Shopify vs Volusion: What’s the Best Builder in 2024?

Shopify vs Volusion: Final verdict

Shopify and Volusion both offer comprehensive ecommerce solutions, but they cater to different business needs and user preferences.

• 
  Shopify (Overall Grade: 8.1/10)
  
  excels in providing a robust, scalable platform for businesses of all sizes. It offers a wide range of ecommerce tools, advanced marketing features, and strong security measures. Shopify’s ease of use, extensive app store, and superior customer support make it an ideal choice for businesses looking to grow and manage their online stores efficiently. When comparing Shopify vs Volusion, Shopify stands out for its professional design options, comprehensive ecommerce features, and overall value for money.
• 
  Volusion (Overall Grade: 6.6/10)
  
  is a solid choice for small to medium-sized businesses seeking an affordable and user-friendly ecommerce platform. It offers a range of customizable templates, essential ecommerce tools, and basic marketing features. However, Volusion falls short in terms of advanced integrations, AI capabilities, and overall performance compared to Shopify. For users prioritizing budget and simplicity, Volusion provides a feasible solution, but it may not meet the needs of larger or more complex online stores.

Which one is the best for ecommerce: Shopify or Volusion?

Verdict

: Shopify is the superior choice for ecommerce, offering a comprehensive suite of tools and features that cater to businesses of all sizes. Volusion, while a solid platform, falls short in scalability and advanced ecommerce functionalities.

• 
  Shopify
  
  : With a score of 9.2, Shopify excels in providing a robust ecommerce solution. It offers extensive payment gateways, advanced inventory management, and detailed analytics, making it ideal for businesses looking to scale. Shopify’s comprehensive store builder and multi-channel selling capabilities further enhance its appeal for serious ecommerce ventures.
• 
  Volusion
  
  : Scoring 7.1, Volusion is a good option for smaller businesses or those just starting out. It offers essential ecommerce features like product listings, multiple currencies support, and SEO tools. However, its bandwidth limitations and fewer advanced features make it less suitable for high-traffic sites or businesses aiming for rapid growth.

Which one is the best for informational and business websites?

Verdict

: When it comes to creating informational and business websites, Volusion slightly edges out Shopify. While Shopify is a robust platform with a strong focus on ecommerce, Volusion offers a more balanced approach that caters well to both ecommerce and informational needs.

• 
  Shopify
  
  : Shopify is primarily designed for ecommerce, offering a range of tools for product listing, payments, and order fulfillment. While it can be used for informational websites, its features are more tailored towards online stores, making it less ideal for purely informational sites. Shopify scores 6.8 in this category.
• 
  Volusion
  
  : Volusion provides a comprehensive solution for building and managing online stores, but it also offers a variety of customizable templates and features that make it suitable for informational websites. With a score of 7.2, Volusion is a better choice for businesses looking to create a balanced online presence that includes both ecommerce and informational content.

Shopify vs Volusion: Detailed comparison

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Winner: Shopify.

If you’re looking for a platform that offers more professional and sophisticated design options, Shopify is the preferred choice.

Shopify’s templates are sleek and professional, ideal for ecommerce sites. They offer a sophisticated look with a focus on online stores. While the free template selection is not large, Shopify’s premium theme store provides a variety of industry-specific options, offering advanced features for a strong brand presence.

Shopify Themes

On the other hand, Volusion offers a variety of design templates tailored to meet the diverse needs of online stores and businesses. The platform provides users with over 30 professionally designed, responsive templates. These templates are crafted to cater to a wide range of industries, ensuring that businesses of all types can find a design that aligns with their brand identity and goals. The selection includes both free and premium options, allowing users to choose based on their budget and specific requirements.

Volusion Themes

🏆 Winner: Shopify

. Scoring 7.5, Shopify is widely praised for its exceptional ease of use, offering a drag-and-drop interface, intuitive layout, pre-built templates, and extensive resources for beginners. Volusion, with a score of 6.9, offers a user-friendly interface that caters to both beginners and experienced users, but some users may find the platform’s features and tools less intuitive compared to leading competitors.

Learning Resources

🏆 Winner: Shopify

. Both platforms offer solid learning resources, but Shopify goes a step further with its wide array of detailed tutorials and active community forums, making it easier for users to learn and adapt.

Shopify and Volusion are both robust ecommerce platforms, but they cater to different needs. Shopify, with a score of 9.2, is a comprehensive solution for businesses of all sizes, offering a range of tools for product listing, payments, and order fulfillment. Volusion, scoring 7.1, is an all-in-one ecommerce solution designed to help businesses build, manage, and expand their online stores. However, it has bandwidth limitations, which can incur additional costs for high-traffic sites.

Shopify ecommerce features:

• Comprehensive store builder
• Shopify Payments and other gateways
• Advanced inventory management
• Multi-channel selling
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Detailed analytics and reporting

Volusion ecommerce features:

• Ecommerce Product listings
• Payment Gateways
• Multiple Currencies support
• Shipping options
• SEO tools
• Social Media Integration

Ecommerce themes & templates

Shopify offers about 150 modern responsive themes for creating a virtual storefront, ensuring a good look on both desktop and mobile devices. While some themes are free, others cost between $170 to $380. On the other hand, Volusion offers 14 free themes and 38 paid themes, each costing $180. These templates are mobile responsive, ensuring that your online store is accessible and user-friendly across all devices.

Product page customization

Shopify has a limit of three options per product, totaling 100 unique variations. This limit may not pose a significant constraint, and it is suggested that for products with numerous options, creating separate listings on Shopify can be a more manageable approach. Volusion offers a range of ecommerce product page customization options to enhance the shopping experience. Users can modify product descriptions, images, and videos to showcase their items effectively. The platform allows for the customization of options and variants, such as size and color, to provide a more detailed and user-friendly product selection process.

Payment processing

Shopify offers payments with typical charges of 2.9% + 30¢ per online transaction on basic plans, and lower fees for higher-tier plans. However, it adds extra fees for using other payment gateways. Volusion offers a comprehensive eCommerce platform that supports various payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, and its own solution, Volusion Payments, tailored for U.S.-based merchants. The platform is distinctive for its low transaction fees, which vary based on the subscription plan. Additionally, Volusion provides POS capabilities, enabling seamless sales both online and in physical locations.

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Winner: Shopify

. Shopify, with a score of 7.9, excels in providing a streamlined, ecommerce-focused editing experience. It’s particularly beneficial for users who prioritize efficient management of online stores. The editor is straightforward, making it easy to add products, manage inventory, and set up payment methods. Shopify’s editor is optimized for sales and business growth, with built-in tools specifically designed for ecommerce businesses.

Volusion’s editor, scoring 7.1, is designed for ease of use, catering to both beginners and experienced users. It offers a drag-and-drop interface, allowing users to easily add, remove, or modify elements on their website without needing to code. Users can customize their site’s layout, adjust colors, fonts, and images, and even integrate various functionalities like social media links, shopping carts, and payment gateways. However, navigating through its more advanced settings and options requires a learning curve.

Mobile editor/app

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Winner: Shopify

. Shopify and Volusion both offer mobile capabilities, but they differ significantly in their approach. Shopify has a dedicated mobile app that allows users to customize their online store directly from their mobile device. This feature enables the addition, removal, editing, and rearrangement of content on the store’s website, offering convenient on-the-go adjustments to the store’s appearance and layout.

On the other hand, Volusion does not have a dedicated mobile editor app. While it is possible to edit on a mobile browser, the experience might not be optimal due to the smaller screen size, and navigating through the admin dashboard could be difficult. Therefore, Shopify is the clear winner in this category due to its dedicated mobile app and user-friendly mobile editing capabilities.

Overall Result

:

Shopify wins

. Shopify scores 8.1, while Volusion scores 7.6 in product testing options. Both Shopify and Volusion offer a 14-day free trial, but Shopify allows testing of all features during the trial period, giving it an edge over Volusion.

Shopify and Volusion offer a range of pricing plans to cater to different business sizes and needs. However, Shopify scores slightly higher in terms of pricing, offering more value for the cost.

Winner: Shopify

. Shopify’s proprietary cloud-based hosting, 99.99% uptime guarantee, and 5 global data centers make it a superior choice for hosting. Volusion, while offering managed cloud hosting and a 99.9% uptime guarantee, falls short due to lack of transparency about their data centers.

🏆 Winner: Shopify

Both Shopify and Volusion place a high priority on website performance and page speed, with Shopify focusing on app efficiency and theme optimization, and Volusion emphasizing CDN, image optimization, code minification, regular monitoring and updates, and SEO optimization. However, Shopify gets a slight edge when it comes to website speed optimization.

Shopify’s approach to enhancing site speed includes app optimization by removing unneeded app code, conditionally loading apps, avoiding immediate pop-up displays, and incorporating app functionality directly into themes. This approach leverages Shopify’s fast servers and CDN network to boost load speed. Shopify also suggests utilizing Google AMP for faster mobile page loads, although with some design compromises.

On the other hand, Volusion focuses on CDN, image optimization, code minification, regular monitoring and updates, and SEO optimization to enhance website speed. It implements various performance optimization techniques for Core Web Vital improvements. However, both the load times and PageSpeed scores for Volusion vary widely, depending on the optimization and website complexity.

🏆 Winner: Shopify.

With a score of 8.7, Shopify outperforms Volusion, which scores 6.8. Shopify offers over 8,000 apps in its App Store, covering a wide range of functionalities. These apps come with various pricing options, including free, paid, freemium, and one-time payment models. On the other hand, Volusion offers 82 integrations to enhance its ecommerce platform. While Volusion’s integrations offer advanced marketing, enhanced analytics, and superior customer service capabilities, Shopify’s breadth and depth, especially for online stores, give it the upper hand.

Shopify Applications

Volusion Applications

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Overall Winner: Shopify

. Shopify stands out for its more advanced ecommerce-focused marketing tools, especially in analytics and ad campaign management. Volusion, while offering a range of marketing features, lacks blogging capabilities and has limited ads and promotions tools.

🏆 Winner: Shopify

. Comparing Shopify vs Volusion, Shopify takes the lead in this category with a customer support score of 8.6. Shopify offers 24/7 support through chat, email, and phone, ensuring that users can get help whenever they need it. The platform also provides clear tutorials, an extensive community forum, and a valuable marketing blog, making it easier for users to find solutions and grow their businesses.

Volusion, with a customer support score of 7.0, offers support via phone during business hours and 24/7 chat support through the Merchant Center dashboard. While Volusion provides adequate support, including a dedicated client success manager for enterprise-level customers, it falls short compared to Shopify’s round-the-clock availability and comprehensive resources.

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Winner: Shopify

. Shopify’s security measures are slightly more comprehensive than Volusion’s, earning it a higher security score. Shopify prioritizes data privacy and security through rigorous measures, including secure infrastructure, encryption, and limited access. They comply with data privacy regulations, practice data minimization, and ensure user control and transparency. Additional security measures include two-factor authentication, regular audits, and a dedicated incident response team.

Volusion also prioritizes the storage and protection of private data through a series of comprehensive security measures designed to safeguard sensitive information. To protect private data, Volusion employs data encryption techniques which ensure that customer and business data are stored securely and are only accessible through authorized means. This encryption applies to personal information, payment details, and any transactional data handled by the platform. Volusion also implements two-factor authentication (2FA), to further secure user accounts and sensitive information from unauthorized access. However, these measures were not enough to surpass Shopify’s security score.

🏆 Winner: Shopify

. Shopify, with a score of 7.9, utilizes AI mainly to enhance the ecommerce experience. Its AI features focus on customer behavior analysis, personalized shopping experiences, inventory management, and sales predictions.

On the other hand, Volusion does not have any AI capabilities. This lack of AI features can limit the functionality and user experience of the platform.

🏆 Winner: Volusion

. Both Shopify and Volusion offer different user roles with varying access levels, but Volusion provides a more detailed description of its user management system.

• Shopify enforces staff account limits based on plans, ranging from 2 to 15, with Shopify Plus offering unlimited
  accounts. Collaborators with limited access are also an option.
• Volusion offers customizable user account management with various roles and permissions tailored for efficient online store operation. These roles, including Administrator, Editor/Manager, Customer Service, and Marketing, provide different access levels for tasks like site design, order processing, and analytics. Subscription plans determine the number of staff accounts available: 1 in the Personal Plan, 5 in the Professional Plan, 15 in the Business Plan, and unlimited in the Prime Plan.

Shopify User Roles and Access Levels:

Unfortunately, Volusion does not provide a user roles table for a more detailed comparison.

Additional Features

Shopify vs Volusion: User Feedback

Shopify’s slightly higher rating on G2 Crowd can be largely attributed to its specialization in ecommerce. Its comprehensive features, ease of use, and robust customer support cater specifically to online businesses, leading to high user satisfaction among those seeking a dedicated ecommerce solution.

Volusion, on the other hand, is appreciated for its affordability and simplified user interface, making it suitable for non-tech users. However, users have raised concerns about its limited integrations and frequent technical issues, such as crashes and slow support responses. Some feel that Volusion lacks the advanced features and customization options offered by competitors like Shopify, making it less competitive in the market. Despite these drawbacks, Volusion remains a feasible option for small to medium-sized businesses seeking a budget-friendly solution for establishing an online store.

Shopify vs Volusion: FAQ