Volusion Shopping Cart Software for Small Business: A Review

For many small business owners, the race is and has been on to create a sophisticated, solid e-commerce storefront.  Volusion offers an award-winning shopping cart that powers storefronts all over the internet.

The reason I call building an online store “a race” is that Volusion knows that small business owners are, well, very busy. So they make the setup process easy and fast to get a template store up and running.

You can then customize that store to make it look and feel like your existing site. Or you can let their software power your site completely.

Volusion Review

I tested the free 14-day trial for this review. Immediately after starting the trial I received an email giving me tips and ideas to help me on the shopping cart path. The next day I received a phone call from Megan, my very own “personal ecommerce consultant” who promised to answer any and all questions and help me get my storefront completed.

Volusion is thorough. And you have to give any company credit when they trademark their support division with a unique name. It’s “Out of this World Support.”

Here is the sample store that I created for Small Business Trends in just a few clicks.  It is clearly just a fake store at first. But again, you quickly move through the sign-up process to a working storefront.

Behind this pretty storefront is a heavy-duty administrative dashboard that allows customization for just about every aspect of an online store.

It covers everything from the design and marketing, to where you enter your products, to how much they cost. You can manage tax levels, shipping details and a host of other moving parts that you don’t think about until you start selling online.

You can see here that they offer standard navigation items to what most small business owners would find important and want to see in one glance. It is easy to get to:  Orders, Reports, Inventory, Marketing, Customers, Design, and Settings.

What I Liked About Volusion

• No transaction fees on the sales of your products by Volusion. That’s a money saver – something we can all appreciate.

• Fraud Score – this is a new product they launched to protect the merchant (you) from credit card fraud.  Worth considering as you shop for a new shopping cart.  You can see the Fraud Score column in the administrative dashboard above which is showing current orders that need to be approved.

• Terrific training videos.  Remember, in addition to an entire library of topics to help you build a store, there is the personal ecommerce consultant.  I had to call mine and say thanks, but I’m just a reviewer.

What Volusion Could Improve

• The initial setup is easy, but once that was complete additional customization felt like it would take a programmer.  That’s beyond my skills and that of many small business owners.  It isn’t drag-and-drop and that was a downside.

• The admin menu was hard to use sometimes if you didn’t scroll exactly into the right place.  Small point, to be sure.

Overall, Volusion offers one of the top shopping cart software solutions on the market.  They have many big brand name customers like Disney and the UK division of National Geographic, plus others you’ll know and trust. They provide many of the tools you need to start, enhance, or expand an online storefront.

You can try it for free for 14 days. No credit card required.

Image: Shutterstock

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