Last updated - November 29, 2022
Shopify and Volusion are two of the many website builders with a few similar features. You can develop and administer these websites with ease, making it easy to develop even by those who do not have advanced technical prowess. In this article, we provide a detailed comparison between Shopify and Volusion.
Keynotes of article
- What is Shopify?
- What is Volusion?
- Detailed comparison
- Pros and Cons
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a hosted eCommerce platform that is ideal for amateurs with no prior experience of programming, coding, or web development. However, with this platform, they can build and operate their own online store with ease. Shopify was launched in 2006 and currently has1,389,995 active websites, worldwide.
What is Volusion?Â
Volusion is one of the oldest ecommerce platforms providing ecommerce solutions since 1999. However, it was overtaken by BigCommerce and Shopify thereafter. The good news though is that with a lot of improvement in its selling features, along with providing unlimited bandwidth, in the recent past, Volusion is slowly making its presence known in the eCommerce world. With its many good features, it can be considered a bankable eCommerce platform that can be a cheaper alternative to Shopify with regard to subscriptions. Volusion is ideal for dropshipping.
While Shopify was primarily developed to help online businesses boost their sales, Volusion was developed to make it easy for novices to be able to create their websites without having to write code. Volusion offers user-friendly features and responsive themes while building the website, along with many other positive features, thus making it a great choice for any website builder.
Detailed comparison
Pricing
Shopify offers three price options – Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify. They all come with a monthly fee, which is mentioned below in the table. Shopify also offers a 14-day free trial; all you have to do is enter your email address.
For those who prefer to sell the Shopify plans in person or through their existing website can do so with Shopify’s $9 per month Shopify Lite plan. Shopify also works well for eCommerce development firms where the prices begin from $2000 per month.
Volusion offers four payment plans starting from $14 to $135 for its premium plan. It also offers a 14-day free trial like Shopify. Volusion is a cost-effective alternative as depending on the package you choose, you may use the service without worrying about transaction costs.
User-Friendliness
Shopify ease of access
The hosted nature of Shopify offers an interface that is highly user-friendly. With the drag-and-drop interface of Shopify, addition, deletion, or relocation of components is easy and just a few clicks away. Moreover, the main page with its straightforward interface offers visual hints and shortcuts that enables customizing themes, adding of goods, and adding a domain. With such amazing possibilities and ok, your eCommerce website can be created with ease.
Volusion ease of access
Volusion, as compared to Shopify, is not as easy or simple to use. It tends to offer too much, such as splitting the editing interface between the storefront (it’s what the customers see) and the backend, which means you are having to move from one interface to the other with no keyboard shortcuts to ease the job. This can be chaotic while you are trying to build your eCommerce store.
It can be concluded that when it comes to ease of use, Shopify scores over Volusion, thanks to its basic functionality and quick ‘undo’ option. Volusion on the other hand is a bit complicated to use.
Themes
Shopify offers a vast selection of at least 13 free templates and 71 premium designs in a price range of $150-350.
A vast array of themes, ranging from sports, electronics, clothing, cosmetics, etc., can be found on Shopify. The Shopify themes are not only beautiful and appealing, but they are mobile-friendly too, and can be edited with the help of their mobile editor. They are developed by UI-UX experts, hence their performance is guaranteed. Last but not the least, your storefront themes can be changed to your liking if what’s selected earlier does not suit your storefront.
Volusion has fewer choice of templates as compared to Shopify with 11 free and 34 premium themes. Volusion templates are a little more expensive than that of Shopify. Though Volusion themes are mobile responsive, they are difficult to manage via a mobile phone. Just like Shopify, Volusion too offers industry-specific themes and features that can help your site performance.
eCommerce compatibility
- Both digital and physical products can be sold with Shopify as well as Volusion. However, the basic difference between the two is that Shopify’s features are easily available through apps, but there are very few apps on Volusion’s app store that can take care of up/cross-selling and 1-click upsell features.
- Shopify comes with some very nice built-in features such as abandoned cart and real-time shipping rates. However, certain features such as the product search feature, subscription, reward points, and 1-click upsells are paid features.
- On the other hand, Volusion does not offer ratings, reviews, and abandoned cart recovery on its Personal plan. While Shopify charges $29 for a Personal plan, Volusion charges $79 at least to access all the features.
- Volusion is the ‘go to’ platform for those wanting to create affiliate programs, as it is a built-in feature, unlike on Shopify where you need to pay to hit this app. Interested affiliates can easily sign up on your website and send out emails to their contacts/affiliates from the Volusion dashboard itself.
- Another feature in favor of Volusion is that it offers more built-in features than Shopify. If you want to sell certain personalized products, you can do so without having to pay over and beyond your monthly subscription to Volusion. However, with Shopify, any extra app calls for extra payment other than your monthly subscription.
Payment Gateways
Payments on Shopify
All major payment methods, such as PayPal, Amazon Pay, Square, and even Bitcoin, along with many more options, are accepted on Shopify. In fact, Shopify is increasing its payment options, making it easy for local suppliers. This ensures higher conversion rates for business owners.
Generally, most payment methods charge 0.5 to 2 percent per transaction, however, Shopify users are not charged this additional fee if payments are made via Shopify’s payment gateway, which is a big savings. However, the payment gateway is not available in all the 17 countries where Shopify is available thus making it an expensive option, wherein people have to pay extra for apps other than the up/cross-selling apps. Though Shopify tends to end up costing more than Volusion, in comparison it offers more features on all its apps.
Payment on Volusion
Like Shopify, Volusion too has its own native gateway but with a credit card transaction fee, which is lower than on other payment gateways. However, there is a restriction on the number of products and the revenue that can be made on each plan, unlike Shopify where there is no restriction on the number of products and the revenue you can make on the basic plan.
Options for Shipping
Shopify offers the option for printable shipping labels, along with built-in connection with shipping services, such as UPS and NHL, ensuring a smooth shipping process. Shopify offers Shopify shipping, which directly lets you print labels from your dashboard by integrating with services like:
- USPS
- UPS
- DHL Express
- Canada post
- FedEx
Volusion allows you to choose shipping types, give special discounts, offer flat shipping alternatives, and determine overall shipping costs with the help of third party shipping applications like ShippingEasy. It also offers drop-shipping like Shopify.
Unlike Shopify, Volusion uses third party applications and ties up with other programs to ensure shipping. In this case, Shopify wins by a long range, as it has integrated shipping and discounted rates with its premium subscription.
Dropshipping
Shopify and Volusion both offer integrated dropshipping for their customers by connecting to shipping services such as UPS, USPS, DHL and many more. The only difference is that Shopify has all these service providers integrated within its dashboard, whereas Volusion connects to these service providers though apps.
Marketing features
Shopify Email Campaigns
With Shopify, you can send free emails to up to, 25000 subscribers through Shopify Email for Abandoned Orders, a marketing tool that is available to all Shopify subscribers, without the pressure of a monthly commitment. After the first, 25000 emails sent to subscribers, Shopify charges $1 for every 1000 emails sent thereafter.
Volusion Email Campaigns
The email marketing feature was available in older versions of Volusion, but not in the current one.
Social Media Incorporation
Shopify Social Media
Shopify enables selling of up to 10 social media platforms, from Facebook to Instagram to Messenger, and not to forget Amazon. Shopify’s social media strength ensures that its merchants have access to an empowering tool that enables them to reach out to a larger number of prospective clients
Volusion Social Media
Volusion separates the social media advertisements from the social media shop in a unique way. It offers a ‘Social Media Center,’ where users may make a basic post and share it on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. It also offers a Google Customer Review feature that allows you to sell on many platforms in the same marketing section, including Facebook, Amazon, eBay, and Google. As a result, while it may appear to have a variety of marketing elements, it lacks deep functions for these aspects.
SEO Optimization
- Shopify and Volusion offer strong product page SEO, with readily customizable pages and meta descriptions. Additionally, sitemap.xml may be produced automatically on both Shopify and Volusion.
- The built-in SEO tools in Shopify make it easy to improve your eCommerce website. The best aspect is that Shopify makes it simple to create names and descriptions for all goods and pages, as well as a sitemap.
- 301 redirects are available on both Shopify and Volusion. A new path in your navigation may be generated using Shopify. The same may be done with Volusion in the manager section.
- Finally, while both Shopify and Volusion have issues with modifying URLs, Shopify is a step ahead of Volusion in that only a few strings are maintained in the URL, which are generally keywords, such as /category/. On the other hand, Volusion adds variables as well to the URL, making it inconveniently long.
Apps and Plugins
Shopify’s eCommerce app shops are among the best and offer over 6000 applications. The array of features Shopify offers is amazing and provides innumerable free and premium options to choose from with a $15 monthly subscription.
Volusion has an app store just like Shopify, but is not as large of a collection with only 20+ apps. Some apps Volusion offers cover the basics but do not go in-depth.
Support Accessibility
Shopify has good customer support that can be easily reached via email, phone, live chat, and its community forum. Moreover, Shopify Plus customers are offered special agent support.
Volusion also provides phone help, but only between the hours of 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. CST. There’s also no email support, since Volusion feels that providing you with phone help would provide you with a better experience.
Although it’s quite straightforward to get any queries regarding your Volusion experience handled, you’ll have a better overall customer care experience with Shopify.
Security
Your eCommerce company data will be well guarded against data leakage or loss with Shopify’s basic level of security. It offers SSL certificates that can provide message encryption and is PCI compliant, thus making your payment gateways secure. Volusion offers equally good security features as Shopify.
Pros and Cons of Shopify vs. Volusion
| Pros | Cons | |
| Shopify | 1. Very fast load time. 2. 1-Click selling. 3. Support of certified partners. 4. Options available for up/cross-selling. | 1. Applicable Transaction fees. 2. Paid Apps tend to make it costly eventually. 3. Not so strong SEO. |
| Volusion | 1. Very good onboarding. 2. Good help center. 3. No applicable transaction fees. 4. Subscription/Recurring payments that are built-in. 5. SMB Friendly. 6. Offers ‘Deal of the day’. | 1. Automatic digital downloads cannot be sold. 2. Does not have up/cross-selling features. 3. Slow SaaS platforms. 4. Does not have a built-in blog feature. |
Conclusion
Shopify provides a greater selection of themes, applications, and integrations than Volusion, as well as POS systems, multi-currency selling, and blogging functionality, as well as no sale constraints. However, when it comes to analytics capabilities, Volusion has the upper hand, and there are no transaction costs. As a result, under different situations, either may be a better choice.
Further Reads
Shopify vs Squarespace – Which is the Best Choice to Build your eCommerce Store?
7 Shopify Marketing Strategies to Build a 6-figure Business
Shopify vs BigCommerce – Choose the Best Option to Build Your eCommerce Store
