Volusion — User Unfriendly
A couple of months ago, I was consulted by an online outfit to analyze their ecommerce strategies given the long term vision of the company (that was the reason I looked into Yahoo Merchant Solutions, the client’s current online store front service provider). After doing a thorough market research, I went back to them with three alternative alternative solutions to Yahoo:
MonsterCommerce
Volusion
OS Commerce
Given the requirements and budget, these three solutions were most fitting for the client. Unfortunately, due to concerns with support on open source, OS Commerce had to be dropped. Out of the other two companies, the client picked Volusion as the ecommerce solution of choice to migrate their online store front to.
Volusion’s online presentations and everything else looked wonderful. But as soon as we started porting existing products and started to configure options in Volusion, we realized just how terrible Volusion’s administration interface is. Granted they provide a fairly decent documentation and speedy tech support, its terrible user interface design just pisses me and my client’s internal staff off. As a tech-savvy person, I understood some of the jargon Volusion’s website spit at me. But I can’t imagine someone with the experience level of MS Word to grasp the extensive (read: things most people don’t care about) and sometimes trivial features the interface insists on displaying.
Why can’t the geeks at Volusion take a page from Apple: show optional features only when necessary by those who need them; and in god’s name, polish up the god damn interface a little. Sure, it’s usable, but damn it, even I was intimidated when a page of roughly 120 form fields (I kid you not) appeared just to add ONE product. WTF?!! Did the monkeys at Volusion even bother to do user testing with their cumbersome interface?
Even though we haven’t tested MonsterCommerce as extensively yet, but for those who are considering trying Volusion, BE WARNED. And no matter how bad MonsterCommerce’s interface is, it can’t be worse than Volusion’s presentation of 120 form fields on a single page with dozens of useless optional fields. Com’on, even volunteers working on OS Commerce could make a usable interface. Why are those paid programmers at Volusion not doing half of what OS Commerce can delivery UI wise?
As for OS Commerce, I couldn’t find a module that conveniently imports an existing Yahoo Store easily. I mean, Yahoo has a feature that exports; and OS Commerce has a couple of features that import xml/cvs files. But I didn’t spend enough time to make them play nicely together. To that end, I give Volusion credit for being able to nicely import products from Yahoo (sans product categories and images). Big deal; so can MonsterCommerce.
UPDATE 01/10/2009: A lot of what I’ve written here have become irrelevant since Volusion proactively updated their software. I’ve written a more updated review here.
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December 8th, 2005 at 5:07 pm
We’ve been using Volusion for about 18 months now and love it. Yahoo! is worth staying away from, but I disagree with your harsh criticism of Volusion’s UI. While the form field type page may seem intimidating at first glance, it is a very worthy way to do things as compared to OSC and MC. Considering BandWidth (BW) limitations, having to switch tabs or use a product wizard is not only click-intensive but also time intensive. If you are not adding a complicated product, there are roughly ONLY 4 fields to enter; name, price, weight, description. More advanced products require more entry, but, it’s still all on one page. This can be very beneficial considering the amount of cut/paste use in various product fields. Also, view is not drill-down intensive as some services are. In my opinion, of all of the “affordable” small business ecommerce solutions for a store front, Volusion is by far the best (in class).
However, you didn’t dig deep enough into their system to find the real problems – most of which will never bother 90% of ecommerce sites either because their product listings are not complex, or, they simply don’t do the volume of business that would bare the flaws. Once you get into complex products and inventory management, you start to see where the Volusion system leaves off and larger more robust systems kick in (CoreSense, NetSuite, Everest, etc). But, at $15k + to touch those systems, most will never outgrow the ROI of Volusion and it’s lackluster ERP/CRM features.
Oh, and good luck getting any catalog to import to another’s ecommerce system without a lot of backend and frontend manipulation. I find you’re much better off keeping everything you do in Excel (for upload/transfer and recovery).
The comment I can make is that if you want an easy-to-use ecommerce front and back end for a relatively small business that does MOSTLY web orders, Volusion is it. If you run a 50/50 (web/phone) or a retail/web establishment or take more than 50 orders per day, best to look for a better solution.
OSC is great if you don’t mind spending a lot of time in the configuration mode, but it really doesn’t offer the piece of mind an established paid solution does (especially if you are not so computer/web savvy).
Monster is good – I have to admit. But their modular pricing structure (similar to StoreFront and Miva) is a bit of a pain to think about.
Ecommerce solution that are good AND effective AND affordable are very rare. Volusion is at the top of the heap, IMHO. If you don’t need any advanced features or you only sell less than 100 products, it’s probably overkill. With our over 5000 products and bustling site activity, it’s a good balance for now… we’ll be moving on soon enough, though. For the SMB that does over 50 orders/day, CORESense has my vote. There are, of course, others.
December 8th, 2005 at 8:06 pm
The biggest complaint I have against the product interface is the fact that there are too many options. Like you said, for most products, you only need a few fields at all times. If I were to design the interface, I’d have a way to let the user customize it so that only the fields he needs appear while others remain optionally hidden. But with a click of a button, any desired field should be made available (given the popularity of AJAX, that shouldn’t be too hard, nor should it be bandwidth intensive since only minimal data is being transmitted). I think this is the single worst flaw of the entire system from what I can see so far.
Another flaw is the use of geeky terms on all the option fields with that annoying underscore. I mean, how much more work is it to make it look nicer for everybody to write a script to remove damn underscore out and capitalize accordingly? And would it kill them if they take advantage of some of that sweet CSS love and make things look a bit user friendly? For a paid solution, I expected the interface to be friendlier much like MonsterCommerce’s. There’s even an OSCommerce plugin that makes the administrative back end look so much more attractive than the default settings (or Volusion’s, for that matter). Speaking of OSCommerce, an offshoot of it, eShox, seems to be gathering steam. It’s a paid, heavily modified and fortified version of OSCommerce.
I have to agree with you again on data export. So many clicky clicks… I’d love to know how you exactly manage your products via Excel.
As for the other stuff you mentioned, I will probably blog about them again as I encounter them. My client is looking to expand his catalog now that they’ve moved to Volusion. The complexity is probably not going to be as much of a concern, but we’ll see. As for now, I only wish they’d take the “geek” out of an otherwise very usable product.
December 8th, 2005 at 10:45 pm
Believe you me, we could commiserate all day long on the inadequacies of Volusion or ANY other of the so-called small biz ecommerce solutions. Most of them just don’t get it. Volusion has many small and large flaws and holes in the current version. But, for what you pay, there’s really nothing better… yet. I keep a pretty close eye on their competition – and, have even used one to develop a subsidary site for a short time.
FYI, eBay ProStores… well, don’t even bother. They purchased it from Kurant because they had the best (at the time) eBay tie-in. Well, after a few days with a free trial, I returned it wishing I could have that wasted time back. It’s a shame eBay even put their name on it.
The primary “key” to all things retail is a SKU. Volusion fails to understand this, as well as most all others (except Storefront, surprisingly). Also, never being satisfied with what you have forces us into a thankless search for the holy grail of ROI. We have not only to watch our bottom line, our competitors, but also our other ecommerce options. It’s literally enough to keep you up at night. That said, and having been with Volusion so long (since they were named Store2003 – talk about a lack of vision), I have seen no less than 1 major release and 4 minor releases. A lot of things have improved while some ill-thought ideas simply disappear with no explanation. At no time will Volusion ever show their hand by promising a feature or a release date. While they do respond quite quickly and vigorously to questions, I have been told repeatedly that feature requests and custom programming is good for month’s of waiting – even if paying for it solely. That tells me they are quite busy, but possibly also severely undermanned. As well, the library of templates is quite impressive until you find out they haven’t added a new one in almost 2 years. If you want to customize it, you’ve got all the tools and documentation at your fingertips (great help manual and template mod tips). But, we prefer to simply get the product to market and into the hands of the end user.
Back to the “they just don’t get it” thing. When we first joined Volusion they eluded to being an all-in-one ecommerce solution that could handle our sort of business – so told to me by their sales reps at the time. Well, try taking a phone order. Try actually keeping an accurate inventory. Try keeping all of your options in order and price updated. Try understanding why you would want to allow a “child” product to belong to more than one “parent”. My personal opinion on this one is that they followed their own incorrect naming convention too strictly… after all, how can a child have more than one parent? Yeah, I don’t get it either.
While I’m griping – since all the businesses I know of are in it to make money, how the heck could COGS be an afterthought? Gee, I never really care how much money I am making – just happy with selling stuff. Let’s see – I could add that you can’t set a product to ground ship only (ever seen the list of prohibited air-ship items), you can’t add a specific shipping cost increase to an individual product (ever heard of oversize), adding alternate images (say of clothing items) to products is as easy as brain-cell twister, and, since I absolutely must agree with you on something specific, why not used industry standard retail naming standards for fields instead of what they thought sounded better. Finally, how many of us out there buy the same product from multiple vendors – well, everyone in the automotive industry does. I can only assume we are not alone. No multiple vendor support in Volusion nor nearly any of its comptetitors that I know of.
Since the proliferation of the small biz ecommerce SaaS vendors, there are a lot of incomplete startups out there. OSCommerce is great for those with some level of web programming savvy and who want to remain the admin. A full-time dedicated techie is not a luxury most of us can afford. It also scares me that the whole system is only as secure as the Open Source community allows it to be. There’s a back door to everything, and too many people have a key to that one.
I gave a few minutes to eShox and could spot the primary flaw in very large print. Aside from the fact that they cater to Macs, (hey, I’m a Mac enthusiast, too – but, we’re still a minority) just a few skims through the support forum and you see that the current version (3) is heavily flawed, and, that the development of the next version (4) is marred by personal differences and a continuing lack of professional commitment. Unlike the full-fledged corporations of Volusion, StoreFront, Monster, Miva, these nifty looking clones using a handful of best-practices are easy to start but hard to follow through on. My experience with Volusion and others is that they are in it for the long haul, do backups daily, protect against security holes and host with big swingers that can really deliver (our semi-deicated service is through Rackspace).
Thanks for the bandwidth (remember when that used to really mean something?
Oh, and keeping all the stuff in excel is an old and probably bad habit. But, it’s brutally easy. Just make a sheet with all of the form fields you think you might ever use, then add the text. If you’re savvy with import/export within excel itself, you learn how to use supplier pricing sheets to fuse updates, then upload to the site. It takes a few tries to get right, but it saves a bunch of time when you’re dealing with 5000+ products from many vendors.
Now, this AJAX thing that’s gaining steam now is very interesting and will change the face of SaaS especially in the CRM/ERP/eCommerce arena. I like what little I have seen of it used in the new webmail applications.
Best regards!
February 6th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
I work prodominately with Volusion, and I have to say that at first the admin was a litle intimidating. But I soon learned my way. You can hide many of the sections on the product page so you aren’t flustered. Also since version 5 was released many of those issues have been resolved. They now have a beginner and advanced settings for the admin. Things are much better, but there is still room for improvment.
February 6th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
@joblank: Thanks for your post. I’d updated my opinions on Volusion with a couple of posts since this entry. But you are absolutely right about Volusion’s vast improvements with the latest 5.x releases. They’ve certainly addressed a lot of concerns I made here and rendered the points moot.