Volusion Review Followup

By Andy Beard | Published: August 17, 2007

I have a couple of great things to report regarding my review of the Volusion Shopping Cart. (note I was compensated for that review)

Volusion Now Integrates With Aweber

This was one of the problems I had with Volusion as a solution. Their own email system is primarily for sales notices, and once you grow a subscriber list beyond a certain number of users, they recommended moving over to using Intellicontact.

I wasn’t very happy with the Intellicontact pricing, but an even bigger concern is that I doubt anyone running their mailing lists with Aweber would even give a second’s thought of moving over to Intellicontact just to use Volusion as a shopping cart.
Your mailing list is your biggest asset, and you don’t move them around because of the need for list members to re-optin with most services.

Maybe my review helped nudge things in a positive direction, as Aweber a few days ago announced Volusion integration with Aweber.

Major Bandwidth Concern Not Addressed

For me it is the bandwidth – I am sure many sites are quite willing to pay $10 per 1GB of bandwidth, but if I was running this blog on Volusion currently, along with a shopping cart I would have to go for one of their Semi-dedicated Premium servers at $499 per month.

This blog at the time of the review was using 9GB of bandwidth per month, and it is now closer to 50 GB – that is with only between 1000 and 2000 daily visitors, and my feeds are handled by Feedburner.

There are ways to offload bandwidth use to other services such as Amazon S3, but note I don’t host large downloads currently, no audio or video, just a few images.

You could also possibly just run the shopping cart on a subdomain, and have the main website hosted elsewhere – not perfect for SEO but viable.

If you have a reasonable cost of goods and profit margin on each sale, bandwidth costs may not be a deciding factor.

Volusion Review Back In Google

I reported 6 weeks ago that for some reason for a period of maybe 2 months my review of Volusion had disappeared from Google search results although it remained on a tag page.

I am please to report that it is back in the index, although link attribution might not yet be accounted for.

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  1. By Volusion Review And Suggestions | Andy Beard - Niche Marketing on August 17, 2007 at 11:18 am

    [...] Aweber integration with Volusion has now been announced. [...]

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