Easy Steps To create a Successful ECommerce Store With Volusion

If you are on an outdated store or old shopping cart

The original premise still resonates: many merchants are stuck on an aging store or a dated cart and want a modern, capable storefront without a multi-year project. That is a real and common situation. The honest 2020s answer, though, is different from the original 2013 one. Rather than building a new store on Volusion, the better path for almost everyone is a modern hosted platform such as Shopify or BigCommerce, or an open-source platform like WooCommerce or Adobe Commerce if your requirements genuinely demand it. If you are currently on Volusion, the practical question is usually not "how do I build on it" but "how do I migrate off it safely" — which we cover below.

What actually makes an ecommerce store succeed

Whatever platform you choose, the fundamentals that determine success are platform-independent. These are the steps worth your time:

• Get the product data right. Clean, consistent product information — titles, options (color/size), descriptions, images, SKUs, inventory — is the foundation everything else sits on. A spreadsheet-driven catalog import is fine; a messy catalog will undermine the best design.
• Choose a theme that fits your catalog and buyer, then customize it deliberately. Modern platforms offer responsive themes; the skill is matching the theme to how many products you sell and how customers decide, not picking the prettiest demo.
• Invest in product imagery. Zoomable, high-quality photos materially affect conversion, especially for visual categories. This is one of the highest-return things you can spend on.
• Treat mobile and speed as primary. Most traffic and Google's primary index are mobile. A fast, mobile-first store is not optional.
• Build in SEO from the start. Clean URLs, unique titles and descriptions, original content, and structured data are far cheaper to do up front than to retrofit.
• Learn the platform's documentation. Every serious platform has current official docs and design guides — read them. (Use modern browser developer tools, built into Chrome/Firefox, to inspect and experiment safely; the old "install Firebug" advice is obsolete since Firebug was discontinued years ago.)
• Plan for measurement. Set up analytics and Search Console before launch so you can tell what is working from day one.

Migrating off an aging platform safely

If you are leaving Volusion (or any legacy cart), the migration itself is where stores most often lose ground — not in the new design but in mishandled URLs. A safe migration includes:

1. A full export and clean-up of products, customers, and order history.
2. A complete URL map from every old URL to its new equivalent, with 301 redirects in place at launch so rankings and backlinks transfer instead of evaporating.
3. Preserved metadata, content, and structured data — a redesign should not silently delete the content that ranks.
4. Post-launch verification in Search Console (coverage, redirects resolving, no spike in 404s).

Done well, a migration modernizes the store and keeps the SEO equity it has built. Done carelessly, it can erase years of organic traffic in a week — which is exactly why it is worth doing deliberately.

Hosted vs. open source for the replacement store

Since the original article's premise was choosing a platform, here is the modern version of that decision done honestly. For the large majority of merchants leaving a legacy cart, a modern hosted platform is the right destination: it handles hosting, security, PCI compliance, and upgrades, launches in days not months, and now covers the great majority of requirements that used to force a custom build. Choose open source (WooCommerce, Adobe Commerce) only when a concrete, named requirement — deep custom product configuration, complex B2B pricing, heavy ERP integration, a headless front end — genuinely cannot be met on a hosted platform and you have the operational capacity to own patching and uptime forever. The failure mode we see most often in re-platforming projects is choosing open source for flexibility the store never actually uses, then carrying the maintenance and security burden indefinitely with nothing to show for it. The decision should be driven by your real, written requirements and your team's operational capacity, not by which platform sounds the most powerful. Whatever you pick, the fundamentals above — clean product data, conversion-focused design, mobile speed, and SEO built in from day one — matter far more to whether the new store succeeds than the platform logo on the login screen.

Frequently asked questions

Is Volusion free or open source? No. It was a paid, hosted, closed-source SaaS platform — the original article's claim was wrong. It has also wound down for new stores, so it is not a platform we recommend starting on today.

I'm on Volusion now — what should I do? Plan a careful migration to a modern platform that fits your requirements. The priority is a complete URL map with 301 redirects so you keep your rankings.

Which platform should I move to? For most merchants, a modern hosted platform (Shopify or BigCommerce); open source (WooCommerce, Adobe Commerce) when specific requirements justify the added operational burden.

Will migrating hurt my SEO? Only if URLs and content are mishandled. With a full redirect map and preserved metadata, rankings transfer with minimal disruption.

How long does a migration take? It varies with catalog size and customization, but the URL-mapping and redirect work is non-negotiable regardless of timeline — rushing that step is what causes traffic loss, so plan for it explicitly rather than treating it as a launch-day afterthought.

If you are on an aging store and want to modernize without losing traffic, our ecommerce platform migration team handles exactly this — data, redirects, design, and SEO preservation end to end.