Well we’ve had the Volusion Shopping Cart for a client up and running for customization for just under a day and here are the thoughts so far:
Things that are easy to work with:
1. Uploading CSV files is going a lot faster in Volusion than in a Yahoo! store. I am keeping track of upload timings and so far the upload time is not decreasing proportionally with the number of products that we are having in our store. We will be eventually writing a full .NET class library to manage the Volusion store (let me know if you are interested in this) but for ease we are going with the CSV route for the initial upload.
2. Our client loves the fact that you can designate products in different warehouses across the country, and the shipping is calculated from the correct warehouses zip code. This is the bomb yo!
3. We see some promising thing with the fact that you can track your distributors part numbers and your cost from your distributors in the product. Hopefully there are some ROI reports in there for each order, month, etc.
4. You get full blown FTP access to your site. This is awesome. Any developer or designer knows that once you have raw file access there is not too much that you cannot do. This remains to be seen, but so far this is very nice.
5. We accidentally dove into some of the site stats. These look quite extensive.
6. It looks like there are some great options for the store manager after an order has been submitted – like being able to send the SAME order back to the customer for a different payment type.
Things that are a challenge so far (Disclaimer: Some of these may be a result of ignorance on our part) :
1. It took forever to figure out why a file we were uploading was not working. It says that there was no data in the file or that the file had no CSV data. This was clearly not the case, and even their support acknowledge the file looked good. This is a definite area of improvement – the diagnostic error messages that come out parsing file uploads. In the end it turned out being an issue on my end. But it just took too long to figure out. To make matters worse I gave the file to them and they uploaded it into my store OK. The end result: The file I was using did not have CRLF on the end (Carriage Return Line Feed). It only had LF. You could not tell this by opening the file in Notepad or Excel as both of them opened OK. I only saw it when I opened the file with Notepad++ and turned on the option to see hidden characters. Phew – that took all day to figure out.
2. Finding the encrypted password you need for API customization was a bear. Thank god for their forums. That should be there back in the admin interface someplace.
3. Your PRODUCTCODE (the unique key for every product) is limited in length. This is more of an adjustment than a gripe. In the current version of the store we are migrating you have 2-3 times the length. We had to move from an SEO optimized code to shorter numeric one. We will get over it.
4. I was not happy with their SEO options. You are limited on length and what control you have over your custom URL. They give you a field PRODUCTSHORTNAME where you put in your SEO optimized page name, but it is limited in length. So you page names come out to be www.sitename.com/productshortname/productcode.htm and not www.sitename.com/productshortname.htm (What I would have expected). Probably more of a mindset change on our part.
5. We were reading up on the Google Analytics tracking in the forum. We are going to want to implement full shopping cart/ecommerce tracking. This looks like it is going to be challenge once we get to it.
6. Even though you have full control over the page templates, there is a middle section called page_content. We are still hunting as to where this is created.
More to come as we get deeper in.
Hi guys. Good post. Have you looked at BigCommerce.com? I’ve seen them everywhere and have heard good things about them on Twitter.
Thanks,
A.
Thanks Alan. Yes we just finished up looking at BigCommerce before Volusion. It looked very nice and very easy to use. But the deal killer for us was the API. It was ‘export only’ which means you can use it to get data out but not back in. So if we needed to write a custom program to get data into a shopping cart, etc. for our client we could not do it.
Alan – Their own words from their own manual:
BigCommerce contains a simple data‐out API that allows remote retrieval of customers, orders and products via a simple XML web service. The API allows requests to be made to search for the above data, or retrieve a particular entry from the database for one of the supported data types.Good luck on using the volusion api to insert data. Unfortunately because of the way you have to use the URL for the command you are *extremely* limited in what you can do (because IE, etc. have max length that an URL can be)
If we are using the API programmatically there is no browser involved. Don’t think we have URL restrictions.
Specifically, I was thinking in my head of when we’ve done saved exports, etc. to access via “web services” and xml so likely not your situation.
That said, depending on what you’re using you can still run into url restrictions (e.g. within MS Access, and other MS apps you’ll still be restricted as the module they are using is essentially the same as IE) if you’re trying to pull XML
Also, on the analytics side, it’s pretty straightforward to get going so you should be fine there.
FTP access is actually quite limited in that you’re restricted from the root, and executing things like asp / aspx is pretty much offlimits to my knowledge (you used to be able to do this though)
Yeah – we are a development shop so we’d using something like PHP or .NET. The software would talk directly to the API .ASP file. No browser involved.
Our new forums are up at http://forum.getyourwebsitetoday.com/ for more discussion on this issue. Feel free to jump right in!