Volusion Plans and Pricing (August 2023)

Volusion is a popular hosted SaaS eCommerce platform that’s gone through several iterations since its inception in 1999, now shifting from their V1 platform to their rebranded V2 platform. It offers a selection of plans at different price levels, ranging from $29/month to $299/month, as well as a “Prime” plan meant for larger enterprise-level businesses with pricing available by quote only. Naturally, many may think that, being a company that’s been around for much longer than most other eCommerce platforms, they’ve refined their available plans and associated features to be the best merchants can get. But, it’s important to do research into this assumption, because you may not be getting the fully-functional platform you think you’re paying for.

Volusion emphasizes that it’s “eCommerce for everyone” and has branded itself as the platform that gives you everything you need to sell online. But, is this claim true? Before you decide on the eCommerce platform you’d like to build your online store on, be sure to dig deep into what they’re actually going to charge you for and what features you’ll be getting with each plan. It’s also important to do research into other platforms to compare what comes with plans of similar price-points.

We’ll begin by taking a closer look at Volusion’s different plans and what each comes with:

Volusion Pricing Plans

Personal Plan

$29/MO

Professional Plan

$79/MO

Startup Plan

$179/MO

Business Plan

$299/MO

Volusion Features and Value

eCommerce Essentials: Functionality and Customer Service

One of the first things you’ll notice when going through the list of built-in features available on Volusion’s plans is the sheer lack of features available. Key eCommerce features needed for selling products online, such as saved carts, pre-orders, and even digital download support, are completely missing from all plans. Other features, like a product Q&A, require you to pay for a separate app to enable it on your store. If you run an Amazon store and need to sync your orders to your store on Volusion, that’s not possible on a Personal, Professional, or Startup plan; you’ll need to be paying for the Business plan or qualify for their quoted Prime plan to get this function.

Shipping is limited too, with several features being locked behind separate apps that need to be paid for and downloaded from their app store. Rather than being built-in, you’ll need to enable FedEx separately in order to access FedEx returns and HAL (hold at location). You’ll also need a separate app to display real-time shipping rates on your store, which should be a basic built-in function.

The main reason behind many essential features being locked behind paywalls is due to the restriction Volusion has on API access. In order to have API access, and therefore gain access to features like Amazon Order Sync, Google Shopping Feed, and QuickBooks Connector, you’ll need to be paying for the Business Plan (which is the most expensive plan they offer, aside from their Prime plan that is based on quote). By restricting API access to their highest paid plans, they’re locking essential features away from smaller businesses, negatively affecting them in the process.

eCommerce Essentials: Accepting Payments

The limitations don’t stop with products and shipping; Volusion places restrictions on merchants and how they can accept payments and make sales too. The most obvious instance of this is their restriction of credit card payments to Volusion Payments, which is their proprietary payment processor. They support Stripe and PayPal payment methods as well, which enables stores to accept Apple Pay. But, the only payment gateway that they officially support is Authorize.net, which puts a huge restriction on merchants who’s stores can’t utilize that gateway. Volusion actually outright says that their platform cannot support merchants that are based outside of the United States, most likely for this reason. Not to mention, their restrictions leave no way for sellers with high-risk products to do business on their platform.

But, it’s not just limited to payment methods. Based on the plan you sign up for, you’re restricted to a certain amount of online sales per year before you’re forced to upgrade your plan. This is normal for most eCommerce platforms, but what’s abnormal is how low their limits are in correlation to their plans. Their $29/month Personal Plan supports up to $50,000 online sales per year, while their $79/month Professional Plan's annual online sales limit is $100,000. You may need to upgrade before your budget is truly ready for it, so if you plan on growing your online business with Volusion, you’ll end up paying for it more than you think.

eCommerce Essentials: Marketing Tools

When it comes to marketing tools with Volusion, they don’t just lock some essentials behind paywalls; many essential marketing features are simply absent from their platform as a whole. Several essential marketing tools, like MailChimp integration, are relegated to Volusion’s lackluster app store. Others, like email marketing newsletters, are only available with their Pro and Business Plans. But, if you want your store to have a blog, you’ll need to use a third-party blogging site and link it to your store. In the case that you want to connect your store to any outside marketing tools, you’ll be forced to use Zapier to connect them (which comes at a monthly cost, of course).

Store Branding: Domain Name

If you want to be a legitimate business, and if you want visitors and potential customers to believe that you are, then you need your own domain name. Unfortunately, Volusion does not give you a domain name as part of their service, forcing you to seek out your own domain name that you need to buy and register yourself. If not, your Volusion store will use a yourname.myvolusion.com domain name, which looks less than professional. MyVolusion refers to the portal offered by Volusion to manage your account.

But, even if you do buy your own domain name, your checkout page will redirect customers to a Volusion sub-domain anyway if you’re on their Personal Plan. This can cause confusion and concern among customers, who may be wary of being navigated to a different site that they don’t recognize or necessarily trust. So, you’ll end up having to upgrade your plan if you want your domain name to remain consistent throughout your online store with Volusion.

Store Branding: Theme Design

The design of your store is one of the most important and influential ways that you can show your brand off to visitors and potential customers. It’s the first thing they see when they visit your store, and the look, feel, and navigation that they’re confronted with has the ability to shape their opinion of your brand forever.

With Volusion themes, you’re limited to a small number of similarly-designed themes that may not look the way you want your brand to. If you want to edit your theme, you may be out of luck unless you have the resource of coding knowledge or the budget for web developers. For something as important as store design, you need as many options at your disposal as possible to effectively curate the brand identity you want the world to see.

To make it clearer on exactly how many features are unavailable, we’re going to directly compare Volusion’s
$29/month Personal Plan to Shift4Shop’s free End-to-End eCommerce Plan:

Personal Plan

$29/MO

eCommerce Plan

Free

Unlimited products, storage, and bandwidth
Unlimited staff accounts
24/7 support
Free domain name for your first year
Dozens more themes than Volusion
Sell in-person (Shift4Shop POS or Square POS) and on Facebook, eBay, Amazon, and Google Shopping
Real-time dashboard
Advanced reporting plus Google Analytics
More advanced inventory tracking
More flexible discount codes, plus gift certificates and shareable wish lists
API access
FTP access (mass file uploads)
Customer Groups for segmentation

Purchase Orders
Product comparisons and Q&A section
FedEx Returns and HAL (Hold at Location)
Delivery estimates for customers
Autoship subscription module
In-Store Pickup module
Real-time shipping and label printing
Unlimited product variants (size, color, etc.)
Unlimited categories and SmartCategories
Advanced product options (variants that have different pricing due to shipping weight, etc.)
Bulk quantity discounts
Single-page checkout
Multiple ship-to checkout
Sell digital downloads

Easy tax rate calculation
QuickBooks connector
Product reviews
Google Customer Reviews
Gift wrapping module
Visitor IP blocking (ban malicious visitors)
Upsell and cross-sell features
Customers can save their cart
Purchase Order module
Returns RMA module
Built-in SEO tools
Built-in blog
MailChimp and AWeber integrations
Dropshipping support and DOBA connector
And much, much more (see eCommerce Plans for a complete list)

Obviously, you can see the vast difference when comparing the two. Some of the features we’ve listed under Shift4Shop’s free plan, like MailChimp and DOBA, are available on Volusion’s app store at an extra monthly cost. But many others, such as blogging and Google Analytics, are both not built-in and not available on their app store. For features like this, you’ll have to go outside the platform and integrate with a third-party provider directly in order to use these features. At the end of the day, you’ll be putting more time, effort, and money into getting the same features that Shift4Shop offers for free — and you still won't be able to get everything on Volusion that we offer at Shift4Shop.

Volusion tries to make up for their lack of built-in features and high prices by incentivizing merchants with “Quick Wins” credits, which they get a certain amount of with the more expensive Startup and Business plans. These credits can be put towards extra services, but they’re not services that every merchant will need, and they don’t make up for the lack of built-in functionality. Sure, an added $25 every month for extra services sounds great on the surface, but the short list of Quick Wins that are actually available makes it clear very quickly that these credits may never get used more than once. At the end of the day, you’re paying more for less.

Shift4Shop Offers Your Business More for Less

No matter what Volusion plan you choose, you’ll still run into locked doors for essential eCommerce features. Whether those doors are extra monthly fees in the app store or third-party integration solutions, you’re being forced to go out of your way to enable tools and functionality that should be built-in at the start. Volusion not only punishes you for wanting basic tools, but it also punishes you for growing by forcing you to pay for a more expensive plan at very low yearly online sale ceilings.

With Shift4Shop, you’re met with open doors that allow you to freely enable built-in features at no extra cost, while also giving you access to a wide library of apps if you want more advanced functionality on your online store. You won’t have to worry about paying for something as simple as API access, which becomes a huge roadblock for a long list of apps and integrations; we include it by default.

Volusion Pricing

Does Volusion or Shift4Shop offer more eCommerce functionality for less?

Volusion Pricing Plans

Volusion Features and Value