Switching from Yahoo to Volusion... Advice needed?

rctoyhouse · #1 (**permalink**) 04-04-2007, 09:21 PM

Our website, http://www.rctoyhouse.com have been live for almost a year using yahoo small business merchant account.

Yahoo charges a monthly subscription and a transaction fee. I personally think there are probably better shopping carts out there, with more features.

What do you think about switching to volusion? Are there other shopping carts that you would recommend?

I understand that choosing a shopping cart is highly dependant on our needs and features.

Some of our competitor's website are:
http://www.hobbytron.com
http://www.hobby-estore.com
http://www.raidentech.com

Let me know what you think and suggestions you may have.

Thank you

Volusion · #2 (**permalink**) 10-12-2007, 07:10 PM

Our shopping cart is much more robust than what you would find in Yahoo. We have a Yahoo import tool that actually brings over most of your store, including product pictures, descriptions, and categories

jestep · #3 (**permalink**) 10-16-2007, 05:42 PM

Honestly, I think that just about anything is better than Yahoo. Their percentage per transaction for all sales is simply rediculous.

One thing you should be careful of is making sure you properly 301 redirect the old pages to the new ones if you do switch to a new system. This way you maintain any ranking you have in the SE's, and anyone who goes to a link to the old site, makes it to the new one.

I'm, personally a fan of Avactis. It allows you to make your website however you want, and the cart integrates into the site, rather than trying to integrate the site into the cart.

Volusion is a very good system as well, just look at some of their featured customer's sites. You do have to pay monthly fees, however hosting is included, and I think that they would be a very good upgrade from yahoo. If you do decide to go with Volusion, I would switch to authorize.net for a payment gateway, and use a merchant account provider other than Yahoo. They tend to be on the very expensive side.

Whatever the case, this is a very big move considering you are already established, so some thorough planning should take place before you decide to do anything.

Volusion · #4 (**permalink**) 10-16-2007, 06:36 PM

If you are going to do 301 redirects, which we strongly advise, just use our 301 Redirect Manager. There is more information located here:
</title> <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> <meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="INDEX, FOLLOW"> <script type="text/javascript" src="/a/j/javascripts.js"></script> <title>Volusion Store

cw1865 · #5 (**permalink**) 10-26-2007, 12:40 AM

Well, that is volusion telling you to use volusion. From a volusion customer, I can assure you that volusion's system is very strong. The strongest aspect of the system from our perspective is handling pictures. I currently have 6 sites on volusion; 3 of them have definitely proven profitable 6 months after launch; 2 of them are under 6 months old and seem to be upward bound and I just launched one. From the customer's point of view, the websites are clean, inspire trust and are idiot proof - the conversion rates are definitely higher than on my older system.

I would like to see them implement some sort of custom url rewrite and if they did I'd bring the rest of the sites over (something about 301 redirects that I don't trust!) - the pages on the older sites are, well, old, and some of them are entrenched in google. I'd like to do something with the sites to grow them, but how do you beat an entrenched page on a $3.99 per month godaddy server? You can't risk losing it.

skincareguy · #6 (**permalink**) 12-27-2007, 08:02 PM

i have a site on volusion, monster (netsol), and a small ct based isp. IMHO no cart software is perfect. I think if I could combine a number of different features from each it would be a perfect creation...for me...and that is the point. Volusion and the others are only as good as their features match up to your needs. Make a list of features you really need. Go to their sites and look at their features. Do they match up? If not there are lots of carts out there.

I will give Volusion props though for speed of getting indexed. They are very good at the basic SEO stuff - site maps, static pages, etc.

Just depends what you are looking for...

Good luck.