Digital River vs. Optimizely Commerce Connect

It is well suited for large organizations with many SKUs, promotions, and large teams, where flexibility and speed to market are not necessarily as important as repeatability and stability. It is also well suited for digital products, especially if they sell internationally. They have the ability to integrate with an existing system for user management and website in a rather straightforward way as well.

Incentivized

Very strong fit for mid-sized organizations that need more flexibility and customization as compared to canned or template-based offerings, but also want the efficiency and externalization that comes with a pre-existing, cloud-hosted platform (as compared to a full custom offering). Works well with a PIM and more mature catalog data in order to fully leverage the dynamic data capabilities.

Incentivized

• Regional settings like local payment methods, ability to apply or not apply local VAT etc.
• Reporting and any kind of business analysis.
• Easy usage of the platform.
• Marketing is definitely strong side of Digital River Global Commerce. Apart from the features it has, there is a strong team behind it who can make all your fantasies come true using all their expertise and possibility of the platform.

Incentivized

• Web content management -- the interface is drag and drop and makes it very easy for business users to create product pages.
• In site search with Episerver Find -- it is easy to promote attributes and make quick tweaks to fine-tune results.
• Integrate with other systems -- we have integrated with our ERP, our product information management system, our digital asset management system and our marketing automation system to take advantage of investments we have already made in content and customer data.

Incentivized

• Integrating with any 3rd party is challenging. The more you can do to clearly define your requirements, the easier it will be to integrate.
• It can be difficult to differentiate and customize your product with an outsourced solution.
• Your internal timeline might not match with their timeline and delivery schedule.

• Support. Episerver used to have direct support and access to the tech team to discuss and resolve issues. The new support portal is not enough for developer needs.
• Quality Assurance. We find issues in the Episerver code that should have been resolved in QA before release.
• Sales. Episervers sells the framework as a solution while showing Alloy. While it helps Episerver sell more, it puts the implementation partner into trouble as the client thinks they bought the solution. Episerver does not provide a solution. It provides a framework that you can build a solution on.

Incentivized

Inertia and cost. To switch platforms would require a significant undertaking to migrate product catalogs, websites and retool marketing efforts. It would require a significant cost differential or game changing technology that would bring a decent ROI on the change

Really want to be able to spend more time and resources on rolling out new things with Episerver but at the moment we seem to be fixing alot of issues and pain points with the way our system was setup.

Incentivized

The job functionality is one of the strongest benefits Optimizely offers. It allows a savvy user to quickly go in to a given job, see the job history to find errors and then even take the steps of a job, copy the code and paste it back into your source to diagnose a potential issue.

Incentivized

We had an incredible team at Episerver Supporting us with the go live, reviewing our integration, and pushing our integration partner to deliver a quality product

Incentivized

Fully understand what is OOTB feature of the platform before proceeding to develop. Then implement a customization of key features once you can prove they are working as OOTB to make them more user friendly and productive for the business. Eg pre order and e gift card

Incentivized

This was in place when I migrated to the role. We were greatly satisfied with the server and products that we did not pursue other products.

Stibo STEP MDM was a powerhouse. It seems we could do anything we could dream up, but we also had an in-house IT dev team to support it. The cost was the reason we went with Optimizely Commerce Connect. We did not explore HubSpot for this project.

Incentivized

• More sales and broader reach to consumers. With the web presence of the eCommerce site, Korn/Ferry products were accessible 24 hours/ 7 days a week. Prior to that change, consumers had to call to order products and had to wait on office hours of when a Customer Service Rep was available.
• Access to data and analytical information for sales. This also allowed for making a more efficient inventory process.
• Transformed the Customer Service role to Commercial Operations which was a major plus. The position became more a support position (which is what was needed) than what was previously a Data Entry position. This also allowed opportunities for marketing a lot of the eProducts to consumers that the organization had.

• Positive: We have a usable website - better than what we had before and we are seeing a constant increase in adoption.
• Positive: Counter associates are using the website to help customers.
• Negative: Too much time being spent QCing previous work.

Incentivized