After my last project using Volusion as an online storefront, I left with some bitter-sweet taste in my mouth. Volusion was excellent in a few things but wasn’t so great with others. This year, I got another chance to work with them again. And I noticed the following:
1. Extremely fast and responsive email tech support. When I say fast, it’s Apple-esque fast, not DELL. This is consistent with the last time I used them over a year ago.
2. Constant improvements on user UI and “some” ease of use. They’ve consolidated some features while making others a lot more usable.
However, there are still other problems they haven’t fixed, the most obvious is the lack of support for CSV files exported using a Macintosh. I’d forgotten that CSV files exported using Mac version of Microsoft Office didn’t play well with Volusion’s import tool. So I ran into the same problems I did last time. Good thing I blogged and documented about it though. Too bad Volusion didn’t bother with fixing that minor issue for Mac users (nor have they improved the documentation for it either).
For Apple’s Numbers users, they are out of luck. Numbers does not have the option to save a Volusion-compatible version of the CSV file. It was rather disappointing to see Apple leaving out a potentially show-stopping feature for a lame import tool such as Volusions.
Okay, enough bashing on Volusion. Obviously I liked them enough to send them another client for me to work on the storefront. The last time I was using them, they’d just upgraded their administration console to 4.0. This time around, it’s 5.0. Though I didn’t see too many obvious changes, I can certainly appreciate them constantly improving on their system. And a lot of the stuff I wrote about have become irrelevant after the v.4 and v.5 releases. For the price and performance, Volusion is a decent vendor to go with for an ecommerce storefront.