Andy I must say you do a solid job with these reviews. Especially considering the mentioned restrictions we faced due to lack of time.
It shows you truly care about delivering valuable information, and that is a quality I admire :-)
Yaro
Mark
· 2 years ago
This is an example of my most recent disaster with Volusion support:
Review your Volusion experience now!
moderated chat session as offered, though it was available for some time - it is not acceptable to post private communication here on the blog without the authorization of the third party - at the time it was posted someone from Volusion was subscribed to the post, though I haven't been running subscribe to comments for a few months now
As I first mentioned, I've gone through this several times with their after hours supports...I've even had email chats with the support manager who seemed very unhappy with how my case was handled. Each time it was a different rep.
There were 2 times I got a rep that just did what I needed and made things right very quick. Every other time it has been a list of why they can't support any given issue. This seems to go against the meaning of support.
As you read in the chat I had with david on 7/4/07, he was evasive in providing with documentation on his policy stance. Why? Does it exist in writing anywhere?
I been setting up shop and love the software and what it allows me to do, it just when I need things tweeked a little or something is just plain amiss, support offers no to very little help.
They either need to revamp there policy if it exist, or just end the after hours support and spend that money making other improvements to their product.
AndyBeard
· 2 years ago
Mark I can related to both sides of this.
I don't generally do consultation because I don't want to be responsible to total cock-ups.
Support staff are specifically trained not to get "hands-on" with a customer site for that kind of reason. The rules might be written down in staff handbooks which are not publicly available, and I rarely see a company publish such document.
If they do publish something, it is normally a much shorter policy note that cannot cover every situation.
Whilst I have questioned some of the costing, you would probably have to pay far more if you wanted hands-on support.
I must admit I am in 2 minds whether to leave this feedback in place. I am not sure of the legal situation regarding the differences between email communication which by law is private, and a live chat application.
I know Cris from Volusion is subscribed to this post by email, so will have notification of your concerns.
If I am asked to remove it, I will remove the specific conversation with Volusion support.
I know this might not be the answer you are looking for, but there are the Volusion forums, and I am sure there are contractors who lurk there who can probably help you for fairly minimal charge.
Some things in webdesign are quite complicated, especially with compatibility between browsers.
Bev
· 1 year ago
I'm curious as to whether or not this "support Poop" continues or has been improved. I desperately need an e-commerce solution that "does it all" - but this sounds scary to a novice like me!
Yaro
· 2 years ago
Andy I must say you do a solid job with these reviews. Especially considering the mentioned restrictions we faced due to lack of time.
It shows you truly care about delivering valuable information, and that is a quality I admire :-)
Yaro
Mark
· 2 years ago
This is an example of my most recent disaster with Volusion support:
Review your Volusion experience now!
moderated chat session as offered, though it was available for some time - it is not acceptable to post private communication here on the blog without the authorization of the third party - at the time it was posted someone from Volusion was subscribed to the post, though I haven't been running subscribe to comments for a few months now
As I first mentioned, I've gone through this several times with their after hours supports...I've even had email chats with the support manager who seemed very unhappy with how my case was handled. Each time it was a different rep.
There were 2 times I got a rep that just did what I needed and made things right very quick. Every other time it has been a list of why they can't support any given issue. This seems to go against the meaning of support.
As you read in the chat I had with david on 7/4/07, he was evasive in providing with documentation on his policy stance. Why? Does it exist in writing anywhere?
I been setting up shop and love the software and what it allows me to do, it just when I need things tweeked a little or something is just plain amiss, support offers no to very little help.
They either need to revamp there policy if it exist, or just end the after hours support and spend that money making other improvements to their product.
AndyBeard
· 2 years ago
Mark I can related to both sides of this.
I don't generally do consultation because I don't want to be responsible to total cock-ups.
Support staff are specifically trained not to get "hands-on" with a customer site for that kind of reason. The rules might be written down in staff handbooks which are not publicly available, and I rarely see a company publish such document.
If they do publish something, it is normally a much shorter policy note that cannot cover every situation.
Whilst I have questioned some of the costing, you would probably have to pay far more if you wanted hands-on support.
I must admit I am in 2 minds whether to leave this feedback in place. I am not sure of the legal situation regarding the differences between email communication which by law is private, and a live chat application.
I know Cris from Volusion is subscribed to this post by email, so will have notification of your concerns.
If I am asked to remove it, I will remove the specific conversation with Volusion support.
I know this might not be the answer you are looking for, but there are the Volusion forums, and I am sure there are contractors who lurk there who can probably help you for fairly minimal charge.
Some things in webdesign are quite complicated, especially with compatibility between browsers.
Bev
· 1 year ago
I'm curious as to whether or not this "support Poop" continues or has been improved. I desperately need an e-commerce solution that "does it all" - but this sounds scary to a novice like me!
David Roth
· 2 years ago
Andy--
Thank you for mentioning IntelliContact in your review of Volusion, a respected name and site in ecommerce solutions. Allow me to first invite you and your readers to take a look at Intellicontact (http://www.intellicontact.com) for its industry leading web based multi-channel ecommunications approach to email marketing. In particular, you addressed the escalating cost to users of Volusion is they exceed the allowable limit. It is true that there is a cost and that Volusion and IntelliContact are partners with a revenue share agreement, however, the cost to their consumers is the same as our pricing to all customers. Furthermore, in our effort to democratize email marketing and in consideration of small business needs, we have provided a tool that not only has the highest industry deliverability but offers a feature rich environment that is normally associated with much higher priced ESP's. Our technology is sophisticated yet our slogan, "We Simplify Email Marketing" is a testament to our software development. All functions are under four simple tabs and represents the easiest to use and most intuitive tool in the market. Finally, our subscriber base model makes all of this very affordable.
What Volusion is doing is consistent with where the market is going. Email is not a 'core' function of ecommerce sites and they cannot be expected to divert their attention to what is another business function with its own set of requirements. More and more hosting sites, ecommerce solutions, web developers and consultants are turning to respected email service providers to supplement their email programs because of the cost of having to manage servers and lists and spam...and the list goes on. They do it primarily out of regard for their customers and the value add it brings and not for the revenue share. We are the professionals and we likewise serve their customers with integrity of reputation, execution and reliability. We are pleased to be associated with Volusion and are honored to be able to serve their customers.
David Roth VP Business Development IntelliContact Broadwick Corporation
David Roth
· 2 years ago
Andy--
Thank you for mentioning IntelliContact in your review of Volusion, a respected name and site in ecommerce solutions. Allow me to first invite you and your readers to take a look at Intellicontact (http://www.intellicontact.com) for its industry leading web based multi-channel ecommunications approach to email marketing. In particular, you addressed the escalating cost to users of Volusion is they exceed the allowable limit. It is true that there is a cost and that Volusion and IntelliContact are partners with a revenue share agreement, however, the cost to their consumers is the same as our pricing to all customers. Furthermore, in our effort to democratize email marketing and in consideration of small business needs, we have provided a tool that not only has the highest industry deliverability but offers a feature rich environment that is normally associated with much higher priced ESP's. Our technology is sophisticated yet our slogan, "We Simplify Email Marketing" is a testament to our software development. All functions are under four simple tabs and represents the easiest to use and most intuitive tool in the market. Finally, our subscriber base model makes all of this very affordable.
What Volusion is doing is consistent with where the market is going. Email is not a 'core' function of ecommerce sites and they cannot be expected to divert their attention to what is another business function with its own set of requirements. More and more hosting sites, ecommerce solutions, web developers and consultants are turning to respected email service providers to supplement their email programs because of the cost of having to manage servers and lists and spam...and the list goes on. They do it primarily out of regard for their customers and the value add it brings and not for the revenue share. We are the professionals and we likewise serve their customers with integrity of reputation, execution and reliability. We are pleased to be associated with Volusion and are honored to be able to serve their customers.
David Roth VP Business Development IntelliContact Broadwick Corporation
AndyBeard
· 2 years ago
@ Yaro I do try my best to include as much information as possible. In many ways it is harder than doing an affiliate review. With any review, if you are going to include criticism it is important to do it as constructively as possible, even if that takes you outside the scope. Also I am increasingly going to be basing my pricing on the time I invest in each review, rather than the traffic I send, or the value of links.
@ David I do respect that Intellicontact is a popular choice, although I feel other Autoresponder services might well dispute your deliverability claims.
However your website claims more than 9024 Clients, whereas there is a high possibility that some Aweber affiliates have referred more than 10,000 customers to Aweber, and GetResponse also have more customers. Email Aces also have a very strong pedigree on deliverability.
Whilst you have reasonable introductory pricing, I would look on that as being a "hook". As soon as someone moves beyond 1000 contacts, Intellicontact becomes uncompetitive compared to Aweber, Getresponse and Email Aces
I am not sure which of these is cheaper at every subscriber quantity currently, but they don't place restrictions on only being able to send out 6 emails to your list per month.
For 10000 subscribers with Aweber you currently pay just $20 per month. Prices at GetResponse are very similar and possibly slightly cheaper.
I am not sure how many customers Aweber have, and they also have customers who purchased white label services. GetRespose quote 500,000 customers.
I totally agree that email shouldn't be a core functionality of an Ecommerce site, and that using the services of a 3rd party specialist is the direction to take. What I don't agree with necessarily is only suggesting one alternative, and having no existing infrastructure to support other popular platforms.
The integrity of email mailing lists is more important than which shopping cart you currently use in many ways.
AndyBeard
· 2 years ago
@ Yaro I do try my best to include as much information as possible. In many ways it is harder than doing an affiliate review. With any review, if you are going to include criticism it is important to do it as constructively as possible, even if that takes you outside the scope. Also I am increasingly going to be basing my pricing on the time I invest in each review, rather than the traffic I send, or the value of links.
@ David I do respect that Intellicontact is a popular choice, although I feel other Autoresponder services might well dispute your deliverability claims.
However your website claims more than 9024 Clients, whereas there is a high possibility that some Aweber affiliates have referred more than 10,000 customers to Aweber, and GetResponse also have more customers. Email Aces also have a very strong pedigree on deliverability.
Whilst you have reasonable introductory pricing, I would look on that as being a "hook". As soon as someone moves beyond 1000 contacts, Intellicontact becomes uncompetitive compared to Aweber, Getresponse and Email Aces
I am not sure which of these is cheaper at every subscriber quantity currently, but they don't place restrictions on only being able to send out 6 emails to your list per month.
For 10000 subscribers with Aweber you currently pay just $20 per month. Prices at GetResponse are very similar and possibly slightly cheaper.
I am not sure how many customers Aweber have, and they also have customers who purchased white label services. GetRespose quote 500,000 customers.
I totally agree that email shouldn't be a core functionality of an Ecommerce site, and that using the services of a 3rd party specialist is the direction to take. What I don't agree with necessarily is only suggesting one alternative, and having no existing infrastructure to support other popular platforms.
The integrity of email mailing lists is more important than which shopping cart you currently use in many ways.
robwatts
· 2 years ago
Bravo Andy. Those guys really got their moneys worth if you ask me. That's what I call a well written, blanaced and comprehensive review of a product. You've really taken the time to look at all manner of aspects that really make a difference in this online marketing world of ours. I'd hazard a guess that Volusion themselves even learnt a little about their product and its perception too.
People use the net to weigh up pros and cons on products and potential purchases. Reviews like this, are a definite asset in that process.
robwatts
· 2 years ago
Bravo Andy. Those guys really got their moneys worth if you ask me. That's what I call a well written, blanaced and comprehensive review of a product. You've really taken the time to look at all manner of aspects that really make a difference in this online marketing world of ours. I'd hazard a guess that Volusion themselves even learnt a little about their product and its perception too.
People use the net to weigh up pros and cons on products and potential purchases. Reviews like this, are a definite asset in that process.
Cris Angelini
· 2 years ago
Hi Andy, Thanks for writing the review. Btw we can totally understand how it’s hard to take in everything b/c there is a lot here. This review has helped us see a few places where we can change our information so that it doesn’t confuse others. Anyway we wanted to take this opportunity to clear up a few incorrect conclusions. 1. Volusion is not a VAR. Volusion has developed all our ecommerce solutions in house (USA). Although we don’t own a datacenter we do obviously offer hosting services to our customers since we sell an on demand solution. Since have close to 100 servers we chose RackSpace since they are the best we could find and actually a lot more expensive than previous hosting companies we had used. We prefer to offer the best instead of the cheapest due to the importance of hosting for our customers. Most people don’t understand all the differences in quality of bandwidth and the # of backbones offered between one host and another but that is just good marketing on the lower level hosts out there. Our monthly hosting also includes extensive firewalls, nightly backups, offsite tape rotation, advanced security, not to mention the 24×7 monitoring both on our side and RS’s side, etc. Our merchants process hundreds of millions in revenue every year, so they require first class hosting. You definitely get what you pay for and hosting is no different. 2. Regarding Volusion designs our customers and their designers make their own designs all day long. Our customers do not have to check with us since they are free to design the sites themselves. 3. Volusion definitely supports downloadable products with product key distribution. Here is a link to the manual giving details. Just scroll down to downloadable products - http://manual.volusion.com/Products-Inventory/9... 4. Volusion Fast Traffic is search traffic not content traffic. We definitely strive to drive very targeted traffic that converts. This is a month to month service, so we have to earn our customer’s business each month. We do this by producing sales. 5. Yes we do have great support from our 24×7 live phone, chat, and email technical support based in the USA down to our free training videos that cover almost everything. 6. Your comment about low volume is not accurate. We have individual customers that do 1000s of orders per day and our largest customers process tens of millions in revenue each year. We hope this clears up some of the confusion. Thanks again for writing the review. Best Regards,
Cris Angelini Business Development Volusion
Iris
· 2 years ago
Volusion is VERY VERY good. But don't try to get any answers on Saturday and Sunday. You will either stay on hold or your chat conversation will close before anyone chats with you.
Rathi Niyogi
· 2 years ago
We are a Volusion customer and our experience has been mixed. Volusion has some fabulous capabilities and overall has a great deal of flexibility. The problem with Volusion is that Ecommerce as an ecosystem has evolved to a point where merely providing an excellent ecommerce engine is not enough. In order to market and track the effectiveness of an ecommerce site there are steps such as adding tracking codes from third party vendors and optimizing content. Volusion's problem is that it provides only basic support. Volusion is great if you have technical proficiency with SQL and html. Otherwise essentially you are being handed keys to a sports car and expected to teach yourself how to drive.
Here's an example. We had decided to add live chat capability to our site and decided to use Volusion's live chat application. In order to install live chat we needed to paste a few lines of code into our Volusion application. Volusion support provided the code but would not tell us where to install it. Mind you, this was Volusion's code to be installed within Volusion's own hosted eCommerce application. Thouroughly miffed, we decided to spend our money with another provider and enlisted the help of a web designer who had some html experience. After some experimentation we had our live chat software.
We are marketers not technical types. This is essentially why one chooses a solution such as Volusion. If we had technical resources we would have built our own solution and managed it in house.
Adding code has become a nightmare and as our site grows it becomes more and more apparent that we may have to "graduate" to a provider that supports its customers. Volusion could solve this issue very easily by offering Professional Services for a fee.
Cris Angelini
· 2 years ago
Hi Andy, Thanks for writing the review. Btw we can totally understand how it’s hard to take in everything b/c there is a lot here. This review has helped us see a few places where we can change our information so that it doesn’t confuse others. Anyway we wanted to take this opportunity to clear up a few incorrect conclusions. 1. Volusion is not a VAR. Volusion has developed all our ecommerce solutions in house (USA). Although we don’t own a datacenter we do obviously offer hosting services to our customers since we sell an on demand solution. Since have close to 100 servers we chose RackSpace since they are the best we could find and actually a lot more expensive than previous hosting companies we had used. We prefer to offer the best instead of the cheapest due to the importance of hosting for our customers. Most people don’t understand all the differences in quality of bandwidth and the # of backbones offered between one host and another but that is just good marketing on the lower level hosts out there. Our monthly hosting also includes extensive firewalls, nightly backups, offsite tape rotation, advanced security, not to mention the 24×7 monitoring both on our side and RS’s side, etc. Our merchants process hundreds of millions in revenue every year, so they require first class hosting. You definitely get what you pay for and hosting is no different. 2. Regarding Volusion designs our customers and their designers make their own designs all day long. Our customers do not have to check with us since they are free to design the sites themselves. 3. Volusion definitely supports downloadable products with product key distribution. Here is a link to the manual giving details. Just scroll down to downloadable products - http://manual.volusion.com/Products-Inventory/9... 4. Volusion Fast Traffic is search traffic not content traffic. We definitely strive to drive very targeted traffic that converts. This is a month to month service, so we have to earn our customer’s business each month. We do this by producing sales. 5. Yes we do have great support from our 24×7 live phone, chat, and email technical support based in the USA down to our free training videos that cover almost everything. 6. Your comment about low volume is not accurate. We have individual customers that do 1000s of orders per day and our largest customers process tens of millions in revenue each year. We hope this clears up some of the confusion. Thanks again for writing the review. Best Regards,
Cris Angelini Business Development Volusion
Iris
· 2 years ago
Volusion is VERY VERY good. But don't try to get any answers on Saturday and Sunday. You will either stay on hold or your chat conversation will close before anyone chats with you.
Rathi Niyogi
· 2 years ago
We are a Volusion customer and our experience has been mixed. Volusion has some fabulous capabilities and overall has a great deal of flexibility. The problem with Volusion is that Ecommerce as an ecosystem has evolved to a point where merely providing an excellent ecommerce engine is not enough. In order to market and track the effectiveness of an ecommerce site there are steps such as adding tracking codes from third party vendors and optimizing content. Volusion's problem is that it provides only basic support. Volusion is great if you have technical proficiency with SQL and html. Otherwise essentially you are being handed keys to a sports car and expected to teach yourself how to drive.
Here's an example. We had decided to add live chat capability to our site and decided to use Volusion's live chat application. In order to install live chat we needed to paste a few lines of code into our Volusion application. Volusion support provided the code but would not tell us where to install it. Mind you, this was Volusion's code to be installed within Volusion's own hosted eCommerce application. Thouroughly miffed, we decided to spend our money with another provider and enlisted the help of a web designer who had some html experience. After some experimentation we had our live chat software.
We are marketers not technical types. This is essentially why one chooses a solution such as Volusion. If we had technical resources we would have built our own solution and managed it in house.
Adding code has become a nightmare and as our site grows it becomes more and more apparent that we may have to "graduate" to a provider that supports its customers. Volusion could solve this issue very easily by offering Professional Services for a fee.
AndyBeard
· 2 years ago
Hi Cris
One additional dilemma I did contemplate was to actually contact Volusion before publishing the review. I remembered the days when I was having software reviewed in magazines, and in general we were never allowed to speak to the reviewers. If paid reviews were a totally accepted system in the blogosphere, more contact would have been easier for readers to accept.
In response to the notes you made
1. VAR and Hosting - I do honestly understand that you get what you pay for with hosting - most of the features you are quoting however are not necessarily bandwidth related, and higher bandwidth use does not automatically relate to more conversions. All it takes is a "Digg" to clock up $100+ in bandwidth charges on Volusion, if you don't take action to minimise the load. It wouldn't be too technically difficult to host media files on a different hosting platform with a redirect created from media.domain.com to the alternate cheaper hosting. A content site would be hard pressed to cover their bandwidth fees with advertising with your pricing. This site frequently takes 100MB hits from Stumbleupon traffic, and that only takes one person to like an article you wrote.
It has been standard practice for some time to offer free downloads from 100kb ebooks to 10MB software as a free incentive to sign up to a mailing list. Only a fraction of those convert to customers.
2. Templates - Good to hear, I will make a correction - please think about giving more access to "play" on the demo.
3. Digital Products - it is a partial solution, though for many digital products such as ebooks DLGuard with its expiring unique download pages are maybe a better solution, and many use such a system even for free reports.
4. Adwords - thanks for the clarification - maybe it could be a useful arbitrage system at those rates for high paying programs.
5. I saw lots of evidence of very responsive support and that was one point I knew you wouldn't disagree with.
6. Are the larger clients really hosting every media file on your servers? Larger sites would typically use Amazon EC2, S3, or maybe Akamai for media files. Amazon S3 hasn't been the most reliable recently but they have competitors, and whilst there are differences in prices we are not talking the order of magnitude between S3 and Volusion currently.
For S3
* No start up fees, no minimum charge * $0.15 per GB for each month of storage * $0.20 per GB of data transferred
It is possible to try to shape a system such that it is attractive to as many business profiles as possible, but it is impossible to suit every kind of business.
Volusion have support for working with drop shipping, which can be lower margin especially if you included an affiliate program.
A good example of conversion rates actually was discussed on Crunchnotes today with Intellicontact you business partner. http://www.crunchnotes.com/?p=366
128,300 Impressions 0.04% CTR 64 Clicks $10.39 Per Click $665.10 Total Cost 1 Conversions to Trial (1.56%)
Not all traffic converts, though if they do get a review on Techcrunch then that would be a very successful marketing campaign.
I don't think I am the ideal customer for Volusion with their current package, but with a few changes their potential marketplace would broaden.
I acknowledge there are core customers for the package. I have to write reviews based on my core audience. Some of my readership is actually the same as Yaro's, and are even considering using the service, but for the majority with a purely online business, I think some of the changes I have suggested would make the service a much better prospect.
AndyBeard
· 2 years ago
Hi Cris
One additional dilemma I did contemplate was to actually contact Volusion before publishing the review. I remembered the days when I was having software reviewed in magazines, and in general we were never allowed to speak to the reviewers. If paid reviews were a totally accepted system in the blogosphere, more contact would have been easier for readers to accept.
In response to the notes you made
1. VAR and Hosting - I do honestly understand that you get what you pay for with hosting - most of the features you are quoting however are not necessarily bandwidth related, and higher bandwidth use does not automatically relate to more conversions. All it takes is a "Digg" to clock up $100+ in bandwidth charges on Volusion, if you don't take action to minimise the load. It wouldn't be too technically difficult to host media files on a different hosting platform with a redirect created from media.domain.com to the alternate cheaper hosting. A content site would be hard pressed to cover their bandwidth fees with advertising with your pricing. This site frequently takes 100MB hits from Stumbleupon traffic, and that only takes one person to like an article you wrote.
It has been standard practice for some time to offer free downloads from 100kb ebooks to 10MB software as a free incentive to sign up to a mailing list. Only a fraction of those convert to customers.
2. Templates - Good to hear, I will make a correction - please think about giving more access to "play" on the demo.
3. Digital Products - it is a partial solution, though for many digital products such as ebooks DLGuard with its expiring unique download pages are maybe a better solution, and many use such a system even for free reports.
4. Adwords - thanks for the clarification - maybe it could be a useful arbitrage system at those rates for high paying programs.
5. I saw lots of evidence of very responsive support and that was one point I knew you wouldn't disagree with.
6. Are the larger clients really hosting every media file on your servers? Larger sites would typically use Amazon EC2, S3, or maybe Akamai for media files. Amazon S3 hasn't been the most reliable recently but they have competitors, and whilst there are differences in prices we are not talking the order of magnitude between S3 and Volusion currently.
For S3
* No start up fees, no minimum charge * $0.15 per GB for each month of storage * $0.20 per GB of data transferred
It is possible to try to shape a system such that it is attractive to as many business profiles as possible, but it is impossible to suit every kind of business.
Volusion have support for working with drop shipping, which can be lower margin especially if you included an affiliate program.
A good example of conversion rates actually was discussed on Crunchnotes today with Intellicontact you business partner. http://www.crunchnotes.com/?p=366
128,300 Impressions 0.04% CTR 64 Clicks $10.39 Per Click $665.10 Total Cost 1 Conversions to Trial (1.56%)
Not all traffic converts, though if they do get a review on Techcrunch then that would be a very successful marketing campaign.
I don't think I am the ideal customer for Volusion with their current package, but with a few changes their potential marketplace would broaden.
I acknowledge there are core customers for the package. I have to write reviews based on my core audience. Some of my readership is actually the same as Yaro's, and are even considering using the service, but for the majority with a purely online business, I think some of the changes I have suggested would make the service a much better prospect.
Mark from Bloglyne
· 2 years ago
Andy - Seriously, this was a great thing to read from a perspective of wanting to get into this sort of thing. I don't know how you find the time to be so extensive, but I think it is great that you are.
Thanks for the perspective Andy.
Mark from Bloglyne
· 2 years ago
Andy - Seriously, this was a great thing to read from a perspective of wanting to get into this sort of thing. I don't know how you find the time to be so extensive, but I think it is great that you are.
I have also modified the article prominently acknowledging this important milestone.
Win
· 2 years ago
As a two plus year customer of Volusion, I read your review with interest.
Re: bandwidth charges. You are right. The ridiculous rates they are charging are from the last century. I have another web site that uses 125 gigs a month and I pay $60/mo for everything.And that's not even that great a deal.
Re: Newsletters. Based on their charges, I have used-off-the web software instead (GroupMail $99) to mail promos, letters etc to my 3500 customers.
One thing you couldn't tell from your brief visit was how Volusion treats their customers problems etc. If you visit their "Support" forum again, note that their are not any forums dedicated to technical problems that customers might be having with the Volusion software. IMO, that would usually be a hub for customers trying to work through problems and would be natural for "support" activities. Say a customer describes being ejected by the software in the middle of ordering, Volusion support has no clue and says that it really can't be a Volusion software issue, so you post in a forum to see if anybody else is having this problem.
I read that before I signed on, the forums were run by a non employee outside the Volusion org and had the usual traffic you would expect in forums for technical glitches. Then, Volusion brought the forums in house, and those sections disappeared. For a while, customers with software issues get around this by posting in a another, related forum, but after a while Volusion started to delete those posts without explanation. You could discuss how to master a particular feature, but not why the server was hanging for a minute at a time. Now all posts are screened before apearing by the Admin and they don't allow technical talk like that.
I asked the forum admin about this and was told that the "Support" forums were not for discussion of Volusion related performance or technical issues, that those should be dealt with directly with tech support. (Forget about users identifying a problem by comparing notes in a forum.) I can see where they could (and should) delete rants or scurrilous attacks, but not tech talk.
Of course, I think the real reason for this policy is obvious. Volusion doesn't want anything that could be perceived as even remotely negative about their service posted in public. They are more than willing to inconvenience current customers and run the risk of not fixing problems that are costings them money in order to attract new customers. I think they are wrong about that. People want to know if a company listen & acts. Geez, I've been on plenty of forums run by for profit companies that air problems all the time. Read Tom Peters.
As it is, if say I get a rash of customer complaints about the way the order page is performing and the tech guy says, "If you can't replicate the problem on demand, I'm not going to spend time trying to ferret it out," I can't verify or dismiss the problem with any other customer.
And I'm afraid their tech support has deteriorated. Two days ago, Scanalert pulled my "Hacker safe" Icon because of a potential security leak detected in the database software. That's Volusion's responsibility, so I emailed them. Not only did I not get the usual automatic trouble ticket email back, I didn't hear anything from them. This morning, I emailed again with the details I got from Scanalert. No response. I called them on the phone, but died on hold. I posted a message in a forum about not being able to contact Volusion support, hoping that even if the message was screened out by the Admin, they would contact tech support and they would contact me. Didn't happen. Finally, I emailed tech support again this noon (seven hours ago) and still haven't heard a word.
It's a real pain to move a store that you have spent two+ years developing to a new vendor , but......
Win
· 2 years ago
As a two plus year customer of Volusion, I read your review with interest.
Re: bandwidth charges. You are right. The ridiculous rates they are charging are from the last century. I have another web site that uses 125 gigs a month and I pay $60/mo for everything.And that's not even that great a deal.
Re: Newsletters. Based on their charges, I have used-off-the web software instead (GroupMail $99) to mail promos, letters etc to my 3500 customers.
One thing you couldn't tell from your brief visit was how Volusion treats their customers problems etc. If you visit their "Support" forum again, note that their are not any forums dedicated to technical problems that customers might be having with the Volusion software. IMO, that would usually be a hub for customers trying to work through problems and would be natural for "support" activities. Say a customer describes being ejected by the software in the middle of ordering, Volusion support has no clue and says that it really can't be a Volusion software issue, so you post in a forum to see if anybody else is having this problem.
I read that before I signed on, the forums were run by a non employee outside the Volusion org and had the usual traffic you would expect in forums for technical glitches. Then, Volusion brought the forums in house, and those sections disappeared. For a while, customers with software issues get around this by posting in a another, related forum, but after a while Volusion started to delete those posts without explanation. You could discuss how to master a particular feature, but not why the server was hanging for a minute at a time. Now all posts are screened before apearing by the Admin and they don't allow technical talk like that.
I asked the forum admin about this and was told that the "Support" forums were not for discussion of Volusion related performance or technical issues, that those should be dealt with directly with tech support. (Forget about users identifying a problem by comparing notes in a forum.) I can see where they could (and should) delete rants or scurrilous attacks, but not tech talk.
Of course, I think the real reason for this policy is obvious. Volusion doesn't want anything that could be perceived as even remotely negative about their service posted in public. They are more than willing to inconvenience current customers and run the risk of not fixing problems that are costings them money in order to attract new customers. I think they are wrong about that. People want to know if a company listen & acts. Geez, I've been on plenty of forums run by for profit companies that air problems all the time. Read Tom Peters.
As it is, if say I get a rash of customer complaints about the way the order page is performing and the tech guy says, "If you can't replicate the problem on demand, I'm not going to spend time trying to ferret it out," I can't verify or dismiss the problem with any other customer.
And I'm afraid their tech support has deteriorated. Two days ago, Scanalert pulled my "Hacker safe" Icon because of a potential security leak detected in the database software. That's Volusion's responsibility, so I emailed them. Not only did I not get the usual automatic trouble ticket email back, I didn't hear anything from them. This morning, I emailed again with the details I got from Scanalert. No response. I called them on the phone, but died on hold. I posted a message in a forum about not being able to contact Volusion support, hoping that even if the message was screened out by the Admin, they would contact tech support and they would contact me. Didn't happen. Finally, I emailed tech support again this noon (seven hours ago) and still haven't heard a word.
It's a real pain to move a store that you have spent two+ years developing to a new vendor , but......
Kirtok
· 2 years ago
Hi Andy Great review as usual. I think your review was the most comprehensive one about Volusion. But, I wanted to write a comprehensive review about Volusion because all the reviews out there were written by non-volusion customers.
It was frustrating for me not to be able to find unbiased information about Volusion before I decided to purcahse. Your review was the ONLY unbiased review. I have been a customer of Volusion for a while, and it was time for me to write my own version of the review. I hope it helps biz owners who are researching about Volusion:
Hi Andy Great review as usual. I think your review was the most comprehensive one about Volusion. But, I wanted to write a comprehensive review about Volusion because all the reviews out there were written by non-volusion customers.
It was frustrating for me not to be able to find unbiased information about Volusion before I decided to purcahse. Your review was the ONLY unbiased review. I have been a customer of Volusion for a while, and it was time for me to write my own version of the review. I hope it helps biz owners who are researching about Volusion:
I definitely hope that Volusion takes the bandwidth conversation to heart. Remember when your $79.95 cell phone bill turned into $500.00 because you were too "gabby" and went over your minutes? Remember when AOL charged by the minute and $29.95 suddenly became $295 on your bill because you were too "chatty"? Well those models eventually broke down as competition evolved.
But, now I feel caught in that same old trap because we are too "trafficky." Those SE spiders are crawling us daily and I'm not about to stop them, and we advertise on search engines to bring in traffic.
The result... our bandwidth overages bill is over $1000 per month. We found that we went over our allocated bandwidth almost from the get-go and upgraded from plan to plan until we could upgrade no more and now the bill just goes up-up-up each month as bandwidth increases.
I've seen it suggested that the solution to the problem is to host your images on another server that offers unlimited bandwidth, but shouldn't $1000 in hosting per month buy oneself unlimited (or at least higher) bandwith in today's day and age?
Mind you, we are not offering digital downloads or serving up porn movies --- this is just from plain old traffic and product .jpg files.
We have asked for a customized proposal but have been told that there are no plans to offer customized pricing plans at this time, but we hope for a change of heart as pricing trends evolve in the future, because we have many good things to say about Volusion too and would prefer to be focused on those.
Jeff
· 2 years ago
In the above post, I should specify that our "hosting bill is over $1,000", not our overage bill. Technically the overage is $500 since we are on the $499 per month plan.
Jeff
· 2 years ago
I definitely hope that Volusion takes the bandwidth conversation to heart. Remember when your $79.95 cell phone bill turned into $500.00 because you were too "gabby" and went over your minutes? Remember when AOL charged by the minute and $29.95 suddenly became $295 on your bill because you were too "chatty"? Well those models eventually broke down as competition evolved.
But, now I feel caught in that same old trap because we are too "trafficky." Those SE spiders are crawling us daily and I'm not about to stop them, and we advertise on search engines to bring in traffic.
The result... our bandwidth overages bill is over $1000 per month. We found that we went over our allocated bandwidth almost from the get-go and upgraded from plan to plan until we could upgrade no more and now the bill just goes up-up-up each month as bandwidth increases.
I've seen it suggested that the solution to the problem is to host your images on another server that offers unlimited bandwidth, but shouldn't $1000 in hosting per month buy oneself unlimited (or at least higher) bandwith in today's day and age?
Mind you, we are not offering digital downloads or serving up porn movies --- this is just from plain old traffic and product .jpg files.
We have asked for a customized proposal but have been told that there are no plans to offer customized pricing plans at this time, but we hope for a change of heart as pricing trends evolve in the future, because we have many good things to say about Volusion too and would prefer to be focused on those.
Jeff
· 2 years ago
In the above post, I should specify that our "hosting bill is over $1,000", not our overage bill. Technically the overage is $500 since we are on the $499 per month plan.
Richard Chilton
· 2 years ago
Thinking about Volusion? I couldn't tell you, I've signed up with the "High Roller" package two months ago. Let me tell you, I certainly don't feel like a high roller. I've been billed twice, and looking at a third bill and just got my logo and 1st homepage revision back. Is that right, getting billed twice for software that I can't even use?
What's really weird is the management team, you can't speak to anyone there. It's like they are avoiding me. After six weeks of virtually nothing, I've decided to hire a different designer, and still use Volusions software. And even this has become a problem. I was promised a $1495 rebate by the "management" there, and now no one will return my call.
Watch this, I'm going to stop payment on the third billing cycle just to see how fast I get a call back from the company.
Seems Volusion is in the game for one reason, and that's not to benefit the customer. What a shame, you wonder if this kind of business practice is brought down from the top, or if the top has gotten so big it's unaware of it's own customer service.
Richard Chilton
· 2 years ago
Thinking about Volusion? I couldn't tell you, I've signed up with the "High Roller" package two months ago. Let me tell you, I certainly don't feel like a high roller. I've been billed twice, and looking at a third bill and just got my logo and 1st homepage revision back. Is that right, getting billed twice for software that I can't even use?
What's really weird is the management team, you can't speak to anyone there. It's like they are avoiding me. After six weeks of virtually nothing, I've decided to hire a different designer, and still use Volusions software. And even this has become a problem. I was promised a $1495 rebate by the "management" there, and now no one will return my call.
Watch this, I'm going to stop payment on the third billing cycle just to see how fast I get a call back from the company.
Seems Volusion is in the game for one reason, and that's not to benefit the customer. What a shame, you wonder if this kind of business practice is brought down from the top, or if the top has gotten so big it's unaware of it's own customer service.
Legg
· 2 years ago
I have been with volusion now for a couple years. Things started out good I was setting up the store and started uploading my products. We are a small business but deal with a number of distributors and offer around 200,000+ Dvds, CDs, and games. I thought it would be no problem since we signed up for the "unlimited products" plan. WRONG. Turns out once I got about 100,000 products up there I could no longer reindex the database. This means I could not do stock updates or change anything in the database. Worst of all when I would try and reindex the server would time out and my store would be empty of all products.
I talked to tech support a ton of times and they had no answer. Eventually they ended up telling me I was running into the limitations of sql. That doesn't make much sense to me and seemed like a straight up lie but what do i know about sql? In order for me to get our database manageable I had to manually delete 100,000 products! Worst part is I had to delete them 500 at a time because they said there was no other way.
I now have 90,000 products which means I cannot offer CDs and Games only our DVD inventory. That doesn't sound like "unlimited products" to me.
All I'm saying is they should have some kind of disclaimer about "unlimited products".
Don't get me wrong, volusion does alot of things right but If I had it to do all over again I maybe would explore some other options.
Legg
· 2 years ago
I have been with volusion now for a couple years. Things started out good I was setting up the store and started uploading my products. We are a small business but deal with a number of distributors and offer around 200,000+ Dvds, CDs, and games. I thought it would be no problem since we signed up for the "unlimited products" plan. WRONG. Turns out once I got about 100,000 products up there I could no longer reindex the database. This means I could not do stock updates or change anything in the database. Worst of all when I would try and reindex the server would time out and my store would be empty of all products.
I talked to tech support a ton of times and they had no answer. Eventually they ended up telling me I was running into the limitations of sql. That doesn't make much sense to me and seemed like a straight up lie but what do i know about sql? In order for me to get our database manageable I had to manually delete 100,000 products! Worst part is I had to delete them 500 at a time because they said there was no other way.
I now have 90,000 products which means I cannot offer CDs and Games only our DVD inventory. That doesn't sound like "unlimited products" to me.
All I'm saying is they should have some kind of disclaimer about "unlimited products".
Don't get me wrong, volusion does alot of things right but If I had it to do all over again I maybe would explore some other options.
Scott Clark
· 2 years ago
Thank you for the review, Andy.
I'm a experienced web store creator and have built stores on at least 20 different catalog environments in the past 10 years.
I have found that Volusion is a poor choice for large catalogs of products - at least on their hosted service. Our product space is apparel. The store environment requires many manual operations required for things that should be done by the software. While most of this isn't apparent until you really "get into it," I felt the need to post a few notes in this space.
In hopes to speed our project, I used the "design" service on one part of the store but, I'll be kind to say the results 'mediocre' ($1000 wasted.) They also took weeks to do what I ended up repeating in photoshop in 2 hours. I do not recommend that service *at all.*
The smartmatch inventory system setup is very difficult to get right. Though the feature itself seems to work (if you can get through the set-up) you will likely find it takes years off of your life. You must go do a series of cut/paste operations whenever you wish to use it which are error prone and impractical for large inventories. If you forget any of those steps, you can find yourself very frustrated trying to figure out what went wrong several steps down.
In all the examples, of course, they are talking about one product or small chunks of inventory. If you have more than 50 products you will start to feel the pain.To their credit, style matrices are very difficult to do in any system. I'm just bothered that they pitch the smartmatch system as "easy."
The online videos on any of the advanced are not much better IMO, and half of my calls to support have met with what can only be described as snobbery. Even the videos have a touch.
All in all the project has been a nightmare and I've been sorry that Volusion was used. I am now fully 1 month behind and can attribute much of that delay to the difficulties with the store system.
Scott Clark
· 2 years ago
Thank you for the review, Andy.
I'm a experienced web store creator and have built stores on at least 20 different catalog environments in the past 10 years.
I have found that Volusion is a poor choice for large catalogs of products - at least on their hosted service. Our product space is apparel. The store environment requires many manual operations required for things that should be done by the software. While most of this isn't apparent until you really "get into it," I felt the need to post a few notes in this space.
In hopes to speed our project, I used the "design" service on one part of the store but, I'll be kind to say the results 'mediocre' ($1000 wasted.) They also took weeks to do what I ended up repeating in photoshop in 2 hours. I do not recommend that service *at all.*
The smartmatch inventory system setup is very difficult to get right. Though the feature itself seems to work (if you can get through the set-up) you will likely find it takes years off of your life. You must go do a series of cut/paste operations whenever you wish to use it which are error prone and impractical for large inventories. If you forget any of those steps, you can find yourself very frustrated trying to figure out what went wrong several steps down.
In all the examples, of course, they are talking about one product or small chunks of inventory. If you have more than 50 products you will start to feel the pain.To their credit, style matrices are very difficult to do in any system. I'm just bothered that they pitch the smartmatch system as "easy."
The online videos on any of the advanced are not much better IMO, and half of my calls to support have met with what can only be described as snobbery. Even the videos have a touch.
All in all the project has been a nightmare and I've been sorry that Volusion was used. I am now fully 1 month behind and can attribute much of that delay to the difficulties with the store system.
Dan
· 1 year ago
I am just about to sign up for a Platnium ( we have just over 1200 products) Account and started to check around on issues. I like the software features and operation.
I thought that we would have a great little store and not exceed bandwith from what the salesman expresed. When I talked about traffic and use his response was :
“The platinum store has 15 GB of bandwidth a month, which equals to between 1500-2250 customers per day on the site.â€
He failed to mention the “other traffic†the spiders, and other creatures of the web. Well I didn’t really ask that and he is a salesman after all.
Is it the pictures that cause the traffic? Would it be less for a members only store or do they still creep in and squander bandwidth?
thanks for any replys
Dan
AndyBeard
· 1 year ago
Dan here are some things that eat up bandwidth
1. Search Engine Crawlers - on this blog it can sometimes be up to 10GB a month, and I have actually reduced pagecount partially because of this. I used to have lots of translated pages, but it was making backup files extremely large.
2. Images - you need lots of images on a content site that is intended to convert.Small thumbnails are not so much a problem as you can reduce those down to 10kb in size, but for larger files, even using jpegs with low image quality, you are often looking at 100kb or more, especially with photographs. Bandwidth can be used by both normal visitors, and those using image search. That shouldn't be looked on as a bad thing, visitors = traffic = potential $$$, but some forms of traffic are lower quality than others.
3. Syndication of content by RSS - if you use RSS, various RSS crawlers are going to check your RSS feeds for changes. This can eat up a lot of bandwidth.
4. Googlebase - I haven't looked into detail with Googlebase, but I would think there is a potential bandwidth usage, maybe even pulling in images
5. Shopping engines of various kinds updating their database could potentially be a server hog.
6. Affiliates will be pulling data from your site in various ways
7. People hotlinking your images - this might be looked on as a bad thing, but if you were running a gallery site for instance, the traffic and links you could get by making your images viral and possibly allowing them to be used on Stumbleupon and other social sites would be welcome, even if the traffic is poor quality. It is hard for commerse sites to get natural links.
I still have no data on how much Rackspace charge their normal clients for "overage" or excess bandwidth, but if it really is $10 per GB, I can't imagine many people using them.
Whilst you can limit bandwidth use by using offsite storage for images, and maybe even for syndicated content, in this day and age it is unreasonable to have to do that for all but the highest bandwidth sites.
I am just about to sign up for a Platnium ( we have just over 1200 products) Account and started to check around on issues. I like the software features and operation.
I thought that we would have a great little store and not exceed bandwith from what the salesman expresed. When I talked about traffic and use his response was :
“The platinum store has 15 GB of bandwidth a month, which equals to between 1500-2250 customers per day on the site.â€
He failed to mention the “other traffic†the spiders, and other creatures of the web. Well I didn’t really ask that and he is a salesman after all.
Is it the pictures that cause the traffic? Would it be less for a members only store or do they still creep in and squander bandwidth?
thanks for any replys
Dan
AndyBeard
· 1 year ago
Dan here are some things that eat up bandwidth
1. Search Engine Crawlers - on this blog it can sometimes be up to 10GB a month, and I have actually reduced pagecount partially because of this. I used to have lots of translated pages, but it was making backup files extremely large.
2. Images - you need lots of images on a content site that is intended to convert.Small thumbnails are not so much a problem as you can reduce those down to 10kb in size, but for larger files, even using jpegs with low image quality, you are often looking at 100kb or more, especially with photographs. Bandwidth can be used by both normal visitors, and those using image search. That shouldn't be looked on as a bad thing, visitors = traffic = potential $$$, but some forms of traffic are lower quality than others.
3. Syndication of content by RSS - if you use RSS, various RSS crawlers are going to check your RSS feeds for changes. This can eat up a lot of bandwidth.
4. Googlebase - I haven't looked into detail with Googlebase, but I would think there is a potential bandwidth usage, maybe even pulling in images
5. Shopping engines of various kinds updating their database could potentially be a server hog.
6. Affiliates will be pulling data from your site in various ways
7. People hotlinking your images - this might be looked on as a bad thing, but if you were running a gallery site for instance, the traffic and links you could get by making your images viral and possibly allowing them to be used on Stumbleupon and other social sites would be welcome, even if the traffic is poor quality. It is hard for commerse sites to get natural links.
I still have no data on how much Rackspace charge their normal clients for "overage" or excess bandwidth, but if it really is $10 per GB, I can't imagine many people using them.
Whilst you can limit bandwidth use by using offsite storage for images, and maybe even for syndicated content, in this day and age it is unreasonable to have to do that for all but the highest bandwidth sites.
I was thinking of switching my store over to Volusion but I am worried about the bandwidth issues. I'm running OSC right now and it has it's limits but I like having total control over my store and its hosting.
Ghillie Suit Guy
· 1 year ago
I was thinking of switching my store over to Volusion but I am worried about the bandwidth issues. I'm running OSC right now and it has it's limits but I like having total control over my store and its hosting.
Kenric
· 1 year ago
I am on their 14 day trial right now and just talked to my sales rep. over there. I really like their 1 page checkout and features but their cost overall seems to add up. Specifically I'm worried that I'll start at the Bronze and move up and up due to bandwidth and product number issues.
In reading the comments here, I just can't imagine what would happen if your store became largely successful in 2 years and you're still stuck with a 15GB limit. They really need to have an unlimited plan at the top.
Kenric
· 1 year ago
I am on their 14 day trial right now and just talked to my sales rep. over there. I really like their 1 page checkout and features but their cost overall seems to add up. Specifically I'm worried that I'll start at the Bronze and move up and up due to bandwidth and product number issues.
In reading the comments here, I just can't imagine what would happen if your store became largely successful in 2 years and you're still stuck with a 15GB limit. They really need to have an unlimited plan at the top.
Tibi
· 1 year ago
About two weeks ago I finished opening accounts, get all the licensing... and organize my files. I am ready to open a on line store for medical equipment and I have a hard time deciding which company I should choose for that. Volusion was and still is a great contender but after reading all this comments I realize the bandwidth I a problem. I assume I will have around 1000 products on the site with a single image for each product. I really don't know much about setting up a website and I completely rely on the videos and step by step instructions offered by the software. All I am trying to do is to start with the right foot. Can anybody advise me what other company I should consider if Volusion is not the right one (considering the bandwidth issue).
Thank you for your time and consideration.
AndyBeard
· 1 year ago
Volusion may still be a good option for you depending on the kind of traffic you expect on the site, the size of images, and cost for conversion metrics.
I would certainly suggest starting your mailing list using Aweber, thus making any clients portable to other systems.
Cheryl Williams
· 1 year ago
You may want to look at CoreCommerce. You get a lot more bandwidth, they also use Rackspace.
AndyBeard
· 1 year ago
Cheryl sorry to disappoint you, but to just host this blog on those servers along with e-commerce I would have to go for the $1000 a month corporate package.
That just isn't acceptable as this site is actually quite low traffic.
I don't host any audio or video, or sell digital products here yet.
250GB a month transfer for $1000 isn't good value, it is still $4/GB
H. Andy Jaxson
· 1 year ago
I agree with the above poster. I checked out Core Commerce along with Volusion and Core Commerce is a newer service, and they seem to offer a lot more from a bandwidth and hard drive point of view. I also talked to a sales guy who told me that with Volusion, they count product options as product also, so like if you were on the small plan for 20 products, you can run out of products really quickly if you have options like sizes and colors. With Core Commerce, the product options do not count, so on their small plan (which is 50 products), you can have 50 products with as many option as you need to have. So if you havent checked out Core Commerce I would. It seems finally there is someone to compete with Volusion that has the same if not better features and competitive pricing. And right now the first month is free with no setup fee.....so I am seriously considering giving it a shot.
Tibi
· 1 year ago
About two weeks ago I finished opening accounts, get all the licensing... and organize my files. I am ready to open a on line store for medical equipment and I have a hard time deciding which company I should choose for that. Volusion was and still is a great contender but after reading all this comments I realize the bandwidth I a problem. I assume I will have around 1000 products on the site with a single image for each product. I really don't know much about setting up a website and I completely rely on the videos and step by step instructions offered by the software. All I am trying to do is to start with the right foot. Can anybody advise me what other company I should consider if Volusion is not the right one (considering the bandwidth issue).
Thank you for your time and consideration.
AndyBeard
· 1 year ago
Volusion may still be a good option for you depending on the kind of traffic you expect on the site, the size of images, and cost for conversion metrics.
I would certainly suggest starting your mailing list using Aweber, thus making any clients portable to other systems.
Cheryl Williams
· 1 year ago
You may want to look at CoreCommerce. You get a lot more bandwidth, they also use Rackspace.
AndyBeard
· 1 year ago
Cheryl sorry to disappoint you, but to just host this blog on those servers along with e-commerce I would have to go for the $1000 a month corporate package.
That just isn't acceptable as this site is actually quite low traffic.
I don't host any audio or video, or sell digital products here yet.
250GB a month transfer for $1000 isn't good value, it is still $4/GB
H. Andy Jaxson
· 1 year ago
I agree with the above poster. I checked out Core Commerce along with Volusion and Core Commerce is a newer service, and they seem to offer a lot more from a bandwidth and hard drive point of view. I also talked to a sales guy who told me that with Volusion, they count product options as product also, so like if you were on the small plan for 20 products, you can run out of products really quickly if you have options like sizes and colors. With Core Commerce, the product options do not count, so on their small plan (which is 50 products), you can have 50 products with as many option as you need to have. So if you havent checked out Core Commerce I would. It seems finally there is someone to compete with Volusion that has the same if not better features and competitive pricing. And right now the first month is free with no setup fee.....so I am seriously considering giving it a shot.
CoreCommerce
· 1 year ago
Noticed your blog and just want to clear something up. Actually there's is $2GB you can pre-purchase on the small business platinum plan (or corporate). So if you don't need a dedicated server, which some don't you can prepay $2/GB for extra bandwidth at the platinum level. So if you wanted 250 GB that would be $400 + platinum plan. Compare this to volusion as in this blog and at volusion that would have been $2350/month + the platinum level (they charge $10/GB). That is quite a difference.
CoreCommerce
· 1 year ago
Noticed your blog and just want to clear something up. Actually there's is $2GB you can pre-purchase on the small business platinum plan (or corporate). So if you don't need a dedicated server, which some don't you can prepay $2/GB for extra bandwidth at the platinum level. So if you wanted 250 GB that would be $400 + platinum plan. Compare this to volusion as in this blog and at volusion that would have been $2350/month + the platinum level (they charge $10/GB). That is quite a difference.
Trezora - Glass Art Jewelry
· 1 year ago
Thank you!
Your comprehensive review saved me yet another costly mistake. I'm wanting to update my site and would have definitely gone over my BW limit. This process is at best overwhelming and your review has helped highlight the type of issues I need to consider. Did I already say Thank You?
Mendy
Trezora - Glass Art Jewelry
· 1 year ago
Thank you!
Your comprehensive review saved me yet another costly mistake. I'm wanting to update my site and would have definitely gone over my BW limit. This process is at best overwhelming and your review has helped highlight the type of issues I need to consider. Did I already say Thank You?
Mendy
jaytee
· 1 year ago
Man, this was a good review. Thanks for outlining their bandwidth issues. The prices they are charging border on scandalous. Signing up would have been a costly mistake.
jaytee
· 1 year ago
Man, this was a good review. Thanks for outlining their bandwidth issues. The prices they are charging border on scandalous. Signing up would have been a costly mistake.
HandyJaxson
· 1 year ago
you should do a review of corecommerce.com. I like them over Volusion and they are a monthly fee service also. Can you post a review of them if you have not done one already?
HandyJaxson
· 1 year ago
you should do a review of corecommerce.com. I like them over Volusion and they are a monthly fee service also. Can you post a review of them if you have not done one already?
Sohoce
· 1 year ago
I am currently using Prostores. They have a pretty good platform although some features are missing (Reviews, multiple tabs for product detail, multiple pictures). They do have several positive points such as 200GB BW, 10GB storage, 100 email boxes and 50000 items for $74.95 per month plus 0.5% per transaction. It offers full integration with Ebay, being an Ebay company plus several extra add-on application for additional cost. I was about to sign up with Volusion, but the BW is definitely a huge deal breaker, as we offer an inventory of 20,000 items. I guess i will just keep looking for the "perle rare"! Thank you for avoiding me a costly mistake. Keep up the good work!
Sohoce
· 1 year ago
I am currently using Prostores. They have a pretty good platform although some features are missing (Reviews, multiple tabs for product detail, multiple pictures). They do have several positive points such as 200GB BW, 10GB storage, 100 email boxes and 50000 items for $74.95 per month plus 0.5% per transaction. It offers full integration with Ebay, being an Ebay company plus several extra add-on application for additional cost. I was about to sign up with Volusion, but the BW is definitely a huge deal breaker, as we offer an inventory of 20,000 items. I guess i will just keep looking for the "perle rare"! Thank you for avoiding me a costly mistake. Keep up the good work!
All Comments
It shows you truly care about delivering valuable information, and that is a quality I admire :-)
Yaro
Review your Volusion experience now!
moderated chat session as offered, though it was available for some time - it is not acceptable to post private communication here on the blog without the authorization of the third party - at the time it was posted someone from Volusion was subscribed to the post, though I haven't been running subscribe to comments for a few months now
As I first mentioned, I've gone through this several times with their after hours supports...I've even had email chats with the support manager who seemed very unhappy with how my case was handled. Each time it was a different rep.
There were 2 times I got a rep that just did what I needed and made things right very quick. Every other time it has been a list of why they can't support any given issue. This seems to go against the meaning of support.
As you read in the chat I had with david on 7/4/07, he was evasive in providing with documentation on his policy stance. Why? Does it exist in writing anywhere?
I been setting up shop and love the software and what it allows me to do, it just when I need things tweeked a little or something is just plain amiss, support offers no to very little help.
They either need to revamp there policy if it exist, or just end the after hours support and spend that money making other improvements to their product.
I don't generally do consultation because I don't want to be responsible to total cock-ups.
Support staff are specifically trained not to get "hands-on" with a customer site for that kind of reason. The rules might be written down in staff handbooks which are not publicly available, and I rarely see a company publish such document.
If they do publish something, it is normally a much shorter policy note that cannot cover every situation.
Whilst I have questioned some of the costing, you would probably have to pay far more if you wanted hands-on support.
I must admit I am in 2 minds whether to leave this feedback in place. I am not sure of the legal situation regarding the differences between email communication which by law is private, and a live chat application.
I know Cris from Volusion is subscribed to this post by email, so will have notification of your concerns.
If I am asked to remove it, I will remove the specific conversation with Volusion support.
I know this might not be the answer you are looking for, but there are the Volusion forums, and I am sure there are contractors who lurk there who can probably help you for fairly minimal charge.
Some things in webdesign are quite complicated, especially with compatibility between browsers.
It shows you truly care about delivering valuable information, and that is a quality I admire :-)
Yaro
Review your Volusion experience now!
moderated chat session as offered, though it was available for some time - it is not acceptable to post private communication here on the blog without the authorization of the third party - at the time it was posted someone from Volusion was subscribed to the post, though I haven't been running subscribe to comments for a few months now
As I first mentioned, I've gone through this several times with their after hours supports...I've even had email chats with the support manager who seemed very unhappy with how my case was handled. Each time it was a different rep.
There were 2 times I got a rep that just did what I needed and made things right very quick. Every other time it has been a list of why they can't support any given issue. This seems to go against the meaning of support.
As you read in the chat I had with david on 7/4/07, he was evasive in providing with documentation on his policy stance. Why? Does it exist in writing anywhere?
I been setting up shop and love the software and what it allows me to do, it just when I need things tweeked a little or something is just plain amiss, support offers no to very little help.
They either need to revamp there policy if it exist, or just end the after hours support and spend that money making other improvements to their product.
I don't generally do consultation because I don't want to be responsible to total cock-ups.
Support staff are specifically trained not to get "hands-on" with a customer site for that kind of reason. The rules might be written down in staff handbooks which are not publicly available, and I rarely see a company publish such document.
If they do publish something, it is normally a much shorter policy note that cannot cover every situation.
Whilst I have questioned some of the costing, you would probably have to pay far more if you wanted hands-on support.
I must admit I am in 2 minds whether to leave this feedback in place. I am not sure of the legal situation regarding the differences between email communication which by law is private, and a live chat application.
I know Cris from Volusion is subscribed to this post by email, so will have notification of your concerns.
If I am asked to remove it, I will remove the specific conversation with Volusion support.
I know this might not be the answer you are looking for, but there are the Volusion forums, and I am sure there are contractors who lurk there who can probably help you for fairly minimal charge.
Some things in webdesign are quite complicated, especially with compatibility between browsers.
Thank you for mentioning IntelliContact in your review of Volusion, a respected name and site in ecommerce solutions. Allow me to first invite you and your readers to take a look at Intellicontact (http://www.intellicontact.com) for its industry leading web based multi-channel ecommunications approach to email marketing. In particular, you addressed the escalating cost to users of Volusion is they exceed the allowable limit. It is true that there is a cost and that Volusion and IntelliContact are partners with a revenue share agreement, however, the cost to their consumers is the same as our pricing to all customers. Furthermore, in our effort to democratize email marketing and in consideration of small business needs, we have provided a tool that not only has the highest industry deliverability but offers a feature rich environment that is normally associated with much higher priced ESP's. Our technology is sophisticated yet our slogan, "We Simplify Email Marketing" is a testament to our software development. All functions are under four simple tabs and represents the easiest to use and most intuitive tool in the market. Finally, our subscriber base model makes all of this very affordable.
What Volusion is doing is consistent with where the market is going. Email is not a 'core' function of ecommerce sites and they cannot be expected to divert their attention to what is another business function with its own set of requirements. More and more hosting sites, ecommerce solutions, web developers and consultants are turning to respected email service providers to supplement their email programs because of the cost of having to manage servers and lists and spam...and the list goes on. They do it primarily out of regard for their customers and the value add it brings and not for the revenue share. We are the professionals and we likewise serve their customers with integrity of reputation, execution and reliability. We are pleased to be associated with Volusion and are honored to be able to serve their customers.
David Roth
VP Business Development
IntelliContact
Broadwick Corporation
Thank you for mentioning IntelliContact in your review of Volusion, a respected name and site in ecommerce solutions. Allow me to first invite you and your readers to take a look at Intellicontact (http://www.intellicontact.com) for its industry leading web based multi-channel ecommunications approach to email marketing. In particular, you addressed the escalating cost to users of Volusion is they exceed the allowable limit. It is true that there is a cost and that Volusion and IntelliContact are partners with a revenue share agreement, however, the cost to their consumers is the same as our pricing to all customers. Furthermore, in our effort to democratize email marketing and in consideration of small business needs, we have provided a tool that not only has the highest industry deliverability but offers a feature rich environment that is normally associated with much higher priced ESP's. Our technology is sophisticated yet our slogan, "We Simplify Email Marketing" is a testament to our software development. All functions are under four simple tabs and represents the easiest to use and most intuitive tool in the market. Finally, our subscriber base model makes all of this very affordable.
What Volusion is doing is consistent with where the market is going. Email is not a 'core' function of ecommerce sites and they cannot be expected to divert their attention to what is another business function with its own set of requirements. More and more hosting sites, ecommerce solutions, web developers and consultants are turning to respected email service providers to supplement their email programs because of the cost of having to manage servers and lists and spam...and the list goes on. They do it primarily out of regard for their customers and the value add it brings and not for the revenue share. We are the professionals and we likewise serve their customers with integrity of reputation, execution and reliability. We are pleased to be associated with Volusion and are honored to be able to serve their customers.
David Roth
VP Business Development
IntelliContact
Broadwick Corporation
I do try my best to include as much information as possible. In many ways it is harder than doing an affiliate review. With any review, if you are going to include criticism it is important to do it as constructively as possible, even if that takes you outside the scope.
Also I am increasingly going to be basing my pricing on the time I invest in each review, rather than the traffic I send, or the value of links.
@ David
I do respect that Intellicontact is a popular choice, although I feel other Autoresponder services might well dispute your deliverability claims.
However your website claims more than 9024 Clients, whereas there is a high possibility that some Aweber affiliates have referred more than 10,000 customers to Aweber, and GetResponse also have more customers. Email Aces also have a very strong pedigree on deliverability.
<h3>Intellicontact Costs</h3>
<pre>
Clever 500 $9.95 $107.46
Sharp 1,000 $14.00 $151.20
Intelligent 2,500 $29.00 $313.20
Smart 5,000 $47.00 $507.60
Wise 10,000 $74.00 $799.20
</pre>
Whilst you have reasonable introductory pricing, I would look on that as being a "hook". As soon as someone moves beyond 1000 contacts, Intellicontact becomes uncompetitive compared to Aweber, Getresponse and Email Aces
I am not sure which of these is cheaper at every subscriber quantity currently, but they don't place restrictions on only being able to send out 6 emails to your list per month.
For 10000 subscribers with Aweber you currently pay just $20 per month.
Prices at GetResponse are very similar and possibly slightly cheaper.
I am not sure how many customers Aweber have, and they also have customers who purchased white label services.
GetRespose quote 500,000 customers.
I totally agree that email shouldn't be a core functionality of an Ecommerce site, and that using the services of a 3rd party specialist is the direction to take.
What I don't agree with necessarily is only suggesting one alternative, and having no existing infrastructure to support other popular platforms.
The integrity of email mailing lists is more important than which shopping cart you currently use in many ways.
I do try my best to include as much information as possible. In many ways it is harder than doing an affiliate review. With any review, if you are going to include criticism it is important to do it as constructively as possible, even if that takes you outside the scope.
Also I am increasingly going to be basing my pricing on the time I invest in each review, rather than the traffic I send, or the value of links.
@ David
I do respect that Intellicontact is a popular choice, although I feel other Autoresponder services might well dispute your deliverability claims.
However your website claims more than 9024 Clients, whereas there is a high possibility that some Aweber affiliates have referred more than 10,000 customers to Aweber, and GetResponse also have more customers. Email Aces also have a very strong pedigree on deliverability.
<h3>Intellicontact Costs</h3>
<pre>
Clever 500 $9.95 $107.46
Sharp 1,000 $14.00 $151.20
Intelligent 2,500 $29.00 $313.20
Smart 5,000 $47.00 $507.60
Wise 10,000 $74.00 $799.20
</pre>
Whilst you have reasonable introductory pricing, I would look on that as being a "hook". As soon as someone moves beyond 1000 contacts, Intellicontact becomes uncompetitive compared to Aweber, Getresponse and Email Aces
I am not sure which of these is cheaper at every subscriber quantity currently, but they don't place restrictions on only being able to send out 6 emails to your list per month.
For 10000 subscribers with Aweber you currently pay just $20 per month.
Prices at GetResponse are very similar and possibly slightly cheaper.
I am not sure how many customers Aweber have, and they also have customers who purchased white label services.
GetRespose quote 500,000 customers.
I totally agree that email shouldn't be a core functionality of an Ecommerce site, and that using the services of a 3rd party specialist is the direction to take.
What I don't agree with necessarily is only suggesting one alternative, and having no existing infrastructure to support other popular platforms.
The integrity of email mailing lists is more important than which shopping cart you currently use in many ways.
People use the net to weigh up pros and cons on products and potential purchases. Reviews like this, are a definite asset in that process.
People use the net to weigh up pros and cons on products and potential purchases. Reviews like this, are a definite asset in that process.
Thanks for writing the review. Btw we can totally understand how it’s hard to take in everything b/c there is a lot here. This review has helped us see a few places where we can change our information so that it doesn’t confuse others. Anyway we wanted to take this opportunity to clear up a few incorrect conclusions.
1. Volusion is not a VAR. Volusion has developed all our ecommerce solutions in house (USA). Although we don’t own a datacenter we do obviously offer hosting services to our customers since we sell an on demand solution. Since have close to 100 servers we chose RackSpace since they are the best we could find and actually a lot more expensive than previous hosting companies we had used. We prefer to offer the best instead of the cheapest due to the importance of hosting for our customers. Most people don’t understand all the differences in quality of bandwidth and the # of backbones offered between one host and another but that is just good marketing on the lower level hosts out there. Our monthly hosting also includes extensive firewalls, nightly backups, offsite tape rotation, advanced security, not to mention the 24×7 monitoring both on our side and RS’s side, etc. Our merchants process hundreds of millions in revenue every year, so they require first class hosting. You definitely get what you pay for and hosting is no different.
2. Regarding Volusion designs our customers and their designers make their own designs all day long. Our customers do not have to check with us since they are free to design the sites themselves.
3. Volusion definitely supports downloadable products with product key distribution. Here is a link to the manual giving details. Just scroll down to downloadable products - http://manual.volusion.com/Products-Inventory/9...
4. Volusion Fast Traffic is search traffic not content traffic. We definitely strive to drive very targeted traffic that converts. This is a month to month service, so we have to earn our customer’s business each month. We do this by producing sales.
5. Yes we do have great support from our 24×7 live phone, chat, and email technical support based in the USA down to our free training videos that cover almost everything.
6. Your comment about low volume is not accurate. We have individual customers that do 1000s of orders per day and our largest customers process tens of millions in revenue each year.
We hope this clears up some of the confusion. Thanks again for writing the review.
Best Regards,
Cris Angelini
Business Development
Volusion
Here's an example. We had decided to add live chat capability to our site and decided to use Volusion's live chat application. In order to install live chat we needed to paste a few lines of code into our Volusion application. Volusion support provided the code but would not tell us where to install it. Mind you, this was Volusion's code to be installed within Volusion's own hosted eCommerce application. Thouroughly miffed, we decided to spend our money with another provider and enlisted the help of a web designer who had some html experience. After some experimentation we had our live chat software.
We are marketers not technical types. This is essentially why one chooses a solution such as Volusion. If we had technical resources we would have built our own solution and managed it in house.
Adding code has become a nightmare and as our site grows it becomes more and more apparent that we may have to "graduate" to a provider that supports its customers. Volusion could solve this issue very easily by offering Professional Services for a fee.
Thanks for writing the review. Btw we can totally understand how it’s hard to take in everything b/c there is a lot here. This review has helped us see a few places where we can change our information so that it doesn’t confuse others. Anyway we wanted to take this opportunity to clear up a few incorrect conclusions.
1. Volusion is not a VAR. Volusion has developed all our ecommerce solutions in house (USA). Although we don’t own a datacenter we do obviously offer hosting services to our customers since we sell an on demand solution. Since have close to 100 servers we chose RackSpace since they are the best we could find and actually a lot more expensive than previous hosting companies we had used. We prefer to offer the best instead of the cheapest due to the importance of hosting for our customers. Most people don’t understand all the differences in quality of bandwidth and the # of backbones offered between one host and another but that is just good marketing on the lower level hosts out there. Our monthly hosting also includes extensive firewalls, nightly backups, offsite tape rotation, advanced security, not to mention the 24×7 monitoring both on our side and RS’s side, etc. Our merchants process hundreds of millions in revenue every year, so they require first class hosting. You definitely get what you pay for and hosting is no different.
2. Regarding Volusion designs our customers and their designers make their own designs all day long. Our customers do not have to check with us since they are free to design the sites themselves.
3. Volusion definitely supports downloadable products with product key distribution. Here is a link to the manual giving details. Just scroll down to downloadable products - http://manual.volusion.com/Products-Inventory/9...
4. Volusion Fast Traffic is search traffic not content traffic. We definitely strive to drive very targeted traffic that converts. This is a month to month service, so we have to earn our customer’s business each month. We do this by producing sales.
5. Yes we do have great support from our 24×7 live phone, chat, and email technical support based in the USA down to our free training videos that cover almost everything.
6. Your comment about low volume is not accurate. We have individual customers that do 1000s of orders per day and our largest customers process tens of millions in revenue each year.
We hope this clears up some of the confusion. Thanks again for writing the review.
Best Regards,
Cris Angelini
Business Development
Volusion
Here's an example. We had decided to add live chat capability to our site and decided to use Volusion's live chat application. In order to install live chat we needed to paste a few lines of code into our Volusion application. Volusion support provided the code but would not tell us where to install it. Mind you, this was Volusion's code to be installed within Volusion's own hosted eCommerce application. Thouroughly miffed, we decided to spend our money with another provider and enlisted the help of a web designer who had some html experience. After some experimentation we had our live chat software.
We are marketers not technical types. This is essentially why one chooses a solution such as Volusion. If we had technical resources we would have built our own solution and managed it in house.
Adding code has become a nightmare and as our site grows it becomes more and more apparent that we may have to "graduate" to a provider that supports its customers. Volusion could solve this issue very easily by offering Professional Services for a fee.
One additional dilemma I did contemplate was to actually contact Volusion before publishing the review. I remembered the days when I was having software reviewed in magazines, and in general we were never allowed to speak to the reviewers.
If paid reviews were a totally accepted system in the blogosphere, more contact would have been easier for readers to accept.
In response to the notes you made
1. VAR and Hosting - I do honestly understand that you get what you pay for with hosting - most of the features you are quoting however are not necessarily bandwidth related, and higher bandwidth use does not automatically relate to more conversions.
All it takes is a "Digg" to clock up $100+ in bandwidth charges on Volusion, if you don't take action to minimise the load.
It wouldn't be too technically difficult to host media files on a different hosting platform with a redirect created from media.domain.com to the alternate cheaper hosting.
A content site would be hard pressed to cover their bandwidth fees with advertising with your pricing.
This site frequently takes 100MB hits from Stumbleupon traffic, and that only takes one person to like an article you wrote.
It has been standard practice for some time to offer free downloads from 100kb ebooks to 10MB software as a free incentive to sign up to a mailing list. Only a fraction of those convert to customers.
2. Templates - Good to hear, I will make a correction - please think about giving more access to "play" on the demo.
3. Digital Products - it is a partial solution, though for many digital products such as ebooks DLGuard with its expiring unique download pages are maybe a better solution, and many use such a system even for free reports.
4. Adwords - thanks for the clarification - maybe it could be a useful arbitrage system at those rates for high paying programs.
5. I saw lots of evidence of very responsive support and that was one point I knew you wouldn't disagree with.
6. Are the larger clients really hosting every media file on your servers? Larger sites would typically use Amazon EC2, S3, or maybe Akamai for media files.
Amazon S3 hasn't been the most reliable recently but they have competitors, and whilst there are differences in prices we are not talking the order of magnitude between S3 and Volusion currently.
For S3
* No start up fees, no minimum charge
* $0.15 per GB for each month of storage
* $0.20 per GB of data transferred
It is possible to try to shape a system such that it is attractive to as many business profiles as possible, but it is impossible to suit every kind of business.
Volusion have support for working with drop shipping, which can be lower margin especially if you included an affiliate program.
A good example of conversion rates actually was discussed on Crunchnotes today with Intellicontact you business partner.
http://www.crunchnotes.com/?p=366
128,300 Impressions
0.04% CTR
64 Clicks
$10.39 Per Click
$665.10 Total Cost
1 Conversions to Trial (1.56%)
Not all traffic converts, though if they do get a review on Techcrunch then that would be a very successful marketing campaign.
I acknowledge there are core customers for the package. I have to write reviews based on my core audience. Some of my readership is actually the same as Yaro's, and are even considering using the service, but for the majority with a purely online business, I think some of the changes I have suggested would make the service a much better prospect.
One additional dilemma I did contemplate was to actually contact Volusion before publishing the review. I remembered the days when I was having software reviewed in magazines, and in general we were never allowed to speak to the reviewers.
If paid reviews were a totally accepted system in the blogosphere, more contact would have been easier for readers to accept.
In response to the notes you made
1. VAR and Hosting - I do honestly understand that you get what you pay for with hosting - most of the features you are quoting however are not necessarily bandwidth related, and higher bandwidth use does not automatically relate to more conversions.
All it takes is a "Digg" to clock up $100+ in bandwidth charges on Volusion, if you don't take action to minimise the load.
It wouldn't be too technically difficult to host media files on a different hosting platform with a redirect created from media.domain.com to the alternate cheaper hosting.
A content site would be hard pressed to cover their bandwidth fees with advertising with your pricing.
This site frequently takes 100MB hits from Stumbleupon traffic, and that only takes one person to like an article you wrote.
It has been standard practice for some time to offer free downloads from 100kb ebooks to 10MB software as a free incentive to sign up to a mailing list. Only a fraction of those convert to customers.
2. Templates - Good to hear, I will make a correction - please think about giving more access to "play" on the demo.
3. Digital Products - it is a partial solution, though for many digital products such as ebooks DLGuard with its expiring unique download pages are maybe a better solution, and many use such a system even for free reports.
4. Adwords - thanks for the clarification - maybe it could be a useful arbitrage system at those rates for high paying programs.
5. I saw lots of evidence of very responsive support and that was one point I knew you wouldn't disagree with.
6. Are the larger clients really hosting every media file on your servers? Larger sites would typically use Amazon EC2, S3, or maybe Akamai for media files.
Amazon S3 hasn't been the most reliable recently but they have competitors, and whilst there are differences in prices we are not talking the order of magnitude between S3 and Volusion currently.
For S3
* No start up fees, no minimum charge
* $0.15 per GB for each month of storage
* $0.20 per GB of data transferred
It is possible to try to shape a system such that it is attractive to as many business profiles as possible, but it is impossible to suit every kind of business.
Volusion have support for working with drop shipping, which can be lower margin especially if you included an affiliate program.
A good example of conversion rates actually was discussed on Crunchnotes today with Intellicontact you business partner.
http://www.crunchnotes.com/?p=366
128,300 Impressions
0.04% CTR
64 Clicks
$10.39 Per Click
$665.10 Total Cost
1 Conversions to Trial (1.56%)
Not all traffic converts, though if they do get a review on Techcrunch then that would be a very successful marketing campaign.
I acknowledge there are core customers for the package. I have to write reviews based on my core audience. Some of my readership is actually the same as Yaro's, and are even considering using the service, but for the majority with a purely online business, I think some of the changes I have suggested would make the service a much better prospect.
Thanks for the perspective Andy.
Thanks for the perspective Andy.
I have also modified the article prominently acknowledging this important milestone.
I have also modified the article prominently acknowledging this important milestone.
Re: bandwidth charges. You are right. The ridiculous rates they are charging are from the last century. I have another web site that uses 125 gigs a month and I pay $60/mo for everything.And that's not even that great a deal.
Re: Newsletters. Based on their charges, I have used-off-the web software instead (GroupMail $99) to mail promos, letters etc to my 3500 customers.
One thing you couldn't tell from your brief visit was how Volusion treats their customers problems etc. If you visit their "Support" forum again, note that their are not any forums dedicated to technical problems that customers might be having with the Volusion software. IMO, that would usually be a hub for customers trying to work through problems and would be natural for "support" activities. Say a customer describes being ejected by the software in the middle of ordering, Volusion support has no clue and says that it really can't be a Volusion software issue, so you post in a forum to see if anybody else is having this problem.
I read that before I signed on, the forums were run by a non employee outside the Volusion org and had the usual traffic you would expect in forums for technical glitches. Then, Volusion brought the forums in house, and those sections disappeared. For a while, customers with software issues get around this by posting in a another, related forum, but after a while Volusion started to delete those posts without explanation. You could discuss how to master a particular feature, but not why the server was hanging for a minute at a time. Now all posts are screened before apearing by the Admin and they don't allow technical talk like that.
I asked the forum admin about this and was told that the "Support" forums were not for discussion of Volusion related performance or technical issues, that those should be dealt with directly with tech support. (Forget about users identifying a problem by comparing notes in a forum.) I can see where they could (and should) delete rants or scurrilous attacks, but not tech talk.
Of course, I think the real reason for this policy is obvious. Volusion doesn't want anything that could be perceived as even remotely negative about their service posted in public. They are more than willing to inconvenience current customers and run the risk of not fixing problems that are costings them money in order to attract new customers. I think they are wrong about that. People want to know if a company listen & acts. Geez, I've been on plenty of forums run by for profit companies that air problems all the time. Read Tom Peters.
As it is, if say I get a rash of customer complaints about the way the order page is performing and the tech guy says, "If you can't replicate the problem on demand, I'm not going to spend time trying to ferret it out," I can't verify or dismiss the problem with any other customer.
And I'm afraid their tech support has deteriorated. Two days ago, Scanalert pulled my "Hacker safe" Icon because of a potential security leak detected in the database software. That's Volusion's responsibility, so I emailed them. Not only did I not get the usual automatic trouble ticket email back, I didn't hear anything from them. This morning, I emailed again with the details I got from Scanalert. No response. I called them on the phone, but died on hold. I posted a message in a forum about not being able to contact Volusion support, hoping that even if the message was screened out by the Admin, they would contact tech support and they would contact me. Didn't happen. Finally, I emailed tech support again this noon (seven hours ago) and still haven't heard a word.
It's a real pain to move a store that you have spent two+ years developing to a new vendor , but......
Re: bandwidth charges. You are right. The ridiculous rates they are charging are from the last century. I have another web site that uses 125 gigs a month and I pay $60/mo for everything.And that's not even that great a deal.
Re: Newsletters. Based on their charges, I have used-off-the web software instead (GroupMail $99) to mail promos, letters etc to my 3500 customers.
One thing you couldn't tell from your brief visit was how Volusion treats their customers problems etc. If you visit their "Support" forum again, note that their are not any forums dedicated to technical problems that customers might be having with the Volusion software. IMO, that would usually be a hub for customers trying to work through problems and would be natural for "support" activities. Say a customer describes being ejected by the software in the middle of ordering, Volusion support has no clue and says that it really can't be a Volusion software issue, so you post in a forum to see if anybody else is having this problem.
I read that before I signed on, the forums were run by a non employee outside the Volusion org and had the usual traffic you would expect in forums for technical glitches. Then, Volusion brought the forums in house, and those sections disappeared. For a while, customers with software issues get around this by posting in a another, related forum, but after a while Volusion started to delete those posts without explanation. You could discuss how to master a particular feature, but not why the server was hanging for a minute at a time. Now all posts are screened before apearing by the Admin and they don't allow technical talk like that.
I asked the forum admin about this and was told that the "Support" forums were not for discussion of Volusion related performance or technical issues, that those should be dealt with directly with tech support. (Forget about users identifying a problem by comparing notes in a forum.) I can see where they could (and should) delete rants or scurrilous attacks, but not tech talk.
Of course, I think the real reason for this policy is obvious. Volusion doesn't want anything that could be perceived as even remotely negative about their service posted in public. They are more than willing to inconvenience current customers and run the risk of not fixing problems that are costings them money in order to attract new customers. I think they are wrong about that. People want to know if a company listen & acts. Geez, I've been on plenty of forums run by for profit companies that air problems all the time. Read Tom Peters.
As it is, if say I get a rash of customer complaints about the way the order page is performing and the tech guy says, "If you can't replicate the problem on demand, I'm not going to spend time trying to ferret it out," I can't verify or dismiss the problem with any other customer.
And I'm afraid their tech support has deteriorated. Two days ago, Scanalert pulled my "Hacker safe" Icon because of a potential security leak detected in the database software. That's Volusion's responsibility, so I emailed them. Not only did I not get the usual automatic trouble ticket email back, I didn't hear anything from them. This morning, I emailed again with the details I got from Scanalert. No response. I called them on the phone, but died on hold. I posted a message in a forum about not being able to contact Volusion support, hoping that even if the message was screened out by the Admin, they would contact tech support and they would contact me. Didn't happen. Finally, I emailed tech support again this noon (seven hours ago) and still haven't heard a word.
It's a real pain to move a store that you have spent two+ years developing to a new vendor , but......
Great review as usual. I think your review was the most comprehensive one about Volusion. But, I wanted to write a comprehensive review about Volusion because all the reviews out there were written by non-volusion customers.
It was frustrating for me not to be able to find unbiased information about Volusion before I decided to purcahse. Your review was the ONLY unbiased review. I have been a customer of Volusion for a while, and it was time for me to write my own version of the review. I hope it helps biz owners who are researching about Volusion:
Volusion Shopping Cart Review by a Volusion Customer
Great review as usual. I think your review was the most comprehensive one about Volusion. But, I wanted to write a comprehensive review about Volusion because all the reviews out there were written by non-volusion customers.
It was frustrating for me not to be able to find unbiased information about Volusion before I decided to purcahse. Your review was the ONLY unbiased review. I have been a customer of Volusion for a while, and it was time for me to write my own version of the review. I hope it helps biz owners who are researching about Volusion:
Volusion Shopping Cart Review by a Volusion Customer
But, now I feel caught in that same old trap because we are too "trafficky." Those SE spiders are crawling us daily and I'm not about to stop them, and we advertise on search engines to bring in traffic.
The result... our bandwidth overages bill is over $1000 per month. We found that we went over our allocated bandwidth almost from the get-go and upgraded from plan to plan until we could upgrade no more and now the bill just goes up-up-up each month as bandwidth increases.
I've seen it suggested that the solution to the problem is to host your images on another server that offers unlimited bandwidth, but shouldn't $1000 in hosting per month buy oneself unlimited (or at least higher) bandwith in today's day and age?
Mind you, we are not offering digital downloads or serving up porn movies --- this is just from plain old traffic and product .jpg files.
We have asked for a customized proposal but have been told that there are no plans to offer customized pricing plans at this time, but we hope for a change of heart as pricing trends evolve in the future, because we have many good things to say about Volusion too and would prefer to be focused on those.
But, now I feel caught in that same old trap because we are too "trafficky." Those SE spiders are crawling us daily and I'm not about to stop them, and we advertise on search engines to bring in traffic.
The result... our bandwidth overages bill is over $1000 per month. We found that we went over our allocated bandwidth almost from the get-go and upgraded from plan to plan until we could upgrade no more and now the bill just goes up-up-up each month as bandwidth increases.
I've seen it suggested that the solution to the problem is to host your images on another server that offers unlimited bandwidth, but shouldn't $1000 in hosting per month buy oneself unlimited (or at least higher) bandwith in today's day and age?
Mind you, we are not offering digital downloads or serving up porn movies --- this is just from plain old traffic and product .jpg files.
We have asked for a customized proposal but have been told that there are no plans to offer customized pricing plans at this time, but we hope for a change of heart as pricing trends evolve in the future, because we have many good things to say about Volusion too and would prefer to be focused on those.
What's really weird is the management team, you can't speak to anyone there. It's like they are avoiding me. After six weeks of virtually nothing, I've decided to hire a different designer, and still use Volusions software. And even this has become a problem. I was promised a $1495 rebate by the "management" there, and now no one will return my call.
Watch this, I'm going to stop payment on the third billing cycle just to see how fast I get a call back from the company.
Seems Volusion is in the game for one reason, and that's not to benefit the customer. What a shame, you wonder if this kind of business practice is brought down from the top, or if the top has gotten so big it's unaware of it's own customer service.
What's really weird is the management team, you can't speak to anyone there. It's like they are avoiding me. After six weeks of virtually nothing, I've decided to hire a different designer, and still use Volusions software. And even this has become a problem. I was promised a $1495 rebate by the "management" there, and now no one will return my call.
Watch this, I'm going to stop payment on the third billing cycle just to see how fast I get a call back from the company.
Seems Volusion is in the game for one reason, and that's not to benefit the customer. What a shame, you wonder if this kind of business practice is brought down from the top, or if the top has gotten so big it's unaware of it's own customer service.
I talked to tech support a ton of times and they had no answer. Eventually they ended up telling me I was running into the limitations of sql. That doesn't make much sense to me and seemed like a straight up lie but what do i know about sql? In order for me to get our database manageable I had to manually delete 100,000 products! Worst part is I had to delete them 500 at a time because they said there was no other way.
I now have 90,000 products which means I cannot offer CDs and Games only our DVD inventory. That doesn't sound like "unlimited products" to me.
All I'm saying is they should have some kind of disclaimer about "unlimited products".
Don't get me wrong, volusion does alot of things right but If I had it to do all over again I maybe would explore some other options.
I talked to tech support a ton of times and they had no answer. Eventually they ended up telling me I was running into the limitations of sql. That doesn't make much sense to me and seemed like a straight up lie but what do i know about sql? In order for me to get our database manageable I had to manually delete 100,000 products! Worst part is I had to delete them 500 at a time because they said there was no other way.
I now have 90,000 products which means I cannot offer CDs and Games only our DVD inventory. That doesn't sound like "unlimited products" to me.
All I'm saying is they should have some kind of disclaimer about "unlimited products".
Don't get me wrong, volusion does alot of things right but If I had it to do all over again I maybe would explore some other options.
I'm a experienced web store creator and have built stores on at least 20 different catalog environments in the past 10 years.
I have found that Volusion is a poor choice for large catalogs of products - at least on their hosted service. Our product space is apparel. The store environment requires many manual operations required for things that should be done by the software. While most of this isn't apparent until you really "get into it," I felt the need to post a few notes in this space.
In hopes to speed our project, I used the "design" service on one part of the store but, I'll be kind to say the results 'mediocre' ($1000 wasted.) They also took weeks to do what I ended up repeating in photoshop in 2 hours. I do not recommend that service *at all.*
The smartmatch inventory system setup is very difficult to get right. Though the feature itself seems to work (if you can get through the set-up) you will likely find it takes years off of your life. You must go do a series of cut/paste operations whenever you wish to use it which are error prone and impractical for large inventories. If you forget any of those steps, you can find yourself very frustrated trying to figure out what went wrong several steps down.
In all the examples, of course, they are talking about one product or small chunks of inventory. If you have more than 50 products you will start to feel the pain.To their credit, style matrices are very difficult to do in any system. I'm just bothered that they pitch the smartmatch system as "easy."
The online videos on any of the advanced are not much better IMO, and half of my calls to support have met with what can only be described as snobbery. Even the videos have a touch.
All in all the project has been a nightmare and I've been sorry that Volusion was used. I am now fully 1 month behind and can attribute much of that delay to the difficulties with the store system.
I'm a experienced web store creator and have built stores on at least 20 different catalog environments in the past 10 years.
I have found that Volusion is a poor choice for large catalogs of products - at least on their hosted service. Our product space is apparel. The store environment requires many manual operations required for things that should be done by the software. While most of this isn't apparent until you really "get into it," I felt the need to post a few notes in this space.
In hopes to speed our project, I used the "design" service on one part of the store but, I'll be kind to say the results 'mediocre' ($1000 wasted.) They also took weeks to do what I ended up repeating in photoshop in 2 hours. I do not recommend that service *at all.*
The smartmatch inventory system setup is very difficult to get right. Though the feature itself seems to work (if you can get through the set-up) you will likely find it takes years off of your life. You must go do a series of cut/paste operations whenever you wish to use it which are error prone and impractical for large inventories. If you forget any of those steps, you can find yourself very frustrated trying to figure out what went wrong several steps down.
In all the examples, of course, they are talking about one product or small chunks of inventory. If you have more than 50 products you will start to feel the pain.To their credit, style matrices are very difficult to do in any system. I'm just bothered that they pitch the smartmatch system as "easy."
The online videos on any of the advanced are not much better IMO, and half of my calls to support have met with what can only be described as snobbery. Even the videos have a touch.
All in all the project has been a nightmare and I've been sorry that Volusion was used. I am now fully 1 month behind and can attribute much of that delay to the difficulties with the store system.
I like the software features and operation.
I thought that we would have a great little store and not exceed bandwith from what the salesman expresed.
When I talked about traffic and use his response was :
“The platinum store has 15 GB of bandwidth a month, which equals to between 1500-2250 customers per day on the site.â€
He failed to mention the “other traffic†the spiders, and other creatures of the web.
Well I didn’t really ask that and he is a salesman after all.
Is it the pictures that cause the traffic? Would it be less for a members only store or do they still creep in and squander bandwidth?
thanks for any replys
Dan
1. Search Engine Crawlers - on this blog it can sometimes be up to 10GB a month, and I have actually reduced pagecount partially because of this. I used to have lots of translated pages, but it was making backup files extremely large.
2. Images - you need lots of images on a content site that is intended to convert.Small thumbnails are not so much a problem as you can reduce those down to 10kb in size, but for larger files, even using jpegs with low image quality, you are often looking at 100kb or more, especially with photographs.
Bandwidth can be used by both normal visitors, and those using image search.
That shouldn't be looked on as a bad thing, visitors = traffic = potential $$$, but some forms of traffic are lower quality than others.
3. Syndication of content by RSS - if you use RSS, various RSS crawlers are going to check your RSS feeds for changes. This can eat up a lot of bandwidth.
4. Googlebase - I haven't looked into detail with Googlebase, but I would think there is a potential bandwidth usage, maybe even pulling in images
5. Shopping engines of various kinds updating their database could potentially be a server hog.
6. Affiliates will be pulling data from your site in various ways
7. People hotlinking your images - this might be looked on as a bad thing, but if you were running a gallery site for instance, the traffic and links you could get by making your images viral and possibly allowing them to be used on Stumbleupon and other social sites would be welcome, even if the traffic is poor quality. It is hard for commerse sites to get natural links.
I still have no data on how much Rackspace charge their normal clients for "overage" or excess bandwidth, but if it really is $10 per GB, I can't imagine many people using them.
Whilst you can limit bandwidth use by using offsite storage for images, and maybe even for syndicated content, in this day and age it is unreasonable to have to do that for all but the highest bandwidth sites.
I know Volusion have done some updates since this review, you might like to also check this review from a user of Volusion.
I like the software features and operation.
I thought that we would have a great little store and not exceed bandwith from what the salesman expresed.
When I talked about traffic and use his response was :
“The platinum store has 15 GB of bandwidth a month, which equals to between 1500-2250 customers per day on the site.â€
He failed to mention the “other traffic†the spiders, and other creatures of the web.
Well I didn’t really ask that and he is a salesman after all.
Is it the pictures that cause the traffic? Would it be less for a members only store or do they still creep in and squander bandwidth?
thanks for any replys
Dan
1. Search Engine Crawlers - on this blog it can sometimes be up to 10GB a month, and I have actually reduced pagecount partially because of this. I used to have lots of translated pages, but it was making backup files extremely large.
2. Images - you need lots of images on a content site that is intended to convert.Small thumbnails are not so much a problem as you can reduce those down to 10kb in size, but for larger files, even using jpegs with low image quality, you are often looking at 100kb or more, especially with photographs.
Bandwidth can be used by both normal visitors, and those using image search.
That shouldn't be looked on as a bad thing, visitors = traffic = potential $$$, but some forms of traffic are lower quality than others.
3. Syndication of content by RSS - if you use RSS, various RSS crawlers are going to check your RSS feeds for changes. This can eat up a lot of bandwidth.
4. Googlebase - I haven't looked into detail with Googlebase, but I would think there is a potential bandwidth usage, maybe even pulling in images
5. Shopping engines of various kinds updating their database could potentially be a server hog.
6. Affiliates will be pulling data from your site in various ways
7. People hotlinking your images - this might be looked on as a bad thing, but if you were running a gallery site for instance, the traffic and links you could get by making your images viral and possibly allowing them to be used on Stumbleupon and other social sites would be welcome, even if the traffic is poor quality. It is hard for commerse sites to get natural links.
I still have no data on how much Rackspace charge their normal clients for "overage" or excess bandwidth, but if it really is $10 per GB, I can't imagine many people using them.
Whilst you can limit bandwidth use by using offsite storage for images, and maybe even for syndicated content, in this day and age it is unreasonable to have to do that for all but the highest bandwidth sites.
I know Volusion have done some updates since this review, you might like to also check this review from a user of Volusion.
In reading the comments here, I just can't imagine what would happen if your store became largely successful in 2 years and you're still stuck with a 15GB limit. They really need to have an unlimited plan at the top.
In reading the comments here, I just can't imagine what would happen if your store became largely successful in 2 years and you're still stuck with a 15GB limit. They really need to have an unlimited plan at the top.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
I would certainly suggest starting your mailing list using Aweber, thus making any clients portable to other systems.
That just isn't acceptable as this site is actually quite low traffic.
I don't host any audio or video, or sell digital products here yet.
250GB a month transfer for $1000 isn't good value, it is still $4/GB
Thank you for your time and consideration.
I would certainly suggest starting your mailing list using Aweber, thus making any clients portable to other systems.
That just isn't acceptable as this site is actually quite low traffic.
I don't host any audio or video, or sell digital products here yet.
250GB a month transfer for $1000 isn't good value, it is still $4/GB
Your comprehensive review saved me yet another costly mistake. I'm wanting to update my site and would have definitely gone over my BW limit. This process is at best overwhelming and your review has helped highlight the type of issues I need to consider. Did I already say Thank You?
Mendy
Your comprehensive review saved me yet another costly mistake. I'm wanting to update my site and would have definitely gone over my BW limit. This process is at best overwhelming and your review has helped highlight the type of issues I need to consider. Did I already say Thank You?
Mendy
They do have several positive points such as 200GB BW, 10GB storage, 100 email boxes and 50000 items for $74.95 per month plus 0.5% per transaction. It offers full integration with Ebay, being an Ebay company plus several extra add-on application for additional cost.
I was about to sign up with Volusion, but the BW is definitely a huge deal breaker, as we offer an inventory of 20,000 items.
I guess i will just keep looking for the "perle rare"!
Thank you for avoiding me a costly mistake. Keep up the good work!
They do have several positive points such as 200GB BW, 10GB storage, 100 email boxes and 50000 items for $74.95 per month plus 0.5% per transaction. It offers full integration with Ebay, being an Ebay company plus several extra add-on application for additional cost.
I was about to sign up with Volusion, but the BW is definitely a huge deal breaker, as we offer an inventory of 20,000 items.
I guess i will just keep looking for the "perle rare"!
Thank you for avoiding me a costly mistake. Keep up the good work!