WANT MORE FROM YOUR ECOMMERCE PLATFORM?
THE SHOWDOWN: VOLUSION VS SHOPIFY PLUS
Don't Be the Last Brand Standing:
Merchants have been leaving Volusion at a phenomenal pace, mostly due to a lack of focus on the e-commerce platform. Spending the last 5 years scrambling to keep up with the times but consistently coming up short, Volusion invested nearly its entire R&D budget into building out and developing their Mozu Commerce platform (newly acquired by Kibo). Cutting their losses, they've switched gears, diving into a new ecommerce platform they've dubbed 'Material'. Volusion's latest funding efforts in early 2015 are a last-ditch effort to save a once successful, but now floundering organization.
Shopify Plus is offering a free migration and up to 6 months free service for existing Volusion users. Contact us to find out more
Bygone Technology With Limited Growth:
Volusion was a great way to do business... 17 years ago. Unfortunately, the core of their technology has changed very little since those early days. As the platform continues to age it’s struggling to keep up with the expectations — particularly performance and scalability — of a modern ecommerce platform.
Before you make any big decisions, always ensure you know what you're getting into with your pricing tiers. Volusion's premium tier caps you at 35 GB and requires you to purchase a yearly SSL certificate. After that you pay per GB, and their rates can't be found on their website. Consumers also lack access to monthly usage rates. So much for transparency. The more successful you are, the more money you're required to fork over to Volusion.
On the flip side, Shopify offers unlimited bandwidth and growth — even at their most basic tier, with all pricing and usage rates posted clearly, so consumers can breathe easy, and plan for growth.
Choose a company that supports your long term goals
Growth Opportunities:
Volusion states they are an all-in-one ecommerce solution. They provide a storefront and Facebook store, but that's where it stops.
Shopify provides merchants the opportunity to maximize growth. They even let you easily sell items directly on your hosted Shopify blog or any third-party site, alongside in-person sales, if you choose to use their POS device. All this is in addition to being able to easily sell products on Amazon, Facebook messenger, Facebook, at Point of Sale terminals in-store or at tradeshows, Wanelo, Twitter and even Pinterest within minutes.
You won't find new opportunities without new technology
Don't Go It Alone. Let Others Help You Out.
With Volusion you are by yourself. You can talk to their support team, but bouncing ideas off of other successful merchants — though hugely valuable — is largely inaccessible. Though the platform has been around for decades, no forums or proper communities exist.
Shopify has a large and vibrantly active community — forums with thousands of threads to help you find the hack you are looking for. A quick search will most likely reveal the answer you're looking for. There's even a VIP Facebook Group for Shopify Plus merchants, along with some extremely active ones that nearly 1 in 20 Shopify merchants use to communicate with each other. These Shopify groups let you ask questions about strategy, design, app recommendations, and everything in between, so you can benefit from community experience and make the right decisions to grow your brand.
With over 350,000 merchants on its platform, Shopify benefits from a body of thousands of Shopify Experts that have grown up around the platform. In order to ensure that Shopify Plus can accommodate the needs of even its largest retailers, the Shopify Plus Partner program was created in June 2016, thoroughly vetting each partner, each of which represents the top agencies within their given competencies.
Shopify has built one of the most enthusiastic and engaged communities of budding entrepreneurs that encourage communication and growth. Between the Facebook groups, vetted Shopify Experts and 24/7/365 Support you can ask get your questions answered in minutes.
What are current Volusion users saying?
More Uptime. Guaranteed.
Scaling an aging infrastructure is always a challenge, and unfortunately Volusion has been barely treading water for some time. Volusion has been plagued by outages and performance issues for nearly 5 years now. Some of the Volusion's largest merchants have literally been kicked off of the platform for consuming too much memory and bandwidth. The experience of lagginess and issues with performance when using their admin tools is not uncommon amongst users, and translates to lower productivity and an overall cumbersome effort.
Comparing uptime guarantees, Volusion offers 99.90% uptime, whereas Shopify knocks them out of the water with an impressive 99.99%. This additional 0.9% means Shopify's tech allows merchants to sell on average 8 hours more than those on Volusion.
What does this mean for retailers? If you're a growing brand selling $500,000/yr, that represents a loss of, on average $450/yr. Now imagine if those 8 hours of downtime struck on Cyber Monday, or in the prime holiday season? The loss of revenue on a platform with uptime guarantees like Volusion's could be crippling. Special days in the retail world are make it or break it. Don't give your competitors the lead.
There Is Still One Thing Volusion Does Better... Making It Easy to Leave
Volusion removed their community forums, eliminated nighttime phone support, and started fresh, building two new ecommerce platforms in the hopes of meeting the needs of today's merchants. Shopify is offering up to 6 months free for any Volusion merchant that's ready for real growth — to fly over by end of year.
