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By: Laura Bernheim
Editor: Lillian Castro
Reviewer: Cristian Lopez
| OVERALL RATING |
4.7
/ 5.0
★★★★★
|
|---|---|
| Features | 4.7 / 5.0 |
| Ease of Use | 4.6 / 5.0 |
| Pricing | 4.8 / 5.0 |
| Reliability & Support | 4.4 / 5.0 |
| See Deals |
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Founded by 16-year-old Kevin Sproles in 1999 as a web design studio, Volusion added ecommerce functionality in 2002 and hasn't looked back.
More than 180,000 entrepreneurs have looked to the company for help hosting and managing their online businesses, and Volusion has processed more than 185 million orders worth $26 billion.
The company offers a hosting/site-building combo platter worthy of consideration if you're in need of a basic online store and the means to promote products. The company focuses on easy, custom designs and ecommerce-optimized features.
Although Volusion could increase its support offerings to further justify a price tag that exceeds most shared hosting competitors, the company's focused niche in online store design and inventory management warrants the investment.
Store owners will need to purchase a domain elsewhere before connecting it to Volusion and launching their store. Once you're ready to start designing your site, Volusion's revamped site builder provides dozens of stellar mobile-friendly themes.
The company used to offer hundreds of themes, so we expect — and want — to see the number of options grow. Unlike many ecommerce site builder plans that limit your product numbers substantially, Volusion's most basic plan allows you to display unlimited products.
Regardless of which plan you choose, site owners are allotted unlimited storage and zero transaction fees, in addition to tools for inventory management, order processing, and shipping oversight.
Finally, market your products via social media integrations and reach new markets via integrations with Amazon, eBay, and Google. Collect payments via all the major credit card issuers (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and AmEx), as well as through cash, PayPal, Google Wallet, Amazon, and Stripe. The platform will calculate reports to show your return on investment and store activity.
"We haven't evaluated Volusion for this type of hosting service — yet. Either the company didn't offer this option at the time this review was written or this section of the review hasn't made it to the top of our editorial queue just yet. Either way, check back later, as we're always working to keep our reviews up to date and as comprehensive as possible!"
"We haven't evaluated Volusion for this type of hosting service — yet. Either the company didn't offer this option at the time this review was written or this section of the review hasn't made it to the top of our editorial queue just yet. Either way, check back later, as we're always working to keep our reviews up to date and as comprehensive as possible!"
"We haven't evaluated Volusion for this type of hosting service — yet. Either the company didn't offer this option at the time this review was written or this section of the review hasn't made it to the top of our editorial queue just yet. Either way, check back later, as we're always working to keep our reviews up to date and as comprehensive as possible!"
Volusion was designed with the intention of helping store owners create an online hub to market and sell their products quickly and easily. The number of available themes has dropped considerably since a recent update, but we expect to see dozens more added in the coming weeks and months. The majority of Volusion's features are centered around the idea of helping business owners track inventory and profit efficiently while making the user experience informative and intuitive for their shoppers. Entrepreneurs can easily customize their online storefront with Volusion's revamped site builder, which provides easy access to product display settings, navigation menus, and more. The drag-and-drop platform is tied in with users' store management systems, allowing business owners to easily switch between design tools and the features covering order processing, customer relationship management, inventory tracking, marketing, design, and analytics.
Volusion seems to strike the balance between affordability and productivity, offering ample features and tools to justify what it charges. Naturally, the platform is significantly more expensive than free, self-hosted, open-source options, such as WooCommerce, Magento, or PrestaShop. Those services, however, require store owners to purchase and maintain a web hosting account. Although hosting can be procured for less than $5 per month, performance, security, and other features typically lag behind until you get to options priced comparably to Volusion. When examined alongside other commercial hosted services, Volusion is quite a bargain. BigCommerce plans start nearly twice as high and come with transaction fees on purchases made through external payment gateways. Although the themes available through each ecommerce platform are visually impressive, they're both typically priced beyond $150. Wix and Weebly are priced equally or less than Volusion and offer cheaper themes, but the site builders include storage or product limitations and fees.
As with seemingly every web hosting provider, ecommerce specialized or not, Volusion promises customers free 24/7 support and a 99.9% network uptime guarantee. Our support standards typically drop somewhat with ecommerce platforms, but Volusion puts forth a decent effort. Although we understand the upsell opportunities of offering priority support to the customers spending the most money on higher-tier plans, as Volusion does, we tend to gripe at hosts that limit support options for the small-time customers just getting started with the cheaper plans. Volusion reserves phone support to those spending at least $35 per month. As for the online-only support, however, we do appreciate the level of depth in the support articles, blog posts, and how-to guides, as well as the ability to relatively quickly chat with a Volusion representative, but we struggled with finding different resources quickly. Information is spread among the blog and help center on the Volusion website, as well as the store and account management interfaces.
Wondering how Volusion stacks up againt other web hosting services? See our host-vs-host reviews below and compare them side by side.
Wix and Volusion pack their plans with some outstanding features.
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Overall Rating
In the Black Friday shopping spree of empowering eCommerce site builders, Shopify and Volusion are always at the front of the line when the doors open.
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Overall Rating
Volusion is the winner
2 out of 2 times.
Laura Bernheim
Hosting Expert:
Volusion's major overhaul in mid-2017 was a giant step forward for the ecommerce platform, giving entrepreneurs and their customers more confidence in doing business together. The company streamlines the daunting process of starting an online storefront, finding success, and growing profits. We appreciate how many features and tools Volusion packs into the company's largely affordable plans, to say nothing of the hassle-free hosting experience. The Volusion website builder might not be quite as intuitive as some of the company's competitors, but motivated site owners should have no problem picking up the reins and taking control of their online business.
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Overall Rating
4.7 / 5.0
★★★★★
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