The thought of starting an e-commerce business leaves you with the puzzle of finding the best e-commerce platform to turn your dreams to reality. During the research, you will come across two prominent e-commerce website builders: Builderfly and Volusion. Choosing the apt platform to build your e-commerce store isn’t an easy deal. It involves a lot of contradictory thoughts and the irresistible features of one winning over the others.
Builderfly and Volusion both are easy-to-use, trouble-free e-commerce store builders that can help you take your business online. If you are one of those readily thinking to choose either of these, we can help you with sharing differentiating points between the two. From pricing plans to the features, ease of designing, and customer service, we will brief you about everything to let you decide the e-commerce platform.
Before diving into the details, let us introduce these platforms.
Builderfly is a compiled e-commerce package that can enrich your e-commerce experience with online store builder and native mobile app builder. It permits businesses to manage their customers, orders, cross-channel sales, tax details, sales, and marketing, all of it via a single dashboard.
Whereas, Volusion is an e-commerce website builder dedicated to offering simplified website creation for merchants to sell their products. From website hosting to content management, template selection, necessary e-commerce functionality, and support, you can get it all on Volusion.
Both Builderfly and Volusion are SaaS(Software as a Service) solutions that let you use the services and features in lieu of the monthly/ annual fee payment. However, Builderfly gives you the relief to launch your store and get lifetime free access with a single-time activation plan. This helps you manage your budget accordingly and the freedom to choose the right business plan for your business needs.
| S. No. | Topics |
| 1 | Pricing |
| 2 | Ease of Use |
| 3 | Web Design |
| 4 | Products & Product pages |
| 5 | Integrations & Add-ons |
| 6 | M-commerce App |
| 7 | Payment Modes |
1. Pricing:
Builderfly provides access to e-commerce website builder as well as m-commerce app builder at extremely competitive rates. To get started with Builderfly, you can choose the business plan that fits well with your present business requirements.
- Startup Plan: Free for lifetime
Create your e-store for free and set up your retail business without any second thoughts. List up to 10 products and make your store live.
- Standard : $35/month
- Advance : $75/month
- Pro : $195/month
- Enterprise: Custom development, where charges depend on your business requirements
From the standard plan to above, Builderfly lets you create a complimentary mobile app for your business in addition to that of your e-commerce store. From the standard plan, you will get access to all the basic e-commerce functionalities like social media integration, gift cards, discount cards, shipping API, Abandoned cart recovery, product reviews, and ratings, etc. On upgrading, you can unlock features like sales channel integration, custom SSL, etc.
Volusion doesn’t come for free. To start your business with Volusion, you need to choose any one of the business plans offered:
- Personal plan: $29/ month
- Professional plan: $79/ month
- Business plan: $299/month
- Prime: Custom pricing
From website hosting to SSL, online support, staff accounts, and shipping integration, you will get access to it for all the plans. The count of products that you can list varies from the Volusion plans you are subscribed to.
Both Builderfly and Volusion allows you to start your 14-days free trial to gain hands-on experience. You won’t be charged any transaction fees to register. But, when choosing the best, Builderfly leads here, with the startup plan. Also, you can save $104 on your pro plan and $4 on an advance plan with Builderfly along with an m-commerce app for your business.
2. Ease of Use:
Builderfly is well known for its easy-to-use admin interface as well as a trouble-free navigation dashboard. It lets you manage your numerous e-commerce sales platforms via a single dashboard. Within the same dashboard, you can access the web-store builder as well as a mobile app builder. This turns the entire journey a lot easier for you as a seller and keeps you away from the task of shuffling the tabs.
Volusion focuses on usability and guides a lot with tooltips that turn annoying later. The interface of the website builder is complication-free, and it allows the third-party app integrations as well. However, the sales channel integration and advanced functionalities are available for the business plan users only.
If you are just getting started with either of the two e-commerce platforms, Builderfly is undoubtedly a platform you would love to consider. It is comparatively easier for non-technical individuals also. To take the feel of the platform and understand their functionality, you can start with their free trials.
3. Web Design:
Builderfly offers you access to a fully functional, ready-to-use web store with the sample theme and sample product listings. Once you login to your store, you need to replace the products’ content with that of your products. This is undoubtedly a good practice to get started. This motivates you as a business owner to understand each functionality at ease.
To change your store’s look and feel, you get a choice among professionally designed highly-responsive themes for free with access to the Builderfly marketplace. You can personalize it by customizing your store theme with the help of a Builderfly design editor that enables live preview check.
Contrary to this, Volusion V2 has a very narrow theme selection. However, they are free, as well as mobile responsive. With the help of the WYSIWYG editor, you can edit the website content as per your business requirements. This way, the visual editor makes it easier for you to alter website elements.
4. Products & product pages:
Products are the key entities that bring life to every store. That’s why product description pages must have an eye-catchy and pleasing look.
When you choose any of the Builderfly subscription-based plans, you can list unlimited products to your store. In addition, you can add as many product variations and details in the product descriptions as you want to. You can design category pages and product description pages with all the details that can fascinate your customers and help them in making their buying decision. Upon the choice of Builderfly startup plan only, you will be able to sell 10 products in your store. However, there will not be any restriction upon the variants that you like to create for each of the product listings.
Volusion has a limited count of product listings based on the chosen plan. It permits you to add 100 products with your plan and 5000 products with your professional plan. For unlimited listings, you need to make a business plan. Also, adding the product variations ain’t that easy as there are not many attributes available.
So, Builderfly wins a point above Volusion because of unlimited product listings and detailed product description pages that improve your e-commerce conversion rate.
5. Integrations & add-ons:
When designing your store with Builderfly, you will find third-party shipping calculation, email marketing tool, tax calculation feature in-built, and staff accounts inbuilt. This saves you from the trouble of looking for the right APIs and checking their compatibility.
At present, Volusion V2 coordinates with 22 applications, which are the paid ones. They don’t have a distinct marketplace where you can search further.
When Volusion gives you the option to integrate third-party applications or software to add certain features to your store, Builderfly offers it as the integrated features.
6. Sales Channel Integration:
Ecommerce businesses often sell their products on other sales channels and marketplaces to enhance the brand’s exposure and improve opportunity for sales.
Builderfly allows you to link your sales channels and manage inventory across the platform. Along with the e-commerce giants and marketplaces, you can also connect your social handles and market your products. In your startup plan, you can integrate your Facebook store and Google marketplace. With the subscription-based plans, you will get options to link your Amazon and Flipkart stores also. Further, you can link your Instagram handle and convert it to a shop.
On creating your store with Volusion, you can link your Amazon and eBay store only. But, such options aren’t available for personal and professional users. If you subscribe to business or prime plan, only you can manage cross channel sales and business inventory.
7. M-Commerce app:
Builderfly authorizes you to build, design, and launch your m-commerce app with all of the Builderfly subscription plans. You need not worry about different OS and designing costs; you can download your APK for Android as well as macOS. Builderfly m-commerce app builder has AI-integrated to it. AI will help you further in personalizing the experience of mobile users. Builderfly empowers you with the option to offer real-time offers to customers and improve the engagement rate.
Volusion is just a dedicated website builder with specialized e-commerce functionalities. It doesn’t offer any options for mobile app development.
8. Payment Modes:
Builderfly enables integration with more than numerous external payment gateways. Razorpay, Paytm and PayPal offer the initial integration. Along with initially integrated payment gateways, Builderfly permits you to collect the payment for your orders via offline payment methods like COD, cheque payments, etc.
Volusion allows the integration with Paypal and Stripe only. They do have Volusion payments, a distinctive credit card processor that won’t charge much credit card processing fees. However, there is a restriction on its usage; primary V1 users are only allowed to use it with V2.
Builderfly offers diverse payment collection options and digital wallet integration, which improves the chances of getting more orders via your e-store.
Builderfly and Volusion both are strong e-commerce platforms. Considering all the factors mentioned above, Builderfly holds more power than Volusion. Builderfly is perfect for startups as well as full-scale businesses. It gives you access to all marketing tools, CRM, POS orders, and social media integration with the standard plan. This helps you grow your business from the initial stage when you need more effort. If you want to explore more, register yourself for the 14-days free trial straight away.
