Marg Volusion

The essentials work, you can do business.

Complete lack of innovation. Far behind.

I would look for a platform that is truly 1 mobile, 2 responsive design, 3 innovating as a company.

In 2005 it was cutting edge and brought great new features to sell online. It has been quite reliable. However the company has put profits ahead of customers and no longer innovates. They are quite out of touch with their customers now. It has been largely tire kicking, surface changes since 2010 and very little real, useful advances in functionality. Basic flaws reported 5 years ago are still there. Yes, we continue to be successful, but clearly inhibited from faster, greater results in specific ways. Volusion has been more focused on creating the most fun and quirky work place for it's staff, rather than ensuring it is focused on the needs of its customers. I have compared most other platforms in detail and they are better in a multitude of ways. We have just been able to figure out the quirks of Volusion and add a patchwork of tools to compensate for its deficiencies. For example, we use an outside CRM (Groove even though Volusion offers a CRM. We use an outside email tool (Listrak even though they have newsletter system built in. I know many small business owners, and referred many to Volusion until 2009 when ethically I could do so no longer. When my last company leaves Volusion platform some day I will say it was 50% because they lost focus on improving the product, and 50% because they treated us badly as a customer - multiple times. One time it took me 7-8 hours of my time, much stress and headache to finally convince Volusion reps that they had miss-billed me one month for $8,200 instead of the roughly $700 or so it should have been. Imagine receiving a bill that large and being told repeatedly that it's legitimate. I had to pull out the bandwidth logs and find where a decimal was placed in the wrong place by their billing department. That's just one example. I could go on.

Although I do not want to, I will say thanks Volusion because you are powering one of our companies still. But please do not shut down my $1M plus store again for my making an honest public review such as this.

Many others have had an excrutiating experience with Volusion so far as well. Despite this, myself and many of those people would be willing to start recommending the product if they happen, just HAPPEN to figure out that innovation, their customer, and under promising, over performing is the way to earn trust and respect. I'm afraid they lost their talent base however, and it would take a change of leadership and staffing to change the company.

There wasn’t anything I like “best”. The team for support was always eager to help and most of the time had an answer or were able to figure out a solution.

Everything else - had a premium plan and was NEVER given premium service. Our account executive was the worst ever and I have seen my share of less than stellar performers. There was no care of making sure we had all we needed to be successful. Once the agreement was in place order taken and money deposited they couldn’t care less if we stayed or left.

Don’t go - do your due diligence and make sure you look at everyone and take your time to make the decision.

Nothing was solved or realized. We have left this platform never to return. I do not think anyone should migrate to them.

Because of the horrible experience that I had with customer complaints over logins I really can't see beyond to tell you anything that I "like best". The rest of it is adequate - I think my site looks good - but there isn't anything that I am really thrilled about over the previous Joomla/Cart 32 site that I had. Most of the "bells and whistles" that made me sign up for it are not really up to par. Abandoned cart and customer review emails don't let you edit subject line and that reduces email opens and responses. Quickbooks integration only works with some versions of Quickbooks. I've been disappointed at every turn.

When a customer does not remember password and tries to retrieve it "cache" issues in their browsers will keep returning the same page to them. This doesn't happen to me when I retrieve passwords on other sites - why with Volusion. Then if they do get through and try to reset to their favorite password or a previous password the screen keeps reloading. It doesn't tell them they can't use a previous password - it just doesn't go anywhere. Beyond that many customers just could not seem to log in. If they tried they were told their user name and password were invalid, when they tried to create a new account it told them email was already in use, and when they tried to reset password they ran into issues above. An endless loop for some - and yet it was so sporadic it could only be recreated once under controlled conditions.

Apparently the parent company just sold off some product line or something and promise they will now be focusing on Volusion and making it better. Give them a bit to do so. In mean time if I had it in me to go through another replatform I would look at Shopify, Big Commerce or Magento or anybody.

So far its just caused me nightmares.

I would give a 0 star but not the facility.

I have been with Volusion for 5 years, constantly they have fallen behind other providers and not done anything to help bring stores up to what is expected in todays ecommerce world

Recently I was informed by customers no payments were going through. I queried with Volusion and was told there was an integration issue with them and Sagepay. No timescale provided I thought it would be a week max which would have been bad enough but understand issues can happen. 2 months later, still can't take payments, Volusion refuse to provide more information or care. This is my small company's busiest period (Halloween and Christmas - Party Business and I am left dangling. Volusion offer to refund 1 month hosting - complete joke this company - avoid. Im leaving, no doubt this will be difficult as well.

Read above, you experience constant issues.

Their software lacks behind others

Can be rude at times

there going backwards

See above

Access to the database to use SQL for custom report writing.

-The platform is out-of-date

-Very few external integrations since they do not have a true API

-AMAZON doesn't work

-EBAY doesn't work

-Very little control of design other than templates

-NO B2B features

-Customer Service is AWFUL!

They haven’t updated their platform in 4 years. When they did finally release a “big update” it turned out only to be a facelift of the admin that thousands of their customers complained about. It created dozens of bugs and made your typical workflow for processing an order take 2x as long. The viewable (usable space was reduced by over 20%, making it hard to data when looking at the products table/page and orders table/page.

See, the biggest problem with Volusion is IF/WHEN they make changes, they don’t speak with their customers. It is as if they think they are smarter than everyone and know what everyone wants.

Another example was their “NEW” PayPal integration. They finally made it to where a customer could see Pay with PayPal on the checkout page rather than only the shopping cart page. The problem is, they force their customers to default to PayPal and make checking out with Credit Card very hard to see. Nothing CSS can’t fix though, right? WRONG! They will not allow you access to change it.

Couple other issues:

Their AMAZON “integration” goes down weekly and at one point, last year didn’t work for months.

Their EBAY “integration” still doesn’t update tracking#’s (bug they have been working on for 3+ years. and is currently completely down. They refuse to fix it, because they are in a code freeze for the holidays…Guess their customers don’t need to sell on EBAY.

After waiting for years of unfulfilled promises, we are finally jumping ship. I’d highly recommend going with a platform that cares about their customers, not just the all mighty $$$.

It gives us a store front, but we are WAY behind the times currently because of their platform.