When entering the weight of a product in Volusion, you need to specify the weight using whole numbers for pounds and the decimal equivalent for any ounces.
For example: if a product weighs one pound and one ounce, you can not enter it as 1lb. 1oz., you need to convert the ounces to decimal values where ONE OUNCE = .0625 (lbs), so in the ProductWeight field you [READ MORE...]
This article is intended for Volusion ecommerce software users and contains information about preparing product image files for bulk upload when importing large amounts of products using product data prepared offline or exported from another source.
The information is also helpful if you are migrating from another ecommerce / shopping cart platform and want to save time converting your existing store's product photos for use in Volusion.
For Volusion stores with only small number of products, using the Admin console to upload your product images is very easy. You simply create a product record, click the Upload New Photos link, and follow the prompts. Volusion will automatically size and store your product image file, and create the various sizes it needs to display on category, product and check-out pages.
There are just two words that sum up the internal search function of Volusion eCommerce shopping cart software -- but being a professional, I won't use those two words, and will instead just say, "not good".
When a user searches your Volusion store, the search only returns results where the search term appears in the Product Code, Product Name or if the words were (manually) entered in the Additional Product Keywords field of a product record. By default, none of the text in product descriptions, product options, category pages, help files, policy pages, the "knowledge base", (or image alt tags, meta data, etc, etc), or any other text in your store is searched.
To enable Volusion's "extensive search", (which does at least search the description fields of your product pages), you need to add the following hidden input field into your search form.
<input type="hidden" name="Extensive_Search" value="Y">
Still the result pages are poorly formatted and since there are no suggestions for mis-spelled words, semantic or contextual search functionality, and no "best match" -- this leaves the user to fumble through the results, or worse; may cause potential customers to leave your site and go to Google or another search engine to locate the product they want to buy.
But, there is a solution...
So, you're whipping around the admin side of your Volusion store, you delete or add some categories, move some products from one category to another and then go to the user side of the store and the changes don't appear...
I found this problem when a category I deleted was still appearing in the left navigation menu, (and now gave the error message: Category ID# Does not Exist when I clicked it).
Why?... It seems Volusion does not alway publish all your changes immediately -- unless you set the Config Variable telling it to. Worse, sometimes Volusion does not honor this setting, (or forgets it was set), and you need to manually reset the variable.
Although Volusion is decent software, there are a few complaints I hear from customers, and one is the cost. Volusion's pricing is based on number of individual product codes in a store's database, (see chart below).
In addition to the monthly fees, there is an initial setup fee... and then you have the typical merchant account fees you'd pay no matter which ecommerce software you use, (even if you use "free" software, you still pay transaction fees, discount rate and statement fees when you make a sale -- that is a "given" cost of online sales).
The pricing is all explained, and there are no hidden costs -- but on large sites that have a lot of image files, videos, or other media that uses a lot of bandwidth, you can get a surprise bill from Volusion for excess bandwidth, (yes, they tell you about it when you sign up, but most people never do the math or consider how much bandwidth modern websites actually use).
A month or two of these bills, and you start thinking of ways to cut down on costs. While some stores can either reduce the number of images, or make them physically smaller, (in pixels), or apply greater .JPG compression to reduce the file sizes, at some point you start thinking there has to be a better way.
There is...