A couple of months ago, I was consulted by an online outfit to analyze their ecommerce strategies given the long term vision of the company (that was the reason I looked into Yahoo Merchant Solutions, the client’s current online store front service provider). After doing a thorough market research, I went back to them with three alternative alternative solutions to Yahoo:
MonsterCommerce
Volusion
OS Commerce
Given the requirements and budget, these three solutions were most fitting for the client. Unfortunately, due to concerns with support on open source, OS Commerce had to be dropped. Out of the other two companies, the client picked Volusion as the ecommerce solution of choice to migrate their online store front to.
Volusion’s online presentations and everything else looked wonderful. But as soon as we started porting existing products and started to configure options in Volusion, we realized just how terrible Volusion’s administration interface is. Granted they provide a fairly decent documentation and speedy tech support, its terrible user interface design just pisses me and my client’s internal staff off. As a tech-savvy person, I understood some of the jargon Volusion’s website spit at me. But I can’t imagine someone with the experience level of MS Word to grasp the extensive (read: things most people don’t care about) and sometimes trivial features the interface insists on displaying.
Why can’t the geeks at Volusion take a page from Apple: show optional features only when necessary by those who need them; and in god’s name, polish up the god damn interface a little. Sure, it’s usable, but damn it, even I was intimidated when a page of roughly 120 form fields (I kid you not) appeared just to add ONE product. WTF?!! Did the monkeys at Volusion even bother to do user testing with their cumbersome interface?
Even though we haven’t tested MonsterCommerce as extensively yet, but for those who are considering trying Volusion, BE WARNED. And no matter how bad MonsterCommerce’s interface is, it can’t be worse than Volusion’s presentation of 120 form fields on a single page with dozens of useless optional fields. Com’on, even volunteers working on OS Commerce could make a usable interface. Why are those paid programmers at Volusion not doing half of what OS Commerce can delivery UI wise?
As for OS Commerce, I couldn’t find a module that conveniently imports an existing Yahoo Store easily. I mean, Yahoo has a feature that exports; and OS Commerce has a couple of features that import xml/cvs files. But I didn’t spend enough time to make them play nicely together. To that end, I give Volusion credit for being able to nicely import products from Yahoo (sans product categories and images). Big deal; so can MonsterCommerce.
UPDATE 01/10/2009: A lot of what I’ve written here have become irrelevant since Volusion proactively updated their software. I’ve written a more updated review here.