Volusion v5.0 Shopping Cart Software Released

New Features Added, Others Improved

For the past few years, one online shopping cart software vendor has remained at the head of the pack -- Volusion!

In September 2007, Volusion released the long awaited version 5 of it's ecommerce solution.

Some of the key features of the upgrade include:

Ability to designate multiple warehouses for product shipping origin - on a product by product basis, online sellers can now specify which warehouse location a product will ship from. This allows sellers to charge more accurately when an order includes multiple items shipped from multiple locations in a single order. In past versions, Volusion merchants would use a single shipping origin, (usually their company address or an estimated "central" location), which all shipping charges were based on. A new tab in the Admin console for Warehouses has been added, once you set up the warehouse data, it's a simple matter of selecting the warehouse from a pull-down on any product record.

Abandoned Cart Tracking - if a user begins to checkout, and then abandons the order, Volusion now keeps track of the information which could help store owners discover potential problems in the checkout process or identify attempts to hack the software.

Better Organization of Image Files - in version 5, Volusion has consolidated the process of attaching color swatches and alternate view image files to products in a single section (at the bottom of each product record). NOTE: While this feature makes it easier to see which swatches and files have been assigned to a given product, we did encounter a problem replacing existing images once they were uploaded. In testing, we uploaded several swatches, then deleted one and tried to replace it -- the AJAX control froze -- a problem which Volusion support told us had to do with cached data and cookies. After clearing (Firefox) browser data, we were able to successfully upload the replacement images.

HTML Syntax Highlighting - on any field in Volusion's back-end databases where you can insert custom HTML code, there is a button marked "EasyEditor". Clicking the button brings up a WYSIWYG HTML editor. The EasyEditor is only "easy" for simple HTML markup. The editor produces bloated, difficult to read, and nearly impossible to re-edit HTML. While syntax highlighting does make it a bit easier to read, for average users, we strongly suggest you either use the EasyEditor all the time, or hand code all the time as the EasyEditor makes a real mess of any custom HTML and CSS codes you enter on your own, (a third option would be to use an HTML editor off-line and cut and paste the code into Volusion's back-end). The EasyEditor also ties to what is known as the Asset Manager -- basically an FTP tool that allows you to upload image files and then pull them into your site's HTML. The asset manager does a poor job of creating IMG tags, omitting height and width, and adding an empty ALIGN parameter if no alignment is selected, (we could write an entire article on the problems with Volusion's EasyEditor and AssetManager -- but for entry level users they will never notice, and for experienced web developer's they will most likely opt to hand code their HTML and FTP their files into place, so it's a moot point)...

All in all, version 5 appear to be a solid update, and has many, many more new and improved features including:

• Improved QuickBooks integration
• Integration with Stone Edge Order Manager
• Improved XML data feeds
• Improved Shipping functions including label printing for USPS, DHL and others, faster live rate calculations, and dimmensional package calculations for UPS.

Related Link: <http://www.volusion.com/version_5_features.asp>