Forum Moderators: buckworks
Here are the caveats:
-They have zero technical ability or people in-house, and want a hosted solution.
-they do a low enough volume that they print out orders and manually bill the credit cards
-they are currently paying upwards of $1000/mo for their site (they pay 2.5% commission on every sale to the company that hosts their site and provides technical help)
I set up a test site with Volusion, and it looks 10000 times better already than their existing site. It seems very powerful and reasonably easy to tweak in terms of category/product display and navigation. It looks like it would be ~$200/month for the site with Volusion, as they have over 1000 products.
Does anyone else here have experience with Volusion? I just don't see anything else at this price point that is an off-the-shelf solution as robust, attractive, and flexible without significant modifications.
For example, they have a big logo that says "Integrated with Quick Books" but come to find out, it's just an export feature that is not at all easy to use. I don't see one post where a user is happy. Same goes for the Shopping Search engine sites which seems so automatic when reading the site feature's but not when reading the user forums!
I've signed up for the demo, loaded about 10 products and have asked a handful of questions via the support email. The responses are somewhat underwhelming, sometimes helpful, sometimes short and evasive. The other users on the forum seem to have similar experiences.
Any Volusion users out there happy with the product and service? Maybe I'm only seeing the complaints on the forum?
Sigh. The quest for the perfect cart goes on!
We bought a license back in 2003 when it was about $3,000 (and not as many features). The cart does exactly what we need it to and we have full access to every file so we can tweak the site to meet our needs. We have done a lot of changing to the original code to get our site where we want it to be... but overall we're happy with Volusion.
Now... their support... well... there isn't any. I've only found 1 person at Volusion who is helpful and can provide help for me and my company. Everyone else seems to never fully read our questions and therefore never answer our questions correctly. If I had to do it all over I'm not sure if I'd pay the $10,000 right now for Volusion and I know I would definately not host with them (no full control of the code or server). But, for the price we paid and where we our now as a shopping cart, I'm extremely happy.
Tech Support has been very helpful for us, though we've never really had a very in depth and/or difficult issue for them.
Overall, for a relatively low cost out-of-box product it is far ahead of any other solution we've found.
mida - not sure which forum you are on, but the volusion forum will have very few complaints as it is HEAVILY moderated. Most of the posts on there are from very inexperienced users who just havent figured ut some stuff yet.
[edited by: ItsAllBallBearings at 11:16 pm (utc) on Jan. 8, 2007]
