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.

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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...

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