company suggests entrusting the management of your accounts to their social media experts.

Volusion introduces an arranged dashboard that doesn’t look like any industry standard. The company combines the site builder and the subordinate shop management in one screen, and this looks even more organic than the dashboards of other eCommerce platforms with split screens.

The setup and management processes of a Volusion site are easy-to-implement. More about the design processes a bit later.

Volusion Store Management

Volusion has made tracking and managing an online store inventory easy. The system displays the status of every product and tracks the stock reorder quantity levels to deliver accurate quantity verification. Choosing Volusion, a virtual merchant receives unlimited storage capacity for submitting thorough product descriptions and adding the best images, videos, etc.

Let us break down all the essential functions of the inventory management system.

Warehouses

To improve your inventory management, Volusion allows connecting warehouses, assigning products, and calculating shipping rates. Also, create purchase orders automatically to restock already sold products, thus streamlining the inventory management process.

Adding and Organizing Products

Managing the product line in a Volusion store is done through the Inventory section. For instance, click +Add to include a new product in the store. The editing process for all products is the same – you give it an SKU, state the price, add the description, and input the product’s weight. Process the Products, and you will have many options at your disposal.

The Image Management tool will let you add as many images per product as you need. However, you can’t do it in bulk. The section Advances Info is a broad one with many extra tools to enhance the presentation of a virtual store. From here, you can edit SEO settings (including meta tags, products’ URLs, etc.) and add information about delivery charges, sales taxes, etc.

Creating and Selecting a Category

There are two ways to further segment your store products into categories and options. Since categories are much more than simply menus or submenus in Volusion, you can set them through the Categories in the Inventory section or straight in the product menu. You can assign every product to a certain category so that it appears in the right submenu. Use the Edit button and follow the system’s directions to create a new category.

The section Options is the key to creating variations of products – categories (like color, size, etc.) and different options. After using the tool to create variations for your products, get some additional fields in the product menu.

Volusion eCommerce Functionality

Volusion has been created as an all-in-one eCommerce platform – it has everything an online merchant needs to set up and run a virtual store effectively. It can handle just about handling, including checkout, order management, and payment processing. Furthermore, the platform has some premium marketing features to enhance the business.

Find more information on the most standout and useful eCommerce features here.

Built-in Marketing Tools

To remain competitive and attract even more customers to your shop, Volusion suggests using some in-built marketing tools. The platform has a variety of them. Particularly:

• Social Media Networks: The social media center of Volusion integrates with social media accounts automatically to promote digital products and the store’s content. By integrating a Facebook account, for instance, you can share content on the account right from your Admin area through the Volusion social media center.
• Facebook Store: Volusion enables its users to sell on Facebook directly through their Facebook store. Furthermore, you can customize your online store design to match that of your Facebook account.
• Google Customer Reviews: If you aim to boost and scale your eCommerce business, Volusion has made it possible to collect customer reviews from Google. This way, you can learn your client’s pain points and improve your business.
• Sell on Google: Google features a merchant account to get your products in front of Google users and sell them through PPC ads. And Volusion gives you the right to create a Google merchant account.
• Sell on eBay: Another perk by Volusion is the opportunity to sell on eBay – a platform with over a hundred million users. The inventory management of both the Volusion and eBay stores will be fulfilled from the same Volusion admin page.
• Coupons and Discounts: If you wish to reward your customers with discounts or coupons, Volusion gives you that opportunity. Add, edit, and trigger any discounts for your clients.
• Newsletters: This feature enables users to create and automatically send email newsletters from the Admin Area. Such sort of email marketing drives repeat purchases.
• Deal of the Day: One of the most effective marketing tactics to increase your sales is adding the Deal of the Day, thus making your regular customers visit the store every day to grab the unique opportunity of a discounted product.
• My Rewards: Another useful tool by Volusion is the configuration of My Rewards system. This presumes rewarding your customers for every dollar they spend on your site with a possibility to exchange the collected reward points to discounts or gifts.
• SEO: Volusion provides its users with multiple SEO tools, such as meta tags for every page, editing of robot.txt files, sitemap XML control, customizable 404 error pages, prevention of duplicate content with canonical links, etc.
• Gift Cards/Certificates: Generate gift cards to sell right on your shop or social media account, manage the existing cards, accept them at checkout, etc., with Volusion.
• In-stock Requests: You can automatically let your customers know when any of your out-of-stock products become available again with the In-Stock Requests feature.

Payment Methods

The eCommerce solution introduces a series of payment processing options to its users. The company also cooperates with industry-leading credit card processors worldwide to ensure your customers can always find their favorable payment gateway.

However, Volusion recommends setting up a payment gateway through Network Merchants, Authorize.net, and CyberSource to accept credit card payments. Other than this, you can set up wire transfers, Amazon Pay, E-check, Money Order, COD, PayPal, Cash, or the Volusion Merchant Service, the brand payment system.

Analytics and Reports

Volusion stands out with its fantastic dashboard analytics tool. It perfectly demonstrates the performance data from the store. And since you are a store owner, you will get complete access to the integrated analytics tools to get precise data on on-site visits, traffic metrics, abandoned shopping cart rates, traffic metrics, and trending items.

Aside from this, Volusion provides some deeper reports within a specific period, such as product sales within categories, the number of active customers, affiliate stats, search terms, and ROI tracks.

Volusion Drop-Shipping Review

In the store settings of your Volusion account, you can get access to some shipping management options, such as adding labels, handling the shipping rates (both flat and special rates), offering discounts, managing free shipping conditions, etc. Drop shopping at Volusion comes at no extra cost.

Taxes

Tax rates are calculated automatically for every transaction based on the customer’s location, provided that you are a US merchant. Otherwise, the feature won’t be available for you.

Custom Domains

With a custom domain, your site can look more professional. It provides you with more control over analytics tools to track conversion.

Volusion App Store and Integrations

The App store of Volusion is not as diverse as those of other popular eCommerce solutions such as BigCommerce or Shopify. However, there are around 80 options available to enhance the performance of a virtual store. Some of the most popular tools are PayPal Express for increasing conversions, ShipStation for creating automated shipping labels, Facebook Chat by Power to assist customers through Facebook, etc. Aside from the paid extensions, there are roughly 10 free offers.

Furthermore, Volusion cooperates with other app developers to boost its range of eCommerce solutions, though the in-built options are enough to run a store regardless of the business size. The top-tier tools for drop shipping, email marketing, accounting, etc., include QuickBooks, Mail Chimp, UPS WorldShip, ShipWire, etc.

Volusion Design and Templates

Volusion provides users with many options, perhaps all tools necessary to design an online store’s facade in the section Design. There are roughly 45 templates presented here, 34 of which are paid options and 11 free. Every premium theme comes at the price of $180. Both paid and free templates are feature-specific. If you can’t find one that’s perfectly catered to your specific business niche, you will have to choose a non-industry-focused design. In this, Volusion significantly yields to its rival companies, which have more extensive portfolios.

However, Volusion allows its users to change the chosen template at any time without losing the content, yet. You can mix up your website’s appearance while any integrated content will be automatically restored.

The Theme Style section functions much like a site builder. It combines advanced design settings to edit the color scheme of the page, including the background, primary, secondary, body text, sale price, and link colors.

For especially skillful and experienced users, though, Volusion has the Advanced CSS Editor – a blank canvas to give the user complete design freedom! You can add new content blocks here, ready-made elements such as maps, testimonials, or portfolios, apply any colors, and drop shadows. However, a professional website designer won’t be impressed by the number of available elements, since it’s rather limited.

All configurations are done in the WYSIWYG format. Consequently, no experience or code knowledge is required.

Customer Support

Volusion features an extended help center with several hundred articles divided into categories, such as “Design Your Website,” “Grow Your Business,” etc. And yet, if you want to get in touch with an expert rather than read articles and guidelines, there’s a ticket system. The support email of the company is support@volusion.com. Hit Contact Support and complete the form to send a message. You can as well schedule a call or call the company yourself between 7 am and 10 pm CST (800 646 3517) if you have purchased any Volusion plan except the Personal. On the contact page, find all the available contact forms depending on your membership.

Volusion Pricing and Fees

Volusion suggests trying the service for free for 14 days. You must complete the form with your business details and personal information to use it. The paid plans of Volusion are four:

1. Personal – Priced at $35/mo, you get one staff account, 100 maximum products, and $50K max GMV per year.
2. Professional – At $79/mo, Volusion offers 5,000 maximum products, five staff accounts, $100K max GMV per year, and a series of available tools.
3. Business – The plan costs $299/mo and limits the max GMV per year to $400K and the staff accounts to 15. You can sell unlimited products with this plan.
4. Prime – The price for this plan depends on the GMV. The Prime tier reveals the full potential of Volusion.

Volusion Alternatives and Competitors

Volusion is hands down one of the best eCommerce platforms in the market today. And yet, if you are no longer happy with its services and are looking for an alternative, we could suggest trying Shopify, OpenCart, and WooCommerce.

Shopify is a cloud-based eCommerce platform catered to small or medium size businesses. It offers numerous in-built tools to design, set up, and manage online stores across many sales channels like mobile, web, social media, pop-up shops, and land-based locations. Compared to Volusion, Shopify is easier to set up and do business with and offers more usability.

WooCommerce is an open-source platform that designs web stores for small to big business owners. The company benefits from a robust technical SEO structure, excellent SEO customization, and a huge community. And finally, WooCommerce is free and comes with no hidden costs. You only have to pay for the plugins you want to purchase hosting.

OpenCart is another open-source platform that is much simpler to use than Volusion. It has all the essentials ready to use right out of the box. OpenCart allows for the sale of digital goods, customer editing, and multi-store support. And although Volusion wins over OpenCart in the features category, the open-source platform can be programmed to do anything – much beyond the limits of the closed-hood Volusion!

You may also check our Voulsion head-to-head comparisons with other eCommerce website builders:

Verdict

It is hard to give a precise mark to Volusion. In some areas, when it comes to customizing a store, for instance, it is hard to beat. However, to coders and website developers, Volusion offers to scheme their site from a draft – empty room to work their imagination and skills.

Furthermore, Volusion is versatile and features numerous options for selling goods, multi-channel sales, and robust dropshipping tools.

On the other hand, the pricing of Vousions plans is relatively high. For beginners this may be a challenge. You also need to come to terms with how the service is structured and how it functions to make the most of the platform.

So, Volusion can’t win the title of the best eCommerce solution, but it does the selling well. And if you have little time but want a well-organized store with excellent in-built features, give Volusion a go.