Volusion: A Powerful Shopping Cart Solution for Small Online Retailers

For millions of online sellers out there, there is nothing more important than having a readymade website and hosting apart from a shopping cart as it allows them to look after other important aspects of business. Volusion provides smart solutions to all these issues and helps create efficient sites with shopping cart solutions that pour in customers which in turn translates into more sales. Another important feature of Volusion is its easy setup that allows the user to be up and running in a matter of hours, if not minutes. Once you have your online store ready with products to sell, you have the liberty to customize it like the site you had been running, or you can choose to let the software to do it for you.

One great attraction of Volusion is the wide variety of options and features that the user can employ to maximize the efficiency of his online store. Not just shopping cart solutions, you also get SEO features, automated email features and a very effective stock management that is at the core of any online business. In fact, Volusion is a one stop shop for all your needs if running a successful online store is what you desire. One good thing about Volusion is that you pay only monthly fees, and there are no transaction fees that Volusion charges (as a percentage of turnover) as is the practice by many of its competitors.

Plus Points

If one were to analyze the system comparing it with others available on the web, there are many positives that make Volusion stand apart. There is a page called category management that allows the user to drag and drop sub categories from one category to another. As an owner, you can view the carts, irrespective of whether your customer has completed the transaction or not. You get a new feature that allows you to send promotional emails to your client base. With the facility of Google Map It feature, the user can see the customer’s shipping address.

You can take orders on phone, and you are no longer required to take customer’s email ID as the system has been so designed so as to recognize a customer on the basis of his name or just his phone number. The page on which orders are taken on phone has been condensed so that you are not required to scroll down as was the case earlier.

Setting Up

Volusion have kept the user interface incredibly simple to make it extremely easy to make a website with the use of various tools that are easy to operate and customize as per user’s requirements. The set up wizard does it all once you enter all the relevant information about your online store into it and it guides you step by step as to how to go about setting up your online shop.

The set up fee is $49, which is reasonable considering the amount of work done by Volusion to place your store on their servers and to check its feasibility. Once you are done with the setting up process, it takes Volusion some time to test the site placing it on their servers. This is the time you must utilize to do some home work as to the types of products and how to do their promotion before the site is finally live.

One Stop Shop for Ecommerce Solutions

This is what Volusion claim there system to be, and though there are some missing links, this shopping cart solution is closest to being perfect and you get your money’s worth when you choose to go with Volusion. The system boasts of all the components that you will need for an effective online store. Whether it is uploading products, tracking inventory, making products live with a click, fulfilling orders, or anything else, everything has been properly planned and carefully executed so that the user has no difficulties when transacting business.

Search Engine Optimized

Volusion allows the user to customize Meta tags which is search engines friendly feature. The category and product URL are also optimized to make them search engine friendly.

Solid marketing

Effective marketing is a strong point of Volusion and it has some strong features that have the potential to generate more sales for your online store. Some of the marketing features are as follows.

Gift certificates- it is an attractive feature that is capable of luring customers and you get option of online as well as offline delivery

Coupons- These are also very effective. You can create various types of coupons as the system is very flexible.

Affiliate marketing- It is a very simple but effective way to improve upon your sales. Volusion has a deep, 5 Tier affiliate system

E-mail marketing- It is a good way to remain in touch with your customers and at the same time can be used as a promotional tool for your products

Inventory management

This is a very important part of any online retail store and Volusion has one of the best inventory management systems around. Within inventory management, there are some important features that need to be mentioned here.

Pricing Flexibility- You can display list price, regular price and discount price along with products. You also have the option to show wholesale prices to wholesalers and retail prices for retail customers. There is a special category called VIP customer price which is for regular and loyal customers.

Security Level

The security provided by Volusion to the users is exemplary as is proved by the fact that it belongs to very few PCI certified shopping cart solutions that are accepted by Visa. This is a big feature as your customers are reassured that they are secured while transacting, and this indirectly boosts your sales.

Volusion have devised a new tool called Fraud Score to prevent merchants from any credit card fraud. For suspect customers, you get an option of blocking their IP addresses. Volusion offers PCI/CISP protection to you, which works to protect credit card data at every step. All pages are Secure socket layer (SSL) encrypted which a feature that is very helpful in preventing eavesdropping and tampering.

Customer Support

When it comes to help and support, there is none to beat Volusion. Every user has round the clock support which is available through phone, email and live chat with a representative of Volusion. Unlike other companies, this live chat is actually with a representative who is within company headquarters and not outsourced. There is a comprehensive FAQ section apart from many other help features.

Conclusion

Volusion is a complete package when it comes to Ecommerce solutions. Its exceptional features are its security, search engine optimization and marketing which are far superior than other such programs. Try it Free