Cloudflare is a distributed DNS, website security, & distributed Nginx powered reverse proxy (for static content) & caching proxy with content delivery network with some additional tracking and reporting ability.

That is a whole load of technology but what this means to you is:-

On average, a website on CloudFlare …
… loads 30% faster
… uses 60% less bandwidth
… has 65% fewer requests
… is way more secure
All for free!

This is how your website is normally exposed on the web.

You are in direct line of fire for everything that can possibly be thrown at it.

With Cloudshare you have an intelligent doorman in the way, only allowing through certain requests. Some high volume menial tasks such as answering the door to the postman and deliveries of groceries get handled by the caching proxy/cdn – unlike a normal CDN the URL for any file doesn’t have to change so it is very much like you set up a reverse proxy with Nginx or Squid yourself and assigned the traffic to a media server.

Simple Setup

The basic setup is fairly straight forward and only requires changing your nameservers. It is only as complicated as your initial setup, so if you have a little bit more going on… Google Apps, domain keys etc, though it looks more complicated those actually get bypassed.

There are also some extended settings

I haven’t explored these too much, but there are some things to be careful about with a blog. As an example some services such as feed readers often pull images directly and thus might be blocked by any hot linking prevention.

There are some interesting options for identifying geolocation and content obfuscation from certain types of visitors, though that doesn’t mean they are designed for cloaking content from search engines.

This is also where you assign security level with the recommendation being to use high security. You could look on the security as being a little similar to Bad Behavior, though with a CAPTCHA. I wonder if they have thought of monetizing the CAPTCHAs?

Security

The threat control is pretty interesting in that it can block web spammers, botnet zombies and exploit attackers of various types, and that is just with the free version.
The team has a lot of pedigree in this area as they were behind Project Honeypot. With the CAPTCHA and I believe also a message facility, there is also a very effective safety net in case of false positives which do happen, though some bots won’t fill in CAPTCHAs is caught by mistake such as Googlebot. I noticed today some discussion about Google’s sitemap crawler being blocked, and some suggestion of lower crawl by Google resulting from this.

In many ways Cloudflare could be looked on as an extension or next generation Project Honeypot, with the additional bribe of actually providing active protection and a huge bribe by caching content.

Analytics

The analytics features look quite interesting as an aggregate view.

They mention why the numbers might seem so much higher than javascript stats though don’t mention browsers pre-fetching content which is fairly standard these days.

Cloudflare seem to (or claim to) have knocked a second off my load time, though from what I have read that is based on the load time of the home page from another server in various locations.
Overall performance and relative performance will depend on what other optimization you are using.

I am currently using:-

W3 Total Cache Enhanced static page cache to disk
W3 Total Cache Database Cache using APC
W3 Total Cache Object Cache using APC
Autoptimize for combining/minification of CSS/jscript
Header & Footer – I discovered this gets added after Autoptimize has done it’s thing, so useful for adding things that I don’t necessarily want cached such as tracking stuff I am testing.
Cloudflare effectively as my only CDN (though I have a Amazon Cloudfront/S3 and a few other alternatives)

I could possibly improve performance a bit by locally caching lots of javascript, combining/minifying and then having it loaded from the CDN, but there is a lot of bug checking.

I don’t use APC for page caching as I found, at least on my Liquid Web Storm On Demand server that that was a lot slower for time to first byte.

Advanced Setup

You will initially hit problems with IP referrals and your server logs – the ideal solution is to to install “mod_cloudflare” on your server.

There is also this alternative (one of 2) for dealing with just the referrer within WordPress, but this won’t fix your server logs.
You would add this to wp-config.php

if ( isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) && !empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) )
{
$X_FORWARDED_FOR=explode(",", $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']);
$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']=trim($X_FORWARDED_FOR[0]); //take the first element in the array
}

Security For Premium Content

This isn’t a secure solution for paid membership sites – you might be better using a real CDN which can either domain lock or generate one time links.

I haven’t actually tried it with video yet.

Mindblowing for e-Commerce

If you are using an e-Commerce platform such as Volusion or BigCommerce which charges you a fortune for bandwidth, but you have control of your Nameservers and DNS this is the most amazing product / solution you will ever find.

Ideally you would go for the pro version with better security and performance which for most e-Commerce stores would likely be just $20/month. The savings for many store owners would be $80+ per month.
Then without messing around with remote hosted image hosting you can have CDN performance and a massive reduction in bandwidth excess fees.

This isn’t the only reason people face extra fees on services such as Volusion and BigCommerce, but it is a major one, and the extra performance and killing the bots makes it a best in class solution.

For further reading I came across this great post comparing the performance of various technology blogs earlier while doing some testing.
TechCrunch: The slowest tech blog, or one of the fastest? Turns out, it’s both.

p.s. I get to use Cloudflare for free, but everyone can – no barter deals for links & currently they don’t have an affiliate program.

Note: This is beta – there seems to be soe problems with some bots currently – most notably Googlebot seems to be having a few problems with this service and my crawl rate dropped by 90% and time to index a page more than doubled – I have currently switched back to my normal nameservers, and a conventional CDN

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.

• You have messed up – maybe blocked the page by accident in robots.txt
• Google have made a major algorithm change
• You have some kind of general penalty or your site has been hacked

It could also be argued that it can be caused by duplicate content, and enter the supplemental results through lack of pagerank. Honest duplicate content could be on your own site, or due to poor syndication (lack of links back to the original document).

There are however other very real scenarios that could cause a web page to drop in rankings overnight.

A Major Bug in Google Algorithms

Google have stated, officially, that if you are syndicating content, you should ensure that in the syndicated content, there is a link back to the original. I achieve this by requesting sites like WebProNews.com to include a link back to my original article rather than just a link back to my domain.
If splogs pick up my full content, they normally also grab the link in my author box at the bottom of each article.

For a number of weeks Google link attribution has been, to put it bluntly, royally screwed.

Google’s Adam Lasnik stated on the Webmaster Central Blog:-

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article. Even with that, note that we’ll always show the (unblocked) version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer.

Google… it isn’t working

For a couple of months my list of dofollow plugins was ranking 3rd for the fairly innocent uncompetitive search phrase “dofollow”. With more blogs talking about dofollow, it does become more competitive, but a large number are linking through to the page, in fact Google’s main index reports 58 links, Google Blogsearch reports 185 individual blogs have linked through.
All of those links were topically relevant, but a fair number were from various lists of supporters, thus maybe given a low weighting.

For over 1 month the syndicated copy of the story on WebProNews which linked back to the original, replaced it in the SERPs at #5 – by replaced, I mean Google decided that was the original article, and the original disappeared

Yahoo site explorer reports that the syndicated copy only has 6 links pointing to it from other pages, and my original has over 1000.

In the last couple of days, even the syndicated copy has disappeared from Google results.

There is no “Google Bombing” activity on the page, all the links were editorial, relevant, and in fact a huge number (for the lists circulated) of the links used my name as anchor text.

Google doesn’t get it wrong all the time

In fact this scenario is the exception rather than the rule. A good example (though slightly contrived) is the charity link meme that so many SEOs are taking part in. I have seen great improvement in search position for my selected listings that have now appeared on a few SEO sites.

A search in Google for the term also is a fairly good demonstration that my “trust” with Google isn’t doing too badly (no global penalty), because I outrank Andy Beal for the term, though there are lots of factors such as additional internal linking.

Maybe there is a penalty for too many editorial links to good content?

My dofollow plugins list isn’t gaining as many new links per day as it was, but the number and quality of many of the links shouldn’t give a penalty.

Google is meant to support high quality content that encourages people to link to it

Selective Page Filtering & Web Spam

Google want you to report paid links.

When Matt Cutts most recently caused an uproar it was actually a different form. The instructions were clear, include “paidlink”.

So what did I do?

I reported myself to Google for Paid Links

It should be noted that the intent of the report to the web spam team was intended to provide them with data to test their algorithms.

I provided them with details of 3 reviews I had written that I regarded at the time as good paid reviews. The reviews were not being written for search engine benefit.
The amount of time I could afford to spend on each review was commensurate with how much I was earning, but still exceeded what would be regarded as a good hourly rate for the time invested.

The reviews were

Search Engine Glossary
Volusion Shopping Cart
Sponsored Reviews

I am biased certainly, but it is my belief that none of those reviews, whether I was compensated or not, should be classed as web spam.

They are consultation generally for sites that don’t even need the links. All the links were editorial, though as I am SEO aware, I give SEO friendly links to things.

As I chose to link to the site, and I was linking to highly related content, I didn’t use nofollow – I wasn’t being paid for links, though I am not sure how an algorithm is meant to determine that.

My Volusion Review Has Been Kicked Out Of Google

It might well have been manually removed by a monkey who wasn’t trained enough to determine the quality and value of the content he/she was looking at.

The monkey was probably programmed a little like this…

• Receive web spam report
• Check for word “paidlink”

Now at this stage there is either going to be an AND or an OR operator in the logic, and that might be where some kind of error took place with individual URLs, although I submitted 3 at once.

Before writing this article, I have waited a fair amount of time observing what was happening.

Google had a mess with their toolbar pagerank export April 30th. Toolbar pagerank is even more inaccurate these days because a grey bar can mean multiple things.

1. The page is new
2. The page is regarded as duplicate content – even if a page is PR3 or PR4, enough to keep it out of the supplemental index normally, if it is detected as being duplicate it will have a grey bar – this is both a good and a bad thing – it might mean that such pages are also not draining Google Juice from your original content for those that aren’t careful about external links on such pages.
3. The page is banned or deindexed – what might be looked on as a bad neighbourhood

Fairly confusing for the average webmaster to know what is going on

The Volusion review was giving a grey bar, as were the tag pages leading from it because they were duplicate content.

This didn’t concern me, the page was still ranking high for the single term “volusion”, and first for “volusion review” (without quotes), despite having a little competition from other blogs who reviewed Volusion at the same time, under similar terms.
I was still seeing traffic to the review.

Syndication of the Volusion Review

One website requested permission to syndicate my review for their new shopping cart review site. I publish my content under GPL, but look on correct attribution as a link back to my original content.
They complied completely with my wishes, and their CMS pinged me. I did think about deleting the trackback, but my review had already been published and index for over 1 month, had already received some links, and was featured prominently in my linking structure 2 clicks from the front page on a page that eventually will receive lots of links, even if it is just from me.

In addition, they didn’t have the comments on their review that made my own permalink page unique from the syndicated copy.

The website owner requested syndicating the content because it was a high quality review.

My ultimate decision to leave the trackback was that he asked permission for syndication. I get splogged a fair amount, and I wanted to give Google a signal that that content was legitimate.
As I use a dofollow plugin, my trackback links hopefully give a little bit of juice after my editorial decision to leave the link on the page.

His syndicated copy has also been kicked out of Google SERPS.

Just that one specific article, that is linked from his sidebar on a PR3 site – possibly the page would be looked at as having some purpose.

That site isn’t the only one that syndicates my content, some of my best articles are also picked up by WebProNews.

On WebProNews I have 2 author profiles

Andy Beard – Static Profile – yes that is a nice PR5 backlink, sometimes it is worth being syndicated on high profile sites.
Andy Beard – Articles – As far as I can see, WPN intend this to be indexed, but it has been kicked out of Google.
The page might be looked on as a search result, but on the domain there aren’t any similar, the page is very much unique compared to what is on my site, and I would suggest it is useful content.

Lets look at individual entries:-

I have 30 articles syndicated on WebProNews
26 of those articles are in Google’s index
4 of those articles are not indexed

The 4 articles not indexed is because they haven’t got any links, and they haven’t got any links because the search engines are not indexing the “category like” search pages.

It should be noted I don’t have to give Google a positive indication of any kind to have my articles indexed on their site.

Conclusion:- In normal situations Google Indexes and ranks syndicated content.

The syndicated copy of my Volusion Review (with permission) should be in Google’s index even if it is in some ways duplicate content – it isn’t 100% duplicate content because it doesn’t have the comments, just like WebProNews.

Duplicate Tag Content

My Volusion review was given 4 tags that were on topic

Volusion – Indexed in Google
Volusion Review – Not Indexed / Banned
Volusion Shopping Cart – Not Indexed / Banned
Shopping Cart Review – Not Indexed / Banned

At this time I haven’t gone to a lot of effort to make those pages unique, and until today those pages had links from a single article so would be quite low on pagerank.
In the future I intend to use some of those tags multiple times, for instance I will probably tag this post with “volusion”, but not with the other tags. I would also like to spend some time looking at other shopping carts because it is relevant to my niche, and I find most of the reviews on the internet quite poor, or overlook many things.

I quite expect pages like that to go into the Google Supplemental index until such time as as they have been made more unique, though I would look on it as a little harsh to have them totally removed from the index.

Google have stated in the past that when they have duplicate content, they will choose which one they think is most relevant to display. I have read nothing stating they will choose one copy, and de-index all the others.

Other sites use indexed tags, and even have such “orphan” single item tag pages, as an example Techcrunch on 1000tags

Google Pigeons

Google joked about their pigeon rank back in 2002 for April fools day

• The category like pages on WebProWorld need to be indexed, or their content that doesn’t have other subject based links just drops out of the indexes of all search engines.
  The fact that most of it is indexed suggests that content that is duplicate isn’t meant to be kicked out.
• There is something clearly wrong with their current handling of link attribution
• It seems like the pigeons are kicking random pages that have been reported to contain paid links out of the index, contrary to what has previously been stated by Google (well actually Matt Cutts)

Here is what I have written in a fresh report to Google:-

Volusion were not buying links, they were buying reviews from experts, so does that mean consultants aren’t allowed to link to their clients, and shareholders can’t link to their stock holdings?

All the links were editorial.

If you can find a better review covering the same topics on the web for Volusion I would love to see it.
I was working to some time constraints, and didn’t have access to the full version of the software.

The review was also syndicated with permission on another site a month after it was originally published – that review has also been kicked out of the index.

Google need to fix their algorithms or we are going to see a lot of good content disappearing from the SERPs

$180 Payola – Isn’t The Standard Term Prize or Competition?

A little while ago Blogcatalog awarded a free “premium listing” for 6 months. I should note that Blogcatalog is a highly reputable directory and social network, and every member’s blog is vetted by a human before inclusion, yet they still have free listings, unlike Yahoo.
Matt Cuts has already stated in the same paid links thread that it is ok to purchase links in reputable directories, thus buying a premium listing at Blogcatalog in theory is ok, unless the job description for the pigeons changes at short notice.

I turned down the opportunity for the paid listing suggesting one of my readers would like it instead. I already have high listings in my selected categories.

Tony from Blogcatalog loved the idea so much that he doubled the prize

Win A 12 Month Premium Listing On Blogcatalog

I want to make this as educational as possible, both for some of my readers and Google’s algorithms.

I was thinking about closing the comments on this post so that it could only be responded to with a link and trackback, but I am a community blogger and thus switching off comments would be a little evil.

What I want people to do is to write a post on their blog discussing what I have talked about here. Speedlinking posts won’t count.

The premium listing will be awarded to a random reader and the number of tickets will be awarded based upon trackbacks.

• One ticket will be awarded for linking through to this post from your article
• One ticket will be awarded for linking through to my Volusion review
• You can link through to both from the same post and receive 2 tickets

You can use rel=”nofollow” for one or both of the links should you choose, if you truly believe that my Volusion review is web spam (and state that in your review), or that my offering a prize for linking through and making your readers aware of the issues is web spam.

I am not offering the prize for links, I am offering it for real opinion, and I am going to count the number of links, and which ones were followed or nofollowed.

I know many readers are using Blogger and Blogger by default doesn’t provide trackbacks. Recently I wrote 2 tutorials on how to use trackback with blogger. The first uses Greasemonkey in Firebox, and is the best way to add trackback for blogger.
The second option is to use Haloscan but please read the instructions carefully, and don’t convert to using their commenting system. Haloscan as far as I am aware cannot be made Dofollow.

• Entries will close on 7th July
• One entry per blogger
• No anonymous bloggers (so I can ensure only one entry per blogger)
• No entries from multi-author blogs of which you are not the primary editor/owner

Also, if you want to combine it and are not a member of PayPerPost, you can combine this with their “Review My Post” offer and make $7.50 for your praise or criticism. See link in comments section for details.

You also might find this article on payola interesting if you missed it when first published.

One tip – if you receive a request for a sponsored review with ReviewMe, don’t accept it straight away – let the acceptance clock tick for a little while because once you have accepted the review, the clock gets reset to 96 hours. There is a big difference between 96 hours to research for a review, and what effectively amounts to a week if you drag things out a little.

Volusion Shopping Cart Review

Volusion is sold as a one-stop, comprehensive, SEO optimized, shopping cart solution.

Be wary of providers who charge add-on prices for additional features.

We will see…

Problems In Reviewing

Time – as previously mentioned, this review is based around a number of hours/days research, rather than extensive use of the product. I did however create a test account to have a look under the hub.
Demo restrictions – The demo actually is a lot more restrictive than is suggested on the sales pages. As an example I didn’t find a way to even examine the template structure.

Primary Caveats

Volusion is a shopping cart, and not a website builder or even an online business solution. Parts of their business model seriously detract from the potential to create an all encompassing service which for me is a shame.

Volusion is a VAR – Value Added Reseller, in fact they are a VAR in many ways more than a shopping cart solution provider, which again slightly, and sometimes greatly discourages me from writing a highly favourable review, even based upon my limited evaluation.
Update: Please refer to Volusion comments regarding this statement

Value

With Volusion you get lots of features, but unless you are willing to purchase a license outright, and pay for subsequent yearly upgrades, you are going to be hosting your shopping cart on their servers.
If you have any sense, unfortunately that is all you are going to host on their servers, because the basic bandwidth allowance is… pitiful.

I think I need to put some perspective on this because I think this is the biggest Achilles Heel of the service.

This blog currently only receives on average 500 unique visitors per day. I use some graphics but they are compressed and most are not full screen. My front page has a fair amount of content, and because it is full content I don’t gain a huge amount more page views on each visit. Most of my readers subscribe to my content, but that is picked up by Feedburner, and their servers are used for bandwidth for the RSS feeds.
I don’t host any video, and I don’t do any Podcasts.

My bandwidth usage in February 2007 was 9GB

A reasonable percentage of that bandwidth usage was from search engines, which is a good thing, because the relationships between my pages change a lot with links to related articles.

Despite the fact that Volusion allows you to build up an HTML based content website on their servers, and maybe even something with ASP.net or with a databased backend, the standard bandwidth available isn’t realistic.

Be wary of providers who charge add-on prices for additional features.

Volusion currently charge just $0.01 per additional MB of bandwidth, or $10 per GB

That doesn’t seem typical for the hosting industry, and Sitesell, who in many ways are competitors to Volusion offer unlimited bandwidth.

So I tried asking Rackspace directly, and I didn’t try to hide anything

you: Hi John, I am currently writing a review of one of your clients, and it would be helpful to get some idea of how much you charge for additional bandwidth
John: I’m sorry I don’t have that info
John: please have your customer contact their bdc

Hmm, seems like a touchy subject that Rackspace don’t want to discuss at the detriment of their customers who are “value added resellers”. Most small business dedicated servers from Rackspace come with 150GB of bandwidth.

Media Temple who also offer very good hosting with their Gridserver Package state:-

Expand the audience for your creative content by serving more visitors faster than ever before with a Terabyte of multi-routed bandwidth.

That is a $20 per month package as long as you are not running very CPU intensive services.

I am currently using Hostgator for this site – I only get 125GB on a reseller account and 100GB on another much smaller package – I have other hosting packages in other places as well, and there is a high chance I will move a few sites over to MT soon as they can probably cope with traffic surges better.

Hosting companies do play a little Russian roulette with bandwidth. They know that most accounts won’t use up the maximum. Even then, with current growth, I doubt additional bandwidth is going to cost you most than $1 per GB.

With Rackspace there are other additional support costs, and their support is supposed to be exceptional, but it is my belief that most of that should be covered by the basic fees.

As I stated at the beginning, Volusion are a VAR – if your bandwidth increases, you have more customers, if you have more customers you are most likely going to have more support queries for Volusion. Support costs money.

Because we provide both dynamic Ecommerce software, coupled with premium Ecommerce hosting by RackSpace at no extra charge, the total cost of ownership (TCO) turns out to be much lower than competitors.

I am not sure they are telling quite the whole truth.

Email Marketing

Various forms of email marketing are one of the best ways to boost your sales income, with various new product offerings, special offers, and upsells.

I haven’t looked deeply into the existing shopping cart email system, because on first inspection I discovered it is heavily crippled with very limited capacity. For the basic service you are limited to a mailing list of only 200, and even when paying almost $200 per month, you can only email 5,000 prospects – that might seem like a lot, but can hardly be looked on as good value.

I have also read of problems with email delivery on the Volusion forums, not only of marketing messages, but also sales receipts and normal customer interaction.

Volusion highly recommend customers purchase a subscription to Intellicontact as an example here on their support page.

You would think Volusion would support more than one 3rd party email package as they have made theirs so limited and recommend using a 3rd party. I decided to contact Aweber, one of the most trusted 3rd party email solutions for deliverability, and one of the most economic.

I asked Shaneka Altino of Aweber whether they currently have integration with Volusion available, and here is his reply (with permission)

Shaneka Altino: we do not have one now, if someone wanted to set one up they could, we have shopping intergration for several shopping carts
Shaneka Altino: as long as its hosted shopping cart such as Paypal and Clickbank

You see one of the things specific with Aweber is that for the majority of addresses brought into the system, they have to be brought in using Aweber’s own forms. What scripts normally do to achieve this is to do the processing in parallel.
With an email system you would certainly want to have customers automatically moved from various prospect lists to purchase lists, specific support lists etc, and not have problems with them being sent multiple emails for the same offer.

Correct integration is important… why isn’t it already available?

Intellicontact might be more flexible allowing you to import existing customers without forcing them to opt-in again, at least last time I looked at their service that was possible, but as soon as you out-grow their basic free offering, costs escalate.

If Volusion want their referral income from Intellicontact, they should ensure every link is clickable.

SEO

Good SEO is one of the primary selling points.

They do have SEO friendly URLs, though for some reason I saw a number of sites using internal part numbers for URLs rather than product names.

Of course the Volusion test site ranks high for every item they display, but they have an insane number of backlinks from Volusion shopping carts – I read in an old review that that is a requirement – I didn’t confirm that on the Volusion site.

Volusion have a blog running on WordPress (logical choice) – the blog is on a subdomain (not necessarily logical)

Volusion is running on Windows servers, thus running what I would regard as standard software like WordPress becomes a little more complicated. Whilst it can be done, and it is done frequently by specialists, I don’t think I would be tempted to do so. Plus I think you have to pay extra for an SQL server.

All the templates I saw that came free with Volusion had the top and sidebar menu appearing first in the source code – that isn’t good SEO practice.

You could build your site on another server, and just link through to products you have on your shopping cart. The current recommendation by most professional SEOs is to have all your content on the same site.

Here is their example store to have a look around.

Templates

Volusion currently has 7 free templates available, all of them in the same overall format.

I couldn’t find any site offering free, linkware or other open source templates available.

Volusion do have a shop where you can buy templates, and I saw a few people making enquiries on places like Elance for “Volusion Certified” templates. Certified? That suggests that a template has to be approved with the system.
Please refer to Volusion Comments – no certification is required for templates

Volusion really need to do something to encourage people to develop free templates, though that would limit the upsell potential

Feeds

When I went to demo sites, I was amazed not to see the availability of RSS feeds. They seem to offer all kinds of feeds to shopping search systems, but site owners are currently not offering their customers site updates by RSS.

Ideally you would have your content on the same site as your cart and offer updates by RSS or email. The RSS feeds would also give SE spiders something to spin into their webs.

I saw ways to import various data feeds, but I couldn’t see how this could be integrated live. There was limited functionality in the demo. Honestly every time I saw the words limited functionality, I just “switched off”.

Digital Products

No functionality for delivery of digital products or premium “membership” items jumped out at me. There may be functionality that I didn’t see.
Volusion have pointed out that some level of digital product support is possible with product keys – please refer to comments for continued discussion

User Generated Content

There is an ability for users to leave comments and reviews on each item, but I have no idea how this data can be used in other ways, for instance latest reviews, hot items, highest rated items etc.

Categories But Not Tagging

Items are placed in categories, but there was no way to tag items for some other more modern method of user navigation. I am a big fan of folksonomy.

Adwords

Volusion offer an Adwords service, you pay a fixed fee and they send a specific number of visitors to you. It doesn’t seem to mention if the visitors are from search or content network (different quality), whether they are from “buying traffic”, or what type of keywords it is based around. If you buy their largest package the visitors cost $1 each.

I wonder if it would work for Adsense Arbitrage or CPA offers? It might be an interesting experiment.
On the other hand I am not sure if it is good value for niche customers.

Volusion in the comments have confirmed that the traffic is “search traffic” and state that as it is a monthly retainer, it most work or customers wouldn’t keep up the subscription

Training Materials

Volusion offer great training materials. I didn’t have time to work through them all, but I am sure based on what I did see that they would be sufficient to get up and running, no matter what your level of technical competence.

Support

The support forums seem to be active, and are open, so you can pop along yourself and actually read about the questions customers raise, and how they are answered.

Conclusions

Volusion don’t agree with many of my conclusions, please refer to comments

If you run an offline business, and just want a web presence to which you will drive PPC traffic, and you sell items in low volume with a solid profit margin, Volusion might be ideal.

Volusion might even be a viable solution for a shopping cart attached to a secondary website that contains content and user support features such as a forum. It would be interesting how their sales funnel tracking works across multiple domains.

If it wasn’t for the bandwidth problem I highlighted, I am sure this review would have turned out differently. If it was my service I would be sorely tempted in this day and age to have unlimited bandwidth just like Sitesell offer. I will have to check how Sitesell handle video these days, maybe that isn’t unlimited bandwidth and they encourage you to host elsewhere. As sites become more successful they are going to purchase more features – charging extras for storage for me isn’t as much a problem, nor is more items in the database.

More effort should be made on the core product and especially the templates. Demos really should be full featured without limitation.

I don’t think I am the ideal customer for Volusion with their current package, but with a few changes their potential marketplace would broaden.

Links to Other Reviews

SEO Shopping Cart highlights the friendly URLs – to be honest I don’t think they examined the system in depth and should have spent more time on their review.

There is one user submitted review on Marketing Mule that is fairly extensive, but effectively suggests to look elsewhere. The review wasn’t dated, so it is hard to tell whether it is current.

ASP Index has 3 user submitted reviews, 2 are anonymous, and the most current one (which is fairly negative) is from an authenticated users.

Yaro is much in the same boat as I am, in that he has had very little time to prepare a detailed review from a long-term customer perspective, but some of the comments he has so far received seem very positive.

Small Biz Technology did a Q & A with Volusion a couple of years ago. Even then the feature set was quite impressive though some of the prices seem to have reduced.

ECartReviews was one of the most recent reviews I found, and actually one of the most detailed highlighting important features such as the different feeds supported.