If you're looking for online shopping cart software, you could do worse than Volusion (which begins at $15 per month for the Mini plan).
It has some great features and comes without transaction fees.
With that in mind, you will have to pay $89 per year for a dedicated secure sockets layer (SSL) certifciate as well as $7 per gigabyte (GB) of bandwidth overage.
With those kinds of added fees, the solution comes up short when compared to Editors' Choice Shopify, though Volusion is still worth considering, especially if you're in need of certain third-party integrations.
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For this review, I looked at Volusion's Plus plan in order to set up an online storefront on an existing domain that the customer is likely running from a third-party, e-commerce-capable web hosting provider.
At first glance, it looked like I would have to pay just $35 to get started with Volusion, but that turned out not to be the case.
You'll also need to pay at least $89 for an SSL certificate.
Registering a brand-new domain tacks on an extra $11.99, but I had my own to try.
It's worth noting that 3dcart ($19 Per Month at Shift4Shop) offers free registration and hosting along with its software, and Shopify offers a shared SSL certificate if you don't want to buy one upfront.
Volusion offers users a 14-day trial, which gives you the opportunity to actually set up a store and test transactions before committing to the platform.
This is the same amount of time as Shopify and Pinnacle Cart.
BigCommerce ($29.95 at Bigcommerce) offers one day more, as its trials go for 15 days.
Volusion has four packages, but, as with Shopify (14-Day Free Trial at Shopify) , you don't have to pick which one you want to use until you've had a chance to try out the platform.
While the pricier packages have some advanced features, the main differences among the plans have to do with bandwidth and storage restrictions.
All of Volusion's plans come with free marketing and SEO tools built in.
The Mini plan ($15 per month) is the cheapest, but it is also very restrictive.
It's very much like Shopify's Starter plan in that it is essentially a glorified trial.
You can list only 100 products and you are limited to just 1 GB of bandwidth per month.
The Plus plan ($35 per month) is more like Shopify's Basic plan and lets you sell up to 1,000 products and offers 3 GB of bandwidth per month.
The Pro plan ($75 per month) supports a generous 10,000 products and the bandwidth cap is 10 GB per month.
The Premium plan ($135 per month) allows unlimited products, but you are capped at 35 GB of bandwidth per month.
That is a little surprising since most services with bandwidth caps remove all restrictions at the highest tier.
However, you do receive an account manager at this tier.
One note about bandwidth fees—it's really difficult to understand what exactly Volusion counts towards the cap.
Bandwidth can be consumed whenever visitors (both the human and search engine kind) visit the site.
If visitors navigate to multiple pages in a single session, that consumes bandwidth.
If you list several images for a single product, or you have a long slideshow, that will eat up your bandwidth.
You have to track your bandwidth usage manually from the dashboard, on the statistics page, or you can use SmarterStats, a third-party tool which lets you create website traffic and bandwidth usage reports.
I would rather spend my time managing my products and fulfilling orders than tweaking my site to make sure I don't exceed the bandwidth caps.
Of course, having a lean site will ultimately help your search engine optimization, but having to also pay for bandwidth overages feels a bit like double jeopardy.
While plenty of other services, such as PinnacleCart and 3dcart, have bandwidth limitations, Volusion is the only one that's cagey about how much it costs if you exceed your monthly allotment.
Bandwidth overages are 7 cents per megabyte (MB) or $7 per GB.
Once you exceed the bandwidth cap, the charge shows up on the monthly bill.
Whether you are better off paying transaction fees to Shopify or bandwidth overage charges to Volusion depends on your sales volume.
You can also avoid the question altogether by signing up with BigCommerce, which offers unlimited bandwidth and no transaction fees on its Plus plan.
For more information on Volusion's bandwidth policy, visit its pricing page.
There are other monthly fees, such as the PCI service fee, which can range from $1.83 to $3 depending on your specific shopping cart setup.
This fee helps offset the expenses Volusion incurs to make sure its infrastructure is PCI-compliant so that you can accept credit cards.
There is also $99 termination fee for cancelling an annual plan.
Volusion does offer 24/7 support regardless of the tier you select, which I like.
You can set up a Facebook store, use a mobile app to manage your store, offer mobile-optimized storefronts, and create slideshows across all plans.
Setting Up a Volusion Store
Getting started with Volusion is, initially, a snap.
I didn't need a credit card for the trial, which is a plus.
I entered my name, email address, and phone number, and I was good to go.
Volusion's interface is easy to navigate, but it isn't very friendly.
There is a navigation bar for Orders, Customers, Inventory, Marketing, Design, Reports and Settings.
Products are easy to add—look under Inventory—and if you have any questions about any of the fields, you can just click on the question mark icon for more information.
Volusion starts with a few products already in the database, which is a nice touch, and the built-in search tool makes it easy to find products already listed in the system.
The Add Products page is split into three sections: Basic, Image Management, and Advanced Info.
Image management lets you keep track of the product images.
Volusion dumps everything beyond product name and basic description into the Advanced Info section, including details about pricing, shipping, SEO terms, and third-party integrations, to name just a few.
As with Magento Commerce (Free at Magento) , this gets confusing and even overwhelming.
I much prefer the simplicity of Shopify or the tabbed interface of BigCommerce.
Volusion offers more than a 100 free templates and paid templates that cost up to $250.
You can integrate with third-party apps, but, as mentioned before, you get a wider selection with Shopify and BigCommerce.
Volusion now lets you edit templates without having to use raw HTML, which is a nice update.
HTML and CSS is still open to users who prefer to tweak in code.
On the other hand, I really like built-in Volusion features such as being able to offer daily deals, eBay integration, coupons, a custome-reviews engine, wish lists, and one-page checkout.
You can also use the built-in affiliate management system to create affiliate marketers (similar to the Amazon Associates program) to drive traffic and sales to your store.
The abandoned cart feature is particularly nice, as it lets you see which customers stopped shopping partway through, or which customer still has items in the shopping cart.
With most services, including Shopify and 3dcart, you use third-party tools to set up a loyalty program.
Volusion offers the MyRewards program right out of the box.
I was able to get my store completely set up within my trial period, but it was definitely much more involved and time-consuming than what I found testing the competition.
It required a lot of effort to figure out what to do regarding domain names: should I point my domain name to the shopping cart application (and how?) or should I just register a brand-new domain to use with Volusion? Having that wizard step me through the process would really have helped smooth the initial setup.
User Experience
An online store isn't just inventory pages and order forms.
Volusion shows product statistics, such as total sales and top products, on the dashboard.
And you can use its customer relationship management (CRM) system to communicate with customers, see order histories, and track support queries.
If you want to have a blog to communicate with your customers, such as Shopify offers, you have to set up your blog separately and then just link to the store.
As the customer, I found it easy to navigate the Volusion storefront.
I like that you can add items to the cart and keep shopping instead of going straight to checkout.
All of Volusion's pages are responsive, so you'll be able to shop in context on any mobile device, and Volusion has introduced one-page checkout on mobile, as well.
Volusion has also done a good job of making its customer service friendly.
The video tutorials are good, and Volusion offers 24/7 support for all plans.
Keep in mind that the Mini plan gets only online support, which means 24/7 live chat support, but no phone support.
The other plans include 24/7 phone support.
The service's knowledge base is comprehensive and its search tool was good at turning up relevant pages in my testing.
However, I would have also liked to see a user forum, such as those that BigCommerce and 3dcart offer.
When it comes to pricing, you have to talk to the sales support team because the customer support team doesn't seem to know about the different fee structures.
I was disappointed the live chat for the sales team was frequently unavailable in the middle of the day during a weekday.
Customer service chat was very responsive, in comparison.
I found it easy to get someone in chat even at 1 a.m.
on a weeknight, and the phone support representative was very helpful answering questions about the different features I could set up.
Accepting Payments
To collect payments, you can use one of the many payment gateways, or you can pick the in-house Volusion Merchant Services.
Like other payment gateways, Volusion Merchant Services charges transaction fees—in this case, 2.17 percent for qualified transactions.
There is also a $17.99 per month gateway fee.
Volusion also integreates with more that 50 alternative gateways.
Like Shopify, Volusion has the ability to accept credit card payments offline, if, for example, you want to take them over the phone.
Volusion also lets you set up recurring billing, which is handy if you are offering subscriptions as opposed to a one-time purchase price, in your store.
Solid But Pricey Service
Volusion is a good, solid service.
It makes sure the customer doesn't have difficulty giving you money, it doesn't charge transaction fees, and it's got some good marketing tools.
Considering how easy it is to get off the ground with our Editors' Choice services Shopify and Pinnacle Cart, Volusion looks expensive for what it offers.
However, Volusion has made great strides since our original review.
It has diversified its storefront themes, it has enabled code-free storefront editing, it has updated its tutorials, and it got rid of some of the obnoxious fees it used to charge for minor services.
As a result, I've raised Volusion's score, and I recommend you give it a trial before deciding which tool to purchase.
The Bottom Line
Volusion gives small businesses the tools they need to start selling online.
With that said, the platform's bandwidth fees can make it hard for entrepreneurs to scale.
