Volusion VS BigCommerce? What’s the difference? Since 1Digital Agency has experience designing and using both platforms we figured we’d try and tackle on this question. We have been developing on both systems, BigCommerce and Volusion for a long time now. Internally within 1Digital Agency we have programmers that prefer one platform over the other for different reasons. After researching this topic on the web we realized that most comparison websites and articles are advertisers trying to gain commission for keyword generated traffic on the term “Volusion vs BigCommerce”. Basically it’s a bunch of garbage that will do you no good when your considering the best platform for you. We figured the best analysis would be from actual user comments/reviews. Who better to tell you the differences between both platforms then the actual user? Someone that used both systems would know, right? We may add comments from our technical team but to be honest, they’re so deeply integrated into both systems that sometimes their opinions are skewed. So we’ve asked a few of our clients that actually have used both systems for their honest opinions. Read below and see if this will help you decide. Both Volusion & BigCommerce have their pros and cons and the below are just opinions from actual users.
VOLUSION VS BIGCOMMERCE: My Honest Opinion
From Client (Private)
Used Volusion in 2012
Uses BigCommerce in 2013
Why Client switched to BigCommerce: Bandwidth charges in Volusion where getting out of control.
IN GENERAL
The best comparison I can make between the two systems is akin to the OS debate that’s been happening for years: do you want a more in depth and detailed system of control while sacrificing the overall look (Windows), or a pretty interface with less control over minutia (Mac)? Both systems have their flaws, some bigger than others, but overall at this point in our business, I do prefer BigCommerce.
LAYOUT
Volusion: There’s something about the Volusion Layout, both back and front end, that look like a student’s HTML-for-beginners final project… All of the language and options are somewhat reliant on the user knowing how HTML works, and it takes some working and re-working to make things “look pretty” on the front end.
BigCommerce: This is what people are looking for in a layout, and the difference between our Volusion layout (front end) and our current layout looks like we spent a couple thousand dollars on a professional and a redesign. BigCommerce also includes a “universal” search bar that lets you search all orders and items and pages on your site for any phrase – which is great for a quick look-up while on the phone or multi-tasking. Even the back end is easier to understand, and color coding for the orders is a great built in system. Everything is clean and simple, best of all pictures are auto-sized, and perfect for a user in a hurry or a user with limited understand of the internet.
MONETARY CONTROL
Volusion: Volusion takes this category, hands down. Right from the Order Page you can refund, capture only a specific amount, see the customers credit card information, and a list of all the transactions you’ve made in between. Upgrading an item and charging a customer more money could be done straight from the same order page. While it took a bit of understanding, ultimately it was a detailed and useful tool in keeping track of orders.
BigCommerce: Can go f#ck itself. Zero control over the money you capture, an arduous process to capture less money (going back and forth between the authorize account), and to capture more money you have the cancel the current order and have a customer place a new one, which is annoying for both parties. The WORST was calling their help line and having them say “they have no idea” and “things might work differently every time” in regards to authorization. Not awesome.
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Volusion: Although ugly to look at, the Volusion system for item management is superior by a mile. Except for the HTML hustle you have to do on occasion, the ability to mass edit items by column is invaluable. I want to change the price of 30 items? Easy, just create a column for price and scroll down, copying and pasting as you go. Individual product pages are broken down in a logical order.
BigCommerce: Item management is a little all over the place. In order to mass-edit, you have to export everything to an excel file, edit, then import and update the entire inventory; it is quite the hassle. Individual product pages are essentially schizophrenic. Ten million tabs for ten million random things, some of them grouped logically and some not. Creating options for items is not intuitive, and creating new items is blase. The only plus is having the ability to sort items by their “status” (visible, not visible, low inventory etc). I would not have wanted to build an inventory in this system, but managing the items I had already built in volusion is easy and doable.
ORDER MANAGEMENT + SHIPPING
Volusion: Order management was okay, the monetary control being the highlight. Shipping items was an ordeal, and going into each individual order to print labels was a pain in the ass that I do not miss.
BigCommerce: Order management is great – customers are easy to find and track, orders are categorized by color and the ability to mass print invoices and the ability to mass-change the status of orders (eg. from awaiting payment to awaiting fulfillment) is a real time-saver. Not sure if this is a credit to them, or to shipstation, but creating shipping labels and printing them all out in one go is an amazing feature.
OTHER + CONCLUSION
The best example of the difference between these two systems is their individual approaches to branding. Volusion treats a brand like a category, so items can be multiple brands. There’s your more control. BigCommerce handles brands with a artist’s blunt brush: their “search by brand” page is appealing and well designed, but you cannot select more than one brand for an item – maybe for most businesses this wouldn’t be a problem, but glass blowers often collaborate and the inability to select multiple brands for an item irks me and is counter intuitive in this business. A similar point can be made regarding coupon codes.
PRICING
Both systems are comparably priced with comparable features. The biggest difference and the difference that made us switch was bandwidth charges. We started off with no issues, our monthly charges with Volusion were around $99 a month but once we started receiving a large amount of traffic that price changed, and changed quickly. We went from spending $99 dollars a month up towards $1500 per month because of traffic spikes. The reason we opted to move to BigCommerce is because BigCommerce gives you unlimited bandwidth for the same monthly charge without penalty. That’s huge!
When we were looking for solutions that would allow us to stay on Volusion (Since we invested so much time and money) we tried hosting our images on other servers and just pointing our code to reference those images, thus when the webpage in Volusion loaded, the bandwidth wouldn’t be effected in Volusion. Unfortunately that barely did the trick and only helped us by a small percentage. Even if we upgraded to Volusions personal servers, our cost would have gone up to $450 per month plus overage charges in Volusion since we were getting about 90 gigs of bandwidth data per month. So we finally decided that enough was enough and switched platforms.
Ultimately…
I prefer BigCommerce, because making things look pretty for customers is something I see as a little more important, even if it means my doing extra leg work to make sure the information is there and that it’s correct.
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More opinions between Volusion Vs BigCommerce are coming soon. If you have an opinion that you would like to share please email info@1DigitalAgency.com and we’ll post your review here.