From a design and usability standpo

From a design and usability standpoint, the BigCommerce design interface struck me as more modern and hip compared to Volusion. Not only does BigCommerce offer more templates but they also look better as well.

Whereas Volusion’s templates come across as kind of vanilla, Big Commerce’s templates are more eye catching and attractive. Of course this only really matters if you are going to go with a standard template with your store, but my first impression was that you can create a better looking store out of the box with BigCommerce.

Another feature that makes BigCommerce shine from a design perspective is that they offer a drag and drop interface with which you can reposition key shopping cart elements using just your mouse. For example, let’s say you want to move a menu from the top of the screen to the left hand sidebar. All you have to do is click on the menu bar and drag it to the left and it will snap into place. Having the ability to massage your shopping cart graphically is nice if you want to quickly rearrange things around with your store in order to see what looks best before you freeze your design.

From a feature perspective, BigCommerce and Volusion are both pretty much on par. Bigcommerce has a few additional minor features like social media toolbars and easy YouTube video integration but realistically, adding these things to your cart is as easy as copying over some javascript code. In other words, they aren’t a big deal.

However, BigCommerce does have one nice useful feature that Volusion doesn’t have and that’s an abandoned shopping cart report. If a customer enters their information and then bails, you can generate a nice report that outlines when, where and how often this happens. This information is useful because you can then try to get them back somehow by either contacting them or giving them a coupon.

To sum it all up, BigCommerce is a sleeker entry into the hosted ecommerce arena from a design and graphical perspective. Their out of the box stores just look better.