Volusion Major Limitation that could kill your site

[iceman1234]

I Have been on volusion for about 2 years now. I am not that happy with it. Its powerful, but it has major design issue which i will list below.

When i first started with volution, i have always wanted to give the customer the option of either creating an account or making a purchase anonymously. So when i first started, i set the system up so everyone was anonymous but they can enter their email address for the purposes of getting and email confirmation.... so all is good right? WRONG!

Problem #1

If you set up a volusion store where all the customers are strictly anonymous, the volusion system will use the email address to send an order confirmation on their first order. But because volusions system is set up so that that particular order has a unique email associated with it and NOBODY can use that email address EVER AGAIN! Why do you ask?.... Because when the customer checks out and they use the email address verification for their order, they will never be able to place an order using that email address again. When i first launched my store on volusion, sales moved up very quickly, then started to drop to where all i was getting was new customer. No repeats. Why, because every single returning customer could not place orders because during checkout, the volusion system would not allow them to use their email address and would say "Email address is already in use by" Result customer goes somewhere else.

Problem #2

So i changed my store to where all customers MUST create an account. I hate this! There are so many customers that just want to checkout anonymously.....Anyway, I find this to be a problem as well under the "unique email address association".

There are SO MANY customers that just dont remember thier email address, dont want to have their password emailed to them, dont want to click more links... etc...etc.

So once again, they try and place another order and they MUST put in their email address, and BOOOM! the system say that the email address they are using to login is in use by another account!

Result.... the ONLY customers that you keep are the ones that can remember their login or password -or- have no problem taking the time to use the link to have their password emailed to them.

Does anyone know a way to solve this? Is there a way to setup volusion so it uses something other than the customers email address as their login?

I would love some input, because i am sure there are other carts out there that use email addresses as the identifier for the account.

[jamesfraser]

Hi there,

I took a look at their site and noticed their $99 plan has API access. This means that a programmer can write some code to interact with their database. You might be able to contract an oDesk.com developer to build you a tool that accesses the API and updates the email address after the order is complete from "[e-mail]" to "[e-mail].<random_numbers>".

This is just a guess but hopefully you might be able to point you in the right direction.

James

[david_jp]

Hello,

Once you get into thinking about custom programming to tweak the volusion API, you're probably getting close to outgrowing their basic platform.

Inexpensive monthly shopping cart apps are nice when you're growing your business, so long as your business fits into their canned model. As you grow you'll inevitably start noticing things about the "can" that don't really work for you. If your business can sustain the cost, I would recommend looking into their higher level packages, or shopping some of the other mid-high level eCommerce apps that are out there like Jagged Peak (my preference) or eCometry.

I'm biased since I work for Jagged Peak, but I hear these kinds of stories all the time and trying to "tweak" the canned functionality of a low-end solution almost always leads to more frustration.

Hope this helps.

~David

[JackieBlue]

I hate to ask the obvious, but what did Volusion support say? Also, I believe you could use the API to get around this with minimal programming. You can download the e-mail addresses (assuming you ask permission to market) and change their e-mail address, after you have completed the order, to the [e-mail]. This way you do not have duplicate addresses. A little bit of extra work but gets around most of your issues.