Volusion E-Commerce Cart

anyone have experience with the Volusion ecommerce shopping cart system?

Anyone have feed back on thei Search Engine Friendly static HTML pages they can generate using their software?

All feedback is appreciated, thanks.

-=Vince

I know Egol has recommended it before. (if memory serves me correctly).

Yep, IMO Volusion is top notch and fathom has spoken well of it (do a search to find the posts). It is an excellent system. Right now most of my sites are on ultracart as they have done big time upgrades and will customize for you any way that is possible - they expect to customize for you and are reasonably priced for doing that. Ultracart is not as strong as Volusion on customer identity and greeting but if you have a site that is a bandwidth hog then ultracart is the better choice in my opinion.

From what i can tell, the Volusion package includes just about everything i would need, including bandwidth. A quick email to their sales team confirmed that if bandwidth is an issue at any point, its quite easy to upgrade to a higher amount.

Is this the only concern you have with the Volusion solution? (funny mix of words)

Thanks again,
-=Vince

I use OS Commerece. I have customized the heck out it. Volusion is a good looking package though as well as Ultracart.

Good Luck.

Mike

You must be kidding... or working for Volusion.... "reasonably priced" at $6000 license purchase or $197 a month leased option. How about these:

osCommerce - FREE - better than Volusion.
ZenCart - FREE - better than Volusion.
X-Cart - $200 purchase license = 100% open source with support.

I'd say X-Cart is the best on the market - it has more features tha Volusion, is a better coded cart and is only a tiny fraction of Volusion's cost. Compare X-Cart $200 and Volusion $6000 plus X-Cart is a better cart than Volusion.

My opinion - Volusion has a weak code, lots of bugs and failures (remember what I wrote if you purchase it) and is extremely overpriced. Stuff like volusion should cost $75 to $150 one time fee. Honest.

And who told you that volusion does customizations? You must be kidding again - they take months and years to implement features that's been on other carts for years. Also the volusion cart is very slow and bugs occur every day.

Volusion customer interface is a neat design.... and that's about it... don't be sorry, try X-Cart and you will thank me for the rest of your life that I saved you $5800 (the difference in cost between X-Cart and Volusion) plus showed you a much better cart.

Some facts:

Volusions, ZenCart, X-Cart are all composites of the Open Source OSCommerce.

The owners have each enhanced their proprietary solution but they are all from the same tree.

Volusions was the first cart I had the pleasure of optimizing for.

HTML generation [works great] - but you do not need it... this is merely a old world SEO problem that used to exist but hasn't in 4 or 5 years.

Since Volusions has taken over the original Store2003 support in superb - which is what you are paying for. X-cart also has superb support... I have always been amazed that there are no language barriers with the Russians [owners]

If you are versed in coding - OSCommerce is better and you can easily upgrade and adapt the solution to your own needs - or pay inexpensively for competent developers - there are 10,000 of them out there.

As with any proprietary solution there are limitations so I would rate all solutions "equal" without any definitive advantage over their competitors... well with exception to OSCommerce since you can augment as you see fit.

are you very sure X-cart and Volusion are orginiated from OSCommerce? I can't find those information on their website. If they are orgiinated form OSC and hide this information, X-cart and Volusion are illegal software due to violation of licence.

Are you sure that is a violation of the license? I see many shopping cart solutions that are all made from osCommerce and sold under new brands.

OSCommerce is 'open source' and released under the GNU General Public License - free for commercial use and may be modified and if so, sold as a new brand.

Am I "positive" that they were originally OSC - no... nor do I care [or would/could anyone else]

The core code appear as a composite of OSCommerce original source code - it matter not though - merely an observation of working with all of the versions I identified.

Getting back to the original question... I use Volusion for my sites. The static HTML pages are great, but in reality does not justify the higher cost for Volusion by themselves. I use Volusion for a number of other features. First, I like its flexibility. I checked out X-cart and a number of other options and found Volusion is the most flexible by far. Second, the back end is excellent. Far more advanced then any other cart I have seen. Since I dropship, I love Voluion's dropship feature which allows me to forward orders via e-mail (very easy). It also does a good job with ROI tracking for my marketing campaigns and provides some basic financial reports. Third, if you know ASP you can really customize the entire cart for your needs. There are a few things you cannot access - for example I would like to have a one page checkout, but I cannot access the database directly. But I have figured out ways around some of the restrictions. If you want to pay $6000 for a full licensed copy you can do whatever you want. Finally, the technical support folks have been very helpful. Volusion has just added user forums and based on feedback there, they are promising some improvements (like the one page checkout) in the near future.

-Ramprof

I have also heard that X-cart is based on Os commerce, hence all the modules they sell. Maybe it's just some good programmers coupled with good marketers.

I suggest X-Cart too.

I almost went with Volusion for one of my sites but they were very expensive. I wasn't so concerned about the high monthly cost... it was the $100 an hour for any customization work done by them. They wanted $2500 just to help me load my database into their system. I talked to this guy Jake. He told me it would only really take him a couple of hours but he would not lower his cost from the $2500. Volusion sounded like a real money pit to me.