Volusion Review

Volusion has been around for ages and you can definitely feel the antique vibe when looking at their templates. They are probably the worst of the worst as far as aesthetically pleasing site designs go. Seriously. They are still using nested tables for their designs for crying out loud. If you can think back to mid 90's geocities days then you have an idea of what Volusion's offerings of templates look like. Utter trash and they shouldn't even promote that they offer 100 or whatever number of free templates they offer. Its all useless rubbish, and they should be ashamed for still offering them. That being said they have been around a while and do have a pretty complete system for creating an online business. The amount of tools and resources they offer seem to be a cut above some of the competition offerings.

Volusion SEO

SEO and Volusion is a mixed bag. For one their site is created in .asp, which already I am not a big fan of. They make a nice offering but it is far from good. You are able to change some aspects of the URL by setting short names for products, however their URL scheming overall is not optimized and you will still end up having extra numbers and extensions such as .html or .asp.

Volusion still continues to use nested tables which break up the semantic structures of websites. Search engines will give preference to sites who's structure is set up properly and uses modern design.

Canonical Tags are not set up by default which is an important factor especially when pages have multiple urls all linking to the same content.

Keywords, which are not used by search engines are required by Volusion in order to make use of their other META data such as title and description. If all these elements are not filled than none of the META data will be used and will use default information.

Volusion Design

As already mentioned, their templates are worse than pretty much anything out there. They offer complete design services at nearly $6,000. Are you serious? It is possible to get some semblence of a website using css with Volusion, but they do not let you have access to the template files, which means you still are relying on archaic code that uses tables to display a large portion of your products and categories. Another serious let down for anyone wanting to customize their website.

Managing a Volusion Store

This is a pretty important factor when considering a shopping cart. It is important to have good tools to keep inventory up today and manage categories and products. Volusion does a good job here and allowing customer to import and export nearly all data including categories, products, customers, and product options.

One of the inconvenient things about the Volusion categories is that every category needs to have an ID number, so you cannot just assign categories when uploading new product feeds like you can do in many other shopping cart platforms. You will first need to create the category and know which ID numbers products will need to fit into. This is not very intuitive and makes managing large databases time consuming when shuffling around products and categories.

Volusion does a good job when it comes to customer management and has a built in CRM system. You can import and export full customer data as well as create orders over the phone on the fly.

Another good thing about Volusion is they have a drop shipping system, which is extremely useful for merchants who deal with multiple vendors. This allows you to set up different warehouse locations and have the ability to set shipping origins based on those locations. This is an extremely useful feature that should be incorporated by more shopping carts.

Final Thoughts on Volusion

Even though Volusion has a pretty much complete package to run an online business, they are lacking in some of the most critical and fundamental aspects to having a successful online business. Those aspects being SEO and web design. Their pricing scale at the low end is much higher than other solutions out there. At the high end they however, they are relatively competitive. Overall there are a lot of core changes that need to be done to Volusion before we give it the OK.