Page 2 - Volusion E-Commerce Cart

1. volusion is ASP, while OSC is in PHP. maybe this wasn't true a few years ago.
2. volusion is a hosted cart, more of a premium service. these days, you are probably looking at spending $100 per mo. plus a few for setup.
3. volusion wins on the admin interface for sure.
4. I not find nearly a fraction of the features in xcart that I find in volusion; however, with that being said, excess features are often not needed.
5. in looking at other popular carts: Veracart shopping cart, monstercommerce , goecart , apple pie cart , etc...?
6. p.s. i think from a basic cart POV, zen cart is much better than os, but even then, it lacks much out of the box....and is definitely better if you are a programmer and like to mod.

Is there anything else out there that has a drop ship system, CRM, etc?

Well they all do actually.

If you use the product/manufacturer attributes.

I used Volusion for almost two years when I first got into the ecommerce business. We have moved on to ASPdotnetstorefront now. I'll explain the good and bad on volusion from someone that has had alot of experience with them.

Good:
1) Their hosting is top notch (They use rackspace) Our site always loaded quickly.
2) They have a built in CRM system and dropship system.
3) It's SEO friendly right from the start.
4) It's easy to bulk edit your products.
5) They have a good basic layout that will work for most simple products.

Bad:
1) You cant customize ANYTHING. Yes you can change the graphics, and your color scheme ect to brand your site, but your stuck with the layout they give you and you can't add anything. In fact you have no access to the code, appconfigs or even the root directory.
2) Absolutely no support if you mess something up when changing your template. (Unless you pay them to fix it or redesign it)
3) You can not install your own pages correctly. If you want to add a page that is not part of the cart it has to go in a "v" folder. Example: www.yourdomain.com/v/yourpage.asp

If your just looking for a reliable cart, and you have no need to customize anything I would recommend Volusion.

We recently moved to ASPdotnetstorefront for our stores and I was blown away after using Volusion's service. With our new cart we can have full access to the code so we can change and rearrange anything anything we want. We were finally able to add in things like an ajax shipping estimator, mouse over popups for the products, links that open mini windows ect ect. Also ASPdotnetstorefront is a million times better out of the box than one of those free carts. Unless you are a code whizz I wouldnt even think of using a free cart.

Anyways sorry for the long post. To sum it all up here is what you should do:

If you are just looking for a reliable cart to sell your products with, go with volusion.

If you are wanting something that can truly be customized, checkout ASPdotnetstorefront.

DanielR, one thing I must say you.
The previous post of Volusion is a total spamming,and as a contributing member you should report in place of answering that.

I'd have to disagree in this instance. From my personal viewpoint, I would consider it quite valid for a company to respond to a thread created about themselves by others. Provided that they clearly identify the relationship (which they have done in this case) and don't pretend to be a "happy customer", then I see no wrong. The post laid out some legitimate points and wasn't overly promotional.

I consider it only fair that a company should have a right to reply to questions about their product.

Well jagnet, I agree with you. But this is an one year old thread and I feel everyone forgot about this thread.
We all know some irrelevant people are doing spamming and making useless post in old threads and this can encourage them,IMO.
May be I am wrong, but thats what I felt.

Point taken about the 1 year delay prior to responding -- perhaps they were busy? With it being a valid product that's still available, the irrelevancy of an old thread is somewhat lessened in comparison to the usual ones that are dragged kicking and screaming from the archives, so I'll let it run. And given DanielR's comparisons with a competing product, they may yet wish to respond again in another 12 months.

Of interest to you... your Volusions software used to be Store2003.

Store2003 was complied from the php OSCommerce source code to work with SQL Server in a Windows environment.

Additionally, if you find Volusions more user friendly than open source carts - it's because you have never invested any time with these carts.

A person that never saw any cart before -- Volusion would be equally unfriendly to them without direct assistance.

... it is a nice 'overall solution' but it isn't really better than any other solution.

Guess I need to get in the habit of looking at the post dates before I waste my time trying to give someone an honest comparison =P

I had no idea that that post was that old, and it does look a bit spammy :0

Shame on you spammers wasting my time! lol.

I don't have any experience of Volusion, but I have been developing a site with ZenCart for a few months now so I thought I would share my thoughts on it:

Firstly I chose ZC because it seemed like the most well supported and developed free open source cart available at the time. In some sense these impressions seem to have been born out. The community forums are very active, and people are keen to help one another out (I get the impression that this was not always the case, but at the moment it is pretty good). According to sourceforge there are 4 developers on the project and it seems like they treat the development of ZC pretty seriously. The developers are very active on the forums and do take an interest in lots of individual problems. I can't be sure, but it seems like at least one or two of them work full time on the project (or full time ish).

The level of technical knowledge of forum members (even heavy posters) is low, so in most cases the advice is basically the blind leading the blind and gets about as technical as "try this setting in the admin section". People on there are mainly hobby shopkeepers who know nothing about web design or programming. Due to this the average ZC store looks like it was built in 1998.

In fact one of the things that lets ZC down the most is the fact that the development team lacks a good designer. This means that out of the box ZC looks terrible (not that this seems to bother most people) and it is in fact rather difficult to make ZC look nice. For a non-technical person, they need to resort to community contributed templates - some of which are ok, but still not what you would term professional - or they have to buy them from template monster or the like and apparently these tend to be for old versions of ZC and don't work very well.

On the plus side ZC seems to be fairly bug free, or rather it somehow manages to work and lots of ZC shops seem to function quite smoothly. From a programmers perspective this makes ZC a pretty decent choice; it basically works, it is flexible and as long as you don't care how it does what it does then you can make it do pretty much what you want it to do.

I'm not a specialist php programmer, but I have a lot of programming experience in various languages including C++, VB, php, javascript and I know SQL. I am also pretty good with html and css so when a friend and I decided to build our store in zencart we decided to design the store that we wanted, exactly how we wanted it to look and function, without asking if ZC could do it or perhaps more to the point how easy it would be to get ZC to do it. I started the coding about two months ago (evenings and weekends) and to be honest, once I got the hang of how ZC worked at the back end it has been fairly easy to do what we wanted, of course there have been some things that should have been easier, but overall, it has been fairly rapid. If I had needed to start from scratch we probably wouldn't even have 10% of the cart built, but we are at about 80-90% now.

I doubt we could have started from such a clean slate and done exactly what we wanted to with closed source software, and I hate the idea of paying for open source (not sure why, just feels wrong) so I can't knock ZC too much.

The big problem with ZC is that the code is a huge MESS. Honestly it is awful (but then so probably is the code that drives all those closed source carts) and is unbelievably processor / database intensive. Their problem stems from two sources:

1) There is a lot of old procedural code inherited from oscommerce.
2) PHP 5 has only been mainstream for a year or so, so OOP hasn't really been a php reality for very long.

I've read posts saying that ZC looks like it was written by people on crack, and I agree. If ZC is going to be a force to be reckoned with in the future they are probably going to need to do a complete rewrite from the ground up and when they do so they are going to need to get a designer to deal with the front end.

I agree with danial. aspdotnetstorefront save me alot of time. I'm a newbie on asp programming. I had 2 years experience on coldfusion. And i have no clue on graphic design. I was deciding which one i should use - volusion and aspdotnetstorefront. My competitors are using very good shopping cart system. one of my competitor are using volusion. But volusion is too expensive for long term and i can't customize my site.

Too be honest. aspdotnetstorefront is for intermediate level programmer. Don't let their testimonal fool you. you need to know about xml, in order to change the layout you want. They only have 6 templates allow you to choose and they are all similar. They don't have all the functions that volusion provided. They don't have the basic "sorting" function. can't sort the product by price low, by whatever. You have to customize the code. No link directory. product page layout is too simple. it only provide user rating and related items. but i think it's enough for most user. X-cart, os commerce. I still believe you get what you pay for.

Don't argue about if you customize the cart, it can be better than any other shopping cart. Yes, you are correct. If i am willing to spend money to customize. I can have a better cart than EBAY. I can customize oscommerce to Alibaba. I can customize oscommerce to Amazon.

But for $850. I can't complaint. Their admin system is wonderful. It is worth trying their demo before purchase.