Maybe you've read a little about Volusion's MultiChildAddToCart function -- or gotten daring and tried it.

What it does is allow you to build a dummy product, and then make several (or all) other products as child products of the dummy product.  This results in a product page where a table with quantity fields and check boxes appear next to each product name, so a customer can order several different products from one page.

Like most of the other automatic functions in Volusion, there is little to no control over the visual or functional appearance of MultiChildAddToCart grids.   They offer one hack, (inserting a tiny comment tag into each child product's name field, e.g.- <!001>, <!456>, <!999>, etc, and the software will sort the grid based on the hidden tag), but it means junking up your products database.

Worse, if you don't get it right the first time, or need to add, edit or delete some child products, after Volusion has generated all the  child product data into your PRODUCT database, you need to manually clean up the mess and start over (creating that parent and group of child products).

Of course there is a better way...

How would you like to be able to create a page with a table of products  arranged into groups, with dividers and headings about each group, areas for special instructions or comments, and the ability to allow customers to order from any or all products you sell in a single page? [READ MORE...]

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...]

While developing a Volusion online store for a customer, I was looking over some reports in SmarterStats and ran across an interesting URL I'd never seen before --- so I popped it into the address bar of my browser and found a nice, yet undocumented Volusion feature.

If you'd like to see what your template looks like without any Volusion generated content on the page, you can use: [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.

[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...]