Volusion Review

Pros

• Easy to use
• Free 14-day trial
• Competitive monthly cost

Cons

• Limited features
• Sales caps on plans with automatic plan upgrades
• Transaction fees for most payment gateways

What Is Volusion?

Volusion is cloud-based eCommerce software that relies on a platform called VOLT, a flexible block-based system that allows even novice users to build a functioning store by accessing pre-built themes and customizing content blocks. Is Volusion the right eCommerce solution for you? This Volusion review will help you decide.

Before we dig into Volusion’s features, customer service, user reviews, and more, let’s look at an important piece of Volusion history. While Volusion has been around since 1999, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2020, spent a year restructuring debt, and emerged from bankruptcy in 2021 newly positioned, the company said, for long-term health and focused on platform enhancements.

Should this recent history make you leery of using Volusion for your online store? Keep reading our full Volusion review for all the information you need to make up your mind about this software company.

Volusion Pricing

Although Volusion pricing is competitive, the four service tiers available rely on a model we dislike. Volusion’s subscription levels include caps on a user’s sales volume on a trailing 12-month basis. If your business surpasses the cap on your plan, you’ll be bumped automatically to the next, more expensive tier. (It’s noteworthy that if your business’s sales drop below your current cap, you’ll need to contact Volusion and ask to change plans; it won’t happen automatically.)

Each step-up in pricing does unlock access to more advanced features. And users who pay for an annual subscription will save about 10% off their plan’s cost. A 10% discount is also offered to users who build additional stores with Volusion. You can test Volusion before you lock into a plan by taking advantage of Volusion’s 14-day free trial, with no credit card required. You can cancel at any time, but refunds are not provided.

If you decide to use Volusion to build your online store, you can choose from these subscriptions:

Personal

Volusion’s Personal plan costs $35/month ($31.50/month if paid annually)and includes:

• Up to $50K in annual sales
• One staff account
• 100 products
• Unlimited file storage and bandwidth
• Web hosting with unlimited bandwidth
• Custom domain, SSL certificate, and PCI compliance
• Secure checkout
• Free, responsive themes
• Drag and drop tools
• Inventory management
• SEO tools
• Social media integrations
• Coupons and discounts
• Support via live chat and email

Professional

Volusion’s Professional plan costs $79/month ($71/month if paid annually) and includes everything in the Personal plan, plus these additional features:

• Up to $100K in annual sales
• Five users
• 5,000 products
• Ratings and reviews
• Newsletters
• Import/export
• Abandoned cart reports
• Support via live chat and email

Business

Volusion’s Business plan costs $299/month ($269.10/month if paid annually) and includes everything in the Startup plan, plus these additional features:

• Up to $400K in annual sales
• 15 users
• Unlimited products
• Amazon and eBay integrations
• API access
• Batch order processing
• Customer loyalty plan
• Advanced report builder
• Third-party shipping calculated rates
• Third-party gateways
• Support via live chat, email, and phone

Prime

Volusion’s Prime plan is available at custom pricing based on gross merchandise volume. It includes everything in the Business plan, plus these additional features:

• Unlimited sales
• Unlimited staff accounts
• VIP support
• Client Success Manager to help you strategize
• Discounts on additional Volusion services
• Premiere access to new features

Volusion Features

Volusion features include the basics most small businesses need to create functional online stores. However, many users may find that the software is missing some important advanced features.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the features that are currently available:

Volusion Themes

When we evaluate web design, we look for three things: elegant design templates, usable theme editors, and customization options. Volusion scores highly on the first two but falls a little short on customization.

For starters, Volusion offers 11 themes for free and 34 themes for $180 each. These themes are professionally designed, mobile responsive, attractive, and image-focused. You can click on any theme to access a demo that gives you a feel for it.

Screenshot of Volusion webpage, captured 8/2/2021

Volusion lets you make changes to your design in a few ways. Users with little technical skill can use Volusion’s intuitive Easy Editor tool to make changes with no backend coding required. You can even use the Style Editor to choose from several premade color and font combinations within themes. These tools are easy to use, but they don’t offer a high degree of customization. Those who know their way around HTML and CSS can fully customize their store’s design and functionality.

Types Of Payment Accepted With Volusion

Volusion accepts payments out of the box through its in-house Volusion Payments Powered by Stripe. If you set up your store to use this as your payment gateway, you’ll pay no added transaction fees. If you use an alternative payment gateway, you can expect transaction fees of up of 1.25% on the Personal plan, 0.65% on the Professional plan, 0.35% on the Business plan, and custom percentages on Prime plans.

Additional payment providers are Authorize.net, NMI (including Fort Point Payments), and PayPal. If you choose PayPay, you’ll unlock multiple payment methods, including buy now, pay later options. That’s not a lot of choices as far as payments go, and we’d like to see Volusion add many more payment options.

Volusion’s own payment provider, Volusion Payments, supports payments from local and international customers in 135+ currencies. Wallet payments and buy now, pay later options are said to be “coming soon.”

Selling On Multiple Sales Channels With Volusion

Link your Volusion store to Facebook, eBay, and Amazon, and manage your Facebook store directly from your Volusion admin panel. You can also link your social accounts to your online store and post to Facebook and Twitter directly from your store admin.

Does Volusion Offer Buy Buttons?

Volusion does not appear to offer an option for using buy buttons at this time.

Selling Internationally

If you add international checkout to your store, you’ll be able to fulfill international orders through your Volusion store. Built-in currency tools support sales across the globe.

Volusion Marketing Features

Customers can leave detailed product reviews, which you can manage from your dashboard. You can generate and manage store gift cards, or create discounts with percentages or dollar amounts and set custom start times and durations. Link them to specific products, categories, or your entire store. Or create a Deal of the Day to encourage shoppers to visit often. 

Volusion also offers in-house marketing services, with experts available to help with PPC, SEO, shopping feeds, social media, and more.

Volusion Product Limits

Volusion’s two lower subscription levels come with product limits. On the Personal plan, you can list just 100 products. Upgrade to a Professional plan, and you can list up to 5,000. On the Business and Prime plans, users are allowed unlimited products. Keep in mind that sales are capped on each plan, too (except Prime).

Volusion also allows you to showcase your products with multiple photos, videos, and item descriptions. Use product category pages and subcategories to customize your site. Set custom pricing for product variants. Use the Related Products feature to display items related to previous purchases and encourage customers to buy.

Inventory Management With Volusion

Volusion allows users to generate custom barcodes for products, making inventory management easier. You can use Volusion’s inventory management system to track stock, displaying product status, stock reorder levels, low stock alarms, and quantity verification. You can also create custom codes for vendors to make managing stock easier and more efficient. Tools are included to manage returns and purchase orders. You can set product variant pricing and display related products. Volusion also supports subscription-based selling.

Volusion Shipping Tools

Volusion’s standard checkout page is secure and PCI-certified. A tax calculator is included so that you can calculate current rates. Volusion lets you specify shipping types, require a signature, provide flat-rate options, and set overall shipping rates. You can also set up warehouse locations, assign products to warehouses, and calculate shipping rates.

If you want to sell by dropshipping, you can install Volusion’s Fulfillment Services app from the Integrations tab on their store’s admin panel. That lets you choose a dropship partner and set up order processing. Choose whether to automate order fulfillment or set it to manual, so you can separate dropship items from those you want to fulfill locally. 

Volusion SEO Tools

Volusion’s VOLT software uses mobile-first indexing to improve organic search rankings and draw more shoppers to your store. Built-in SEO tools let you manage all your metadata in one place to keep all your pages SEO friendly. However, you can use Volusion’s editable robots.txt file to prevent search engines from crawling certain pages, if that fits with your SEO strategy.

Blogging

You won’t find a full blogging feature with Volusion, but you can use the native Newsletter tool to share your thoughts and stay in touch with customers.

Volusion Discounts & Coupons

You can create discounts with a custom start time, duration, and value. You can also create coupon codes to send to customers. Highlight discounts and promotions on your home page using Volusion’s Slideshow feature.

Developer Tools

Volusion allows developers to create their own custom XML exports to extend Volusion’s functionality and build integrations with third-party software and services. Users on the Business plan and above gain API access.

Is Volusion Easy To Use?

Volusion’s VOLT block-based site designer is made to be easy to use, allowing even novice site designers to create a professional site using prebuilt themes and blocks. That includes product review displays, announcement bars, and more — and if you don’t see what you like in the block library, you can create your own from scratch. It’s easy to reuse the block across multiple pages and to change colors, fonts, layouts and more across one block or the whole domain.

We found Volusion’s admin panel to be well organized, with categories listed in a toolbar to the left. When you first sign up, the Home page features the steps you need to take to set up your online store. Once you’ve published your site, this page gives you a more general overview of your store.

Source: Volusion

Volusion offers a generous 14-day free trial to all prospective customers. Although you have to provide contact info, you do not need to pull out your credit card to sign up. As you test the software, you’ll probably find that, in general, the basic features of Volusion are easy to use. It’s a straightforward matter to add a product, set shipping preferences, and make small adjustments to the look and feel of your website.

Source: Volusion

That said, when it comes to locating advanced features, Volusion can be fairly clumsy. The toolbar on the left side of the screen does not expand into nesting subcategories, which means that if you’re looking for a specific feature, you often have to click into multiple pages to find it. What’s more, we found Volusion doesn’t offer the highest level of eCommerce functionality. In fact, one reason Volusion is easy to use is because it doesn’t have very many features, and that’s one of our biggest Volusion complaints.

Customer Service & Support

Support is available 24/7 to users on all Volusion plans. However, support options are fairly basic on lower-level pricing plans, with better support options becoming available on higher-level plans. All users can find a fair amount of self-help resources online. Here’s a rundown of the support options available for Volusion users:

• Phone: Subscribers on the Business and Prime plans can schedule a phone call with Volusion from your admin panel.
• Live Chat: Users on all plans can access live chat support on the Volusion website or in their admin panel.
• In-Software Help: Click the “?” icon in your admin panel to access the Help Center and live chat support or schedule a time for a phone call.
• Videos: You can find tutorial videos throughout your admin panel during the setup process. Volusion offers a larger selection of videos and webinars on YouTube.
• Help Center: The Volusion Help Center offers information about accepting payments, processing orders, logging in and resetting passwords, and designing your storefront.
• Quick Wins: Volusion’s “Quick Wins” are support services offered at flat-rate pricing. With prices between $25-$450, these provide expert help in SEO, ads, design, and the use of specific programs like Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics, among other topics.
• Blog: Volusion maintains an active blog that covers various topics, such as online selling, site building, and marketing. You can also find industry news and Volusion product updates in the blog.
• Social Media: Volusion is fairly active on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn as well as YouTube.

Volusion Integrations & Add-Ons

Volusion currently lists only 80 integration partners offering modules and other third-party software. This number is actually an improvement from recent years. Still, it’s a relatively low number compared to other eCommerce solutions, especially those in the same price range as Volusion.

Fortunately, one of the applications on offer is Zapier. A connection with Zapier allows users to integrate multiple third-party solutions beyond the listed applications. You’ll recognize a number of other big-name integrations, such as Google Analytics and Google Customer Reviews, Shipstation and ShippingEasy, Xero and QuickBooks Online. Still, we would like to see Volusion continue to add integrations to its VOLT platform.

Volusion Reviews

Despite its time in bankruptcy, Volusion is accredited by the Better Business Bureau and maintains an A+ rating. Looking at some popular software review sites, it seems that users rate Volusion fairly well but not highly. For example, at Trustradius, Volusion scores 5.4 out of 10, with 34 reviews. At Capterra, Volusion rates 3.8 out of 5 stars, with 46 reviews. However, at Trust Pilot, Volusion has just 1.9 out of 5 stars, with 375 reviews.

Let’s take a deeper look at some of the most common Volusion complaints and compliments.

Negative Volusion Reviews & Complaints

Here are the most relevant, recent, and recurring complaints from those using Volusion software:

• Too Expensive: Compared to similarly priced eCommerce competitors, Volusion has some extra costs, and users report feeling nickeled and dimed. Volusion is one of only a handful of platforms still charging transaction fees. And I’m just baffled by the poor optics of Volusion’s $1.83 monthly PCI-compliance fee. I’ve simply never seen this included as a separate cost passed on to users.
• Limited Features And Integrations: Volusion doesn’t offer many integrations, and that number has not increased significantly over the past few years. It doesn’t seem like developers are interested in building connections with the software, which makes it difficult to add advanced features to the platform.
• Too Simple: Volusion lacks features in a few key areas. There are no tools for creating a blog, although you can integrate a blog from another site, and there are limited marketing features. I’ve also seen several reviews that say Volusion needs stronger reporting tools.
• A Lot Of Bugs: Users frequently report bugs and glitches. A few comments say Volusion’s updates cause more problems than they solve.
• Limited Support Options: Users don’t like the lack of an email support option, and some say the live chat option isn’t a good one. Users on the base plan particularly dislike that phone support is no longer available to them.

Positive Volusion Reviews & Testimonials

While we do find positive reviews of Volusion, there can be few and far between. Here are a few positive features that we see users commenting on frequently:

• Ease Of Use: Users say it’s simple to set up an online store and you can add your products online quickly and easily. Users appreciate how the software is all-inclusive, which takes out many of the technological challenges of running a website.
• Good Customer Support: I’ve seen numerous reviews that praise Volusion’s support team. These positive reviews tend to mention live chat support, specifically, saying the chat option essentially functions as a support ticket, with no waiting in line and fast responses that you get in real-time and not to your inbox.
• Just-Enough Functionality: Even while acknowledging that Volusion doesn’t offer all the advanced features one could want, some users say it’s a “just right” solution for small businesses needing a few more tools than some free or low-cost platforms offer but able to get by without all the bells and whistles.

Final Verdict Of Volusion

While Volusion has its fans, I can’t recommend it to new users. It’s simply not the best option out there, in any of the categories we studied. Volusion’s limited features and integrations make the software less scalable than I would like it to be. And I’m never a fan of subscription levels that automatically bump you up based on gross sales because the types of products you sell and their unique profit margin aren’t taken into account. I much prefer plans that allow users to scale up to the next level when they want access to more advanced tools and features.

Although we also dislike transaction fees as a penalty for using one’s choice of payment processor, we don’t see any common complaints about Volusion Payments. In fact, we don’t see much that stands out as specifically wrong with this software; it has its fans and you may be one! Volusion may not score the highest, but a full Volusion review does show some positives as well as some negatives. Although we feel there are better eCommerce solutions available, with a 14-day free trial of Volusion available, if you are curious about the software you have very little to lose from giving it a go.

On the other hand, if you’re ready to expand your search for a different solution, we have some suggestions! Anyone can start with our list of the best eCommerce platforms, where you’re certain to find some good options for your particular needs. If you’re a price-conscious shopper, check out the options listed in our picks for the best free eCommerce platforms to find your perfect eCommerce match.

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