This is a guest post from my daughter, Nikki Purvy who uses Volusion for her online fashion boutique.
Celebrating 1 Year with Volusion
Today I celebrate the first birthday of my online boutique Estava Morioka, that I built using the shopping cart software Volusion. When I first began my online e-commerce business exactly one year ago, I knew nothing about e-commerce, web design, or SEO. All, I knew is that I was going to run an online boutique selling women’s dresses. 
I figured since I had the vision, the passion, a plan, and a little bit of money, I could do it. Why, you ask, would I start a business in a field that I know nothing about? Well, I'm one of those people that thinks if I know someone that can do a task that I can’t do, then chances are I’m smarter than them and therefore, I can do it too. It’s a very arrogant/crazy/foolish way of thinking but unfortunately, this is how my brain works.
Shopify versus Volusion
But I digress…So at the time when I started my business a year ago, I knew nothing about SEO, e-commerce, or web design. I delved right into setting up my online boutique using a shopping cart software called “Shopify”. For the beginner e-commerce retailer, this software is perfect. It's very intuitive, very easy, and inexpensive. It only took me 3 full days to set up my store from start to finish. Now keep in mind that as a side affect of my self diagnosed ADHD, I frequently go into hyerfocus when I work on a task for 16,18,20 hours straight . So those 3 days were 3 consecutive 18 hour days (mind you, I was vacationing in Vegas at the time, so you can only imagine how severe my hyperfocus gets). Shopify was also perfect for me at the time because it only cost 30 bucks per month.
Around month 2, I started to run into problems. I realized that Shopify did not offer user-friendly SEO capabilities, I couldn’t get live rate quotes from shipping carriers (UPS, Fedex, USPS, etc), and I didn’t really have that much design flexibility (their templates were terrible and at the time I was totally HTLM and CSS illiterate). Keep in mind this was a whole year ago and from my understanding Shopify has made some major upgrades to their software since then.
But looking back, Shopify was more for websites that want to “Shopify” its current non-shopping site, hence the name. For instance, Shopify is a perfect solution for a rockband who wants to add a subdomain to their existing fanclub website selling t-shirts to hardcore fans, or for a popular blogger who wants to sell hats with their logo to members of their cult following. Now that I see it for what it was, it makes sense for them not to offer user-friendly SEO capabilities for a shopping site that they assume will not be the main attraction. Maybe they figure that you have already “SEO-ed” your main domain so you don’t need to do it here at your Shopify site. I’m sure that I could have gone directly into the HTML code and “SEO-ed” everything there but the portal to get there was not easily locatable.
So around month 2 I went researching my next shopping cart software. I was growing up. I needed software for big girls.
Volusion was the answer to all my prayers
Then, I found Volusion. (angels singing in the background)
Volusion was the answer to all my prayers. It was my Savior. It was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Now, wait. It wasn’t easy at first.
#1 Volusion was more expensive…$99 per month vs Shopify’s $30
#2 At first, it was not intuitive at all!!!
And #3 – the customer service was great but if you try calling during normal business hours, you would be on perma-hold for AT LEAST an hour. No exaggeration.
The Low-Down of Why Volusion Is an Amazing Shopping Cart Software
Although, It sounds bad, I will address each and get to the low-down of why Volusion is an amazing shopping cart software.
#1 – $99 is not a lot of money when you compare it to the costs of a brick and mortar business. And besides, Volusion is well worth it. AND plus, they have cheaper packages than $99.
#2 – SEO, HTML, and CSS are not intuitive languages by nature (they are logical but intuitive they are not). So, any software that properly translates these languages to something that everybody can understand will inherently have an element of “WTF-edness” to it. Besides, now that I am moderately fluent in HTML and CSS and a baby wizard at SEO, Volusion is 100% intuitive to me.
And #3 – There isn't really an excuse for hour-long perma-holds. No wait actually, it reminds me of a logic riddle that we worked on in my mentally gifted program in grade school… A man comes to a new town and needs a hair cut. There are only 2 barbers on town, barber #1 has a clean shop and an amazing hair cut and barber #2 has a dirty shop with hair all over the floor and a terrible hair cut. The man decides to go to barber #2 for his cut. YOU figure out why. This is very similar to Volusion and their jammed up phone lines. Clearly they have superior service. Everyone wants it.
Here Are Some Other Really Cool Features About Volusion
– You can SEO every page and every image on the site including adding meta info.
– It acts like a watered down version of Google analytics. When a customer makes a purchase, they provide you with the referring site info. (an amazing feature!)
– Great order management
– Amazing shipping management – You can link your Fedex or UPS account right to the site and print your shipping labels directly from your site, leaving little to no room for shipping typo errors (I am a professional typo-ist). And your customers get live shipping quotes fed directly from Fedex to the checkout page.
– The freedom and ability to change anything on the site. I update my main page frequently with the use of very little HTML and CSS and a lot of my own logic (something that basicblogtips owner gave to me when she birthed me).
– They just added a feature where you can add Youtube videos of the products on the product pages. I love it! Click the link to this orange cocktail dress and scroll down to see what I mean. It's really cool!
– You can manage affiliates using their internet marketing tools. Yup, this is exactly what it sounds like.
– You can manage abandoned carts. You can send reminder emails to logged in customers if they abandon their shopping carts.
– You can manage facebook and twitter directly from the backend of the site (Although, I would never do this. No reason)
– Great product presentation – Product pics allow customers to roll over them and magnify the pic. Click the link to this cocktail dress and roll over the pic to see what I mean.
– You can update different elements of your site from the backend AND the front end.
And the best part about Volusion is the customer service. It's actually pretty outstanding. Although I have to wait an hour to speak to someone, as soon as someone gets on the phone their expertise and friendliness helps me to quickly forget the fact that I spent the better part of the last 60 minutes wishing that I chose to sit and watch the grass growing channel rather than call Volusion and listen to Kenny G on Muzak.