Volusion

[paulyh]

Hi everyone, following on from my previous post. I have been looking at Volusion as they seem to offer a very good package. Has anyone had any experience with them?

 

[Cherrie Hub]

not personally, but before launching my website I have spent weeks reading reviews of various ecommerce platforms and volusion didn't look too rosey. But check online for the reviews or get their free trial to test it

 

[quikshop]

Volusion are predominantly an American company; there are literally dozens of UK hosted solutions to choose from who will all do a competent job for you. www.actinic.co.uk used to be worth a look, not sure what they are like these days now they're owned by a big European player.

 

[zigojacko]

Yes, they're awful, dated, limited and loads of etailers often jump ship to move to a better platform.

All depends on what you want to achieve with your website though. What might not work for one business could work for another.

 

[JamiePMortimer]

Don't do it. I did and jumped ship.
I had lots of problems, the final straw was an issue where if a customer entered a space at the end of any of the address fields when they got to checkout, when they tried to proceed it wouldn't move to the next page, it would loop. Volusion claimed this was to do with their code but it functioned as expected and I would have to tell customers not to do it. Which I said was ok (but not really) but what about the new customers that just went elsewhere. No answer.

So I moved, to Magento.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[14Steve14]

I thought about volusion but I got put off by the fact that every other ecommerce software i searched for on google cam up with an add running down the package I had search for and that I should use volusion. It just seemed very heavy handed. I also read reviews of their software and support and didn't even bother looking into using them anymore.

 

[paulyh]

Thanks for all the replies. I've looked into volusion some more and have ruled them out. Have read lots of positives about shopify and bigcommerce. Any first hand reviews?

 

[deniser]

Have read lots of positives about shopify and bigcommerce. Any first hand reviews?

Shopify has many plus points but the downsides for me (which is why I won't use them again) are:

1. The only really properly compatible and safe payment processor is Paypal. The others either don't have any fraud protection - like Stripe - or can't (except one) be used with 3D Secure. The only one which can be used with 3D Secure is Sagepay Form but this isn't fully integrated so you can't refund from within Shopify nor can you use analytics properly. If you are happy to use Paypal forever - which you may well be - then this isn't an issue but if the site is successful then you would want to switch to a more traditional payment gateway and merchant account set up.

Because they don't have 3DS in USA, they can't see the point of integrating it for UK customers.

2. They used to charge transaction fees but it seems they are now waiving these if you use their own payment processor. I haven't really investigated it but I am fairly certain it has no fraud protection but this needs checking out. I'm not sure whether the business model with transaction fees still exists. Anyway, if they are still charging transaction fees (when you don't use their payment processing), then you need to be aware that their system does not support the partial refund of transaction fees if you get items returned - a big issue for clothing retailers.

3. None of the templates seem to be compatible with clothing retail insofar as you can't categorise items by what is available in a certain size. You would have to get this coded separately.

4. It's geared to the north American market and the voice of the UK customers is just not loud enough to get things changed to suit the UK. In some countries - I think Spain is one - you can set postage rates by county but this isn't set up for the UK. Even having the UK divided into England, Scotland, NI , Wales etc would help with setting shipping rates but they won't do this. There is also a postcode calculator for the customer to estimate the shipping rate but it doesn't work with UK postcodes.

Apart from this, I think it's great. It's a shame they just can't get the basics with the payment processing right.

 

[paulyh]

thanks for the reply @deniser, some really good info to help in my research.
I only use paypal atm due to selling on ebay so that doesn't bother me too much and I will look into shopify's own payment gateway to see what it offers etc. I'm not too put off by transaction fee's as they are minimal in comparison to ebay. 1.5% on shopify compared to 11% on ebay is a big difference.
Anyone got any experience of using bigcommerce?