In order to kick start your business what are the requirements? Of course there’s a lot to take into account, but the basics are a proper layout of the business plan, the funds and most importantly the foundation upon which your ecommerce site would build up. And choosing the right platform is the absolute necessity as the stronger base would help not dwindle up your business in the long run.

In the quest of platforms you must have encountered two names Shopify and Volusion. Shopify is the leading website building platform in the ecommerce world today and side by side we have Volusion, the oldest platform created in 1999.

Which will be the best fit for you? That’s what is going to be in this blog.

Shopify has advanced and powerful tools than Volusion. It powers over a huge number of over 1 million businesses. Volusion on the other hand is a cloud hosted platform is best preferred by the one who just started the business.

Volusion so far powers over 40,000 online businesses. But so does Shopify, supports businesses of every volume. Then what sets both of them apart?

Let’s find out in this blog where we will make the parallel comparison between Shopify and Volusion so that by the end of this blog you will be fully educated about both of them and your search would wind up.

There should be, in a platform, powerful ecommerce tools to facilitate useful functionality but what’s the use of it if the features are unapproachable and really difficult to navigate? It just creates a lot of headache as well as wasting so much time of yours when meanwhile you could have gotten straight into running your businesses; but here you are stuck still setting up the website. So before going in depth with the features of each platform, firstly let’s check out which among both of them will be user friendly.

Shopify, as already stated is the best platform having impressive features made simplified for its users to have a seamless experience with the platform. Shopify is intuitive with a simple and clear interface having arranged each category in the arsenal for easy navigation. Shopify has a drag-and-drop system making it beginner friendly.

With Shopify you would need professional help only when you want to have a fully customized ecommerce website of yours but this shouldn’t make you think a non-technical person cannot run it. Upon testing it with its contemporaries, Shopify showed most proficiency.

If you are still not sure about it, Shopify gives a free trial of 14 days. You can judge yourself why we are raving about it. Being a proprietary platform it takes care of security issues as well and provides a completely secure hosting.

Volusion contrarily doesn’t give much ease to beginners to get the best out of it. The interface is not clear and has a complicated set up to get it started with. One has to rely on the guide for whatever they need to do. Volusion is very less intuitive. Also the editing interface is divided into two halves which makes it a lot more cumbersome to perform with Volusion.

They say don’t judge a book by its cover. But in the ecommerce business, the statement is reversed. A down at heel website would drive away the customers instead of having traffic on your online store. A sleek and premium platform entices the customers and helps in building their trust on your website.

Shopify without any doubt has the finest templates of a wide range (over 1,200), one unique from the other. There are a lot of them free and the perks of it is, being a free template it isn’t an average one and neither is provided with similar templates. All have different and attractive designs and are very flexible.

There are further an absolutely large number of premium themes available in Shopify’s theme store. All the themes are industry specific and designed by the professionals. You can customize the theme with the help of a website designer. This will add a more unique touch to your online store. The premium themes range from $ 140 to $ 180.

Volusion again lags behind in this area. It has very few themes, only 11 free themes and 34 paid themes and the major drawback here is all of the paid themes cost $ 180. Also there is very limited customization you can do in Volusion themes. Without coding the customizations are limited to only changing colours and fonts and with the help of coding one can do a bit more customizations. But the themes of Volusion are mobile responsive similar to that of Shopify’s. The free themes are very average and all look somewhat similar.

Keeping aside the other factors, the utmost importance is the sales features of a platform. These have to be very powerful and reliable and should fetch the merchants growth in their business. Let’s thus get straight into analysing the sales features of both the platforms.

Shopify has all advanced sales tools to help you in every way possible while running the ecommerce business. It comes with many powerful features inbuilt let alone talk about apps and add-ons.

Shopify has abandoned cart recovery measurement inbuilt along with it there’s multi-channel selling, free SSL certificate, great analytics to monitor the performance of your business. Shopify natively supports ad format so it will roll out ads on Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms and also run email campaigns. In every plan of Shopify you will get all the features mentioned.

There’s no limit in selling through Shopify. It’s highly scalable supporting unlimited products and having unlimited bandwidth. Shopify supports more than 100 third party payment gateways apart from having its own payment processor. There’s a seperate app store of Shopify which has over 4000 apps available both paid and free adding onto more functionality of your ecommerce site.

Volusion although does really well in ecommerce features still we would give it less star than Shopify, the reasons we will discuss it here.

Volusion has a POS similar to Shopify but it isn’t really accessible through smart phones. Volusion has its own payment processor, named Volusion Payments, and apart from that it supports only 40 payment gateways. But here one of the advantages of Volusion is that it doesn’t take transaction fees which Shopify does upon using the third party payment gateways.

Volusion has good analytics and inventory management. Volusion too has an abandoned cart recovery feature. In order to have multi-channel features, you need to have the Volusion Social Store application and a SSL encryption. Also not to forget the customization is not easy in Volusion. Apart from that if one needs more apps they would have to integrate their online store through Zapier.

Technical issues may occur now and then. And even if you’re a tech pro or not, help and support always comes handy while running such a big business. Let us now check what all Shopify and Volusion has to offer regarding help and support and how they will assist their customers.

Shopify truly impressed us with its ways of tackling issues and the number of ways it provides to its users. Below mentioned the channels for customer support:

• Video tutorials
• Shopify community
• Webinars
• Changelog
• 24/7 phone support
• 24/7 live chat support
• Email support
• Social media support
• Shopify Expert (in the Plus plan)

Regarding the help center, Volusion is a bit of a disappointment while comparing it with Shopify. Volusion has phone support, you may chat with them or call a Volusion expert or even ask for a scheduled call but in the time slot from Monday to Friday (7 am to 10 pm CST). Other than that there are few guides available from which one may take help from.

At last comes the pricing and which one of the platforms will be best value for money. Before checking out the monthly plans of both the platforms, it must be remembered what are the features both of them offer and then judge accordingly. We will parallelly compare the monthly costs of Shopify and Volusion.

After comparing the prices we can certainly say that Shopify is a better value for money platform. There isn’t much difference in the price point of both the platforms and Shopify is after all loaded with features, and when you are getting such a good deal it will be the smartest option to invest in Shopify. And the crux of the discussion is, if you are planning for a company that would grow eventually, Shopify is your go to platform.

• Shopify is an easy to navigate platform whereas Volusion is complicated to operate.
• Shopify has far better themes than Volusion.
• Volusion doesn’t take transaction fees whereas Shopify charges transaction fees if not used Shopify’s payment processor.
• Shopify has an impressive number of apps available in its app store better than Volusion’s.
• Volusion lacks the blogging feature.
• Shopify has great customer support and Volusion lags behind in this area by not able to provide much customer support.
• Shopify has a free SSL certificate whereas Volusion SSL certificate is not available as standard in any of the plans of Volusion.

Shopify no doubt is the winner of the comparison. Shopify really impressed us in each test we put it through against Volusion. Volusion is also a good platform, best can be used by small scale industries. Else Shopify is the all-rounder platform and is the best option to go with.