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Any Americommerce or Volusion users to give feedback?
We have been utilizing a small time Work at home mom web hosting site and custom shopping cart software for about nine months now and have clearly outgrown it. It's lackluster, cumbersome, and essentially forgotten about. My wife wants the ease of a cart with a powerful but easy to use backend to really perform tasks easily and be able to follow up with customers. Americommerce seems to be as feature rich as anything I've seen, a step above volusion in fact. THeir abandoned cart follow up module is remarkable. Anyone have any experience with this host/cart? It's expensive for the plan we need @ $99/mo.
Volusion has the best functionality for sure. Bandwidth is only an issue on very large sites and can be negotiated upfront. SEO is the best too. Americommerce tries to sell on multiple store function but it is very buggy and has poor customer service. They are trying to stay alive on a small number of large sites that have supported them so far.
I've been using Volusion for over 2 years now and really like it. I have had NO bandwidth issues on any of the sites. Customer support is good and their forum members are some of the most helpful anywhere. It is on the expensive side, but you really do get what you pay for. I tried demoing the Americommerce and did not like it. The only advantage it had over Volusion was the ability to manage more than one site from a single admin area.
Hi,
I am assuming you were using merchant moms. I have a website designer encouraging me to use them. Can you tell me what you didn't like about the program and what you mean by your business has outgrown it.
Thanks
I have built sites with Americommerce and Volusion and I would say that you get what you pay for.
If I had to choose one over the other, I'd say Americommerce, because Volusion is, excuse me, absolute garbage on the front end, and the back end hardly makes any sense.
Volusion's front end is barely customizable at all. If you like their templates, then you'll be pleased. If not, too bad. They use font tags and embedded images, and if you don't want some of those buttons or features to show up, you have to replace them with a blank image. We had a lot of trouble just getting the product images to upload and then show up. If you upload them in the wrong order, too bad.
Volusion's support is terrible. The folks they hire either don't know much about the software, or don't want to tell you. Our accountant had a very hard time trying to configure the credit card processing feature.
My biggest problem with Americommerce as a designer was that it was table-based, and not completely customizable. Apart from that, they were OK. Their support team was much better than Volusion. They were able to make changes to our site and discuss new features. They were pretty quick to respond to trouble-ticket issues. Most of my problems with Volusion stemmed from the fact that I had used Americommerce before.
The biggest limitation was that Americommerce used tables, which are bad for SEO and accessibility. I can't count the number of SEO/accessibility problems with Volusion. Volusion's code base is very '90s, very HTML 3.0.
I'm looking into using Magento as a shopping cart for my customers right now. You host it on your own server, and it's free as far as I can tell.
I've had great results using the SearchFit shopping cart.
The template system is very versatile. I to avoid using tables whenever possibly and this system allows for tableless design, which is great! The SEO features are extremely customizable as well. They also are a smaller company so they have great customer support over the phones and forum.
The platform was recently a finalist for Best Ecommerce Solution in the Small Business Computing Awards.
Just my comment on the benefits of Volusion - I do not think it is the optimum solution for a full fledged developer. But for someone who is looking for a shopping cart with a lot of features, free templates, and software that is not too state of the art you can't stumble through it, it's a big step up from the entry-level carts out there. It has major features which can serve large catalogs, including export api features for automated exports to a lot of 3rd party platforms. It's SEO features are not perfect but they're again much better than the many entry level platforms out there. If you do not have a lot of products, I think 3Dcart is actually better. It has easier to use administration area for sure, no going from one giant page to another, and it's cheaper. It also has very good support and I think a better product image presentation. however they do not have the number of free templates. So budget is always an issue and decent looking templates are important if you do not want to spend a lot of money on 3rd party developing. It also has a free chat program, and decent built-in email marketing module. I don't know too much about monstercommerce, but I found their demo very difficult to deal with and not very intuitive. If you have a small business and are looking to grow slowly and don't want to spend a lot of money but want something with good features and a quick startup I think the best choice is quickcart. You can also have a free demo there FOREVER - unlimited - which is great if you really are feeling your way through and don't want to spend money before you can really sell. For pure SEO features, there is no doubt SEO-Cart is the way to go. This generates real html pages, no mumbers, no .asp, .php just pure html pages and abbreviated url addresses. It also has automated metatags. I've tried the demo and the description tags are very good, keywords are a decent start you can always modify them. Still it will save a lot of work on a large catalogue. However, you will need to pay for a template. Volusion, in my opinion, is a good package in that, well, what you don't get doesn't cost you money, what you do get saves you money. But there are definately better choices I think if you do not have a lot of products; 3dcart and quickcart provide templates. So these are inexpensive startups.
We area frustrated Volusion customers,we run for several clients sites on Volusion and they have been good but have grown to big,and now we needa solution that can support these features
1.Narrow Yor Results,on left navigation within categories in checkbox format showing results amount,products filtering
2.Volusion API is limited
3.Sort of pages customizable (EG: catalog page #)
4.Google Checkout Full integration
5.Pricing Levels by login,unlimited or at least 10
6.Options to display full pricing not price differnce (eg:+50)
can someone recommend a solution i can use and customize to meet my needs,instead of builing from scratch
The Volusion-type solutions are a little pricey, especially if you are not generating much income yet. I think you should use something like Zen Cart or Quick Shopping Cart. Let me know if you have other questions.
__________________ Collabora Hosting - Small Business Hub for SaaS
Web Hosting, Email, Ecommerce, CRM, VPS/VDS
I've tried both and have settled with Volusion. It's not perfect and there are things that drive me batty about it but it is solid and a great value. They do charge bandwidth charges in excess of the allotted usage, but that obviously scales with traffic, which should mean more sales. We have no issue with that. Much better than paying a % of sales like with Yahoo.
Americommerce has great ideas, but they just don't deliver. They're better at designing what a great ecommerce solution should be than at delivering a solid, bug-free solution. We tried them out and bailed because we couldn't count on them and couldn't imagine building a store with a platform that was that buggy.
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