While working on a customer's Volusion site, I needed to log in as a test customer who was set at one Discount_Price_Level, then log out, and see if the same code worked for customers who were not logged in.

Since the code I was testing involved displaying prices to customers based on level.  It should have displayed and calculated orders using the retail prices only to anyone who wasn't logged in.  The same code should have displayed a discounted price to logged in users who had a discount price level set.

There was a problem. After being logged in as a user with a discount price level set,  I logged out using the link at the bottom of the My Account page labeled:

"I'm done managing my account, log me out."

...but, this doesn't completely log the user it out.   Clicking the link tells you you're logged out -- but if the store has set the config setting: [READ MORE...]

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.

You May be Losing Sales because of Volusion Search!

But, there is a solution...

[READ MORE...]

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.

[READ MORE...]