Adobe Commerce vs. Orderwave

We need to do a lot of quotes, and sometimes customers call and want to pay. Adobe Commerce (Magento) did not let you keep saved quotes, so you had to put people on hold whilst you started making the order from scratch rather than just taking payment, which was very annoying.

Incentivized

If you manage orders of physical goods, Orderwave works just fine! They integrate with many e-comm platforms and are generally well-suited to those who sell products on their site, who want to send automated order receipts and confirmation emails, and for accounting purposes to tally up total sales (including taxes, shipping costs, etc.). The fact that they also integrate with our email platform makes it extra useful so I can really hone in on segmentation and order history. That's pretty invaluable to me, as an email marketer. If you don't sell goods, I can't see it being appropriate

Incentivized

• Magento Commerce Cloud allows us to develop our own custom solutions for problems that we need solved.
• Magento Commerce Cloud can also be integrated with many of the third part vendors that we use. This has made many implementations go very smoothly and tends to be much quicker than developing our own custom solution.
• There are many features available right out of the box. Many of them we have not implemented yet, but it is great to have them available to us when we are ready.

Incentivized

• Order management is clearly important when you run an e-commerce platform. As I can only speak from a marketing perspective (not business intelligence or finance), please know I may be limited in what I know/share. It's seriously a ridiculously useful piece of software. Anyhow. Orderwave allows me to pull in order information into Listrak, our ESP (email service provider). With this information, I can segment on SO many levels such as order total, number of orders, date of last (or all) purchase(s), what was purchased, over what period of time X items were purchased.... the options are limitless.
• Because I do a lot of testing with my emails - testing the whole customer experience from receiving an email to completing an order - I need the ability to review order information (name, address, items purchased, S&H info, tax info, etc. etc.). While our admin manages all the customization of that order receipt, I'm able to quickly make any changes necessary in the back end, like if I'm seeing a pricing discrepancy between what is advertised on our site and what the final order purchase was (usually due to the way we set up a bundle product and not an issue with the platform).
• It's really, really easy to see if we have available inventory of select SKUs that we are about to promote. It also gives me an idea if there is an issue with syncing between SAP and Orderwave, or Orderwave and Magento (our e-comm platform).

Incentivized

• The Magento admin is not as user-friendly has other e-commerce platforms, and this is why I never recommend it for smaller ecommerce stores.
• You absolutely need a skilled developer to customize and extend Magento. A skilled developer can make Magento amazing, but if you're looking for a DIY website option, Magento will frustrate you.
• Magento takes a lot of server resources, so you will not be able to run on it a shared hosting account. You will need a dedicated server for it.

Incentivized

• I'm not the biggest fan of their email platform, but it does exactly what it needs to do... I just like drag & drop email builders. In addition, I've found that at times the code editor doesn't expand very large, so I often have to copy & paste into a separate code editor (such as Sublime Text) to edit a few lines of code. While the WYSIWYG editor opens in a new window allowing it to more easily expand, I don't get that with the code editor (at least not in Chrome on Mac).
• Support documentation is still a little difficult to manage, but I have noticed truly significant improvements and am more easily able to find the things I need. Our AM is able to help me when I can't find something, which is a big help. I'm sure in time it will improve more.
• The overall look and feel feels old. Like the email platform, it does exactly what it needs to do and it does it well without issue. But the innards feel like Windows XP in 2018. The walls are sturdy and supportive; it just needs a new coat of paint. :)

Incentivized

Magento is well-supported by a big development team at eBay, which not only addresses bug reports very quickly, but also is constantly working on improvements to the platform. The wealth of Magento third party modules ensures that the platform will be up to date with future changes to
Payment or ERP systems.
Security is always a concern and with the Zend framework as a foundation, Magento has had very few security-related patches since I have started to work with it

As an experienced user of Adobe Commerce platform, i found the platform complex for beginners yet very flexible to customize as per the client requirements be it a integration with third party system, implementing any payment gateway, managing multiple stores or customising the Adobe Commerce default functionalities, we did not experience issue with it.

Incentivized

The technical service was impeccable. They were on point and were very knowledgeable.

Great value for an flexible, open source platform.

Open source nature of Magento was a key consideration, particularly when launching in new markets. Cost is another key factor here and the GMV model is an important enabler for us as we continue to grow. Adobe Commerce is highly extensible and advanced customization and flexibility built in meaning that we can shape the product into exactly what we require.

Incentivized

I wasn't involved in the purchasing decision of Orderwave, but I am familiar with IBM Order Management (used in the past) and much prefer Orderwave. It's cleaner and the information I need is more direct an apparent. Despite it's 'old' look, it's far more effective and far easier to use. I need easy. My day is spent between 10+ applications and if something isn't easy to use, I just won't use it. Orderwave lets me do my job well

Incentivized

• When we first went LIVE with Adobe Commerce our SEO / Organic traffic plummeted and so did our conversion so our initial take of Adobe Commerce wasn't great. This was partly to do with business decisions but also to do with out of box functionality not being as expected.
• Fast forward and we basically did a redesign on the platform and partnered with a fantastic SEO partner and improved results and now are doing extremely well on the Magento platform. Much improved!

Incentivized

• It has really helped us with business intelligence and gathering more information on who our customers are, what they have (or haven't) purchased, and how we can more effectively market to them. The BI has also helped our telemarketing side (with the call center) better understand what products are most frequently ordered over the phone vs online.
• Managing stock levels is super easy and allows our marketing team to more effectively merchandise and promote products. Without this, we would just be guessing what we should promote.
• I think one of the biggest ROI pieces has been the customizability of the Order Confirmation email. We have a dynamic tool that our email provider offers that serves up products based on what the customer has ordered, viewed, and abandoned, so we can dynamically populate those products in the Order Confirmation email. Orderwave helped us create a custom variable that we could use with our ESP's dynamic code, and we've seen an increase (~3-4%) in sales from the Confirmation email.

Incentivized