IBM Digital Commerce vs. iSpring Market (discontinued)

I think WebSphere Commerce is well suited for customers looking to sell products online that need robustness and scalability as a priority. It provides a complete order cycle out of the box, or you can integrate with your existing order fulfillment. Online shopping models like digital subscriptions or a marketplace are not well suited as it requires a lot of customization

Incentivized

iSpring Market is suited for small organizations with limited staff and limited IT resources. Allowing users to self-register is a huge time-saver for small organizations. SEO, Google Tag Manager and SSO are included and easy to set up. For the most part, the documentation is good and the help desk provides timely customer service. iSpring Market is not the best tool for larger and more sophisticated organization. It's extremely difficult to get global reporting data, it doesn't import data from other systems, and it only exports a limited amount of data for use in other applications such as business intelligence software.

• Websphere commerce provides efficient contract based pricing. Contract based pricing greatly helps in handling prices for different business
• Catalog filtering is one other strength of websphere commerce, as it helps to filter the show only those products that the customer is entitled to
• Extended site model is one other strength of WCS as it greatly helps in having multiple e-commerce sites for different demographics, for branding etc

Incentivized

• It is easy to use.
• It works with Stripe.
• The UI is clean and intuitive for customers.

• The e-Marketing spots contain content associated with marketing activities to target customer segment - needs some improvement. The algorithm to set up the priority of each of the Web Activity with in eMarketing spot is little bit confusing.
• The catalog load can be simplified.
• WebSphere Commerce is a huge application - someone needs to spend at least 5-6 years to learn about the whole application.

Incentivized

• There are few global reporting features. I can get specific information on a user or a course, but there is no easy way to find users who made an account and didn't enroll in a course. You have to look at every user, or download spreadsheets and search.
• There are very few hooks available to Zapier to transfer data to other services.
• You can't transfer data into the iSpring Market using Zapier, so we can't use our member management system to populate courses.

The scalability and various configurations of the product allows for a wide range of e-commerce site features. It provides a storefront to begin with so it helps with speeding up development.

Incentivized

IBM Digital Commerce was a lot more customizable and had a good engine for us to make enhancements. We were not locked down to certain integrations and we were able to utilize a lot of the features outside of the box vs using a prescribed set of features and functionality that other tools would force us to use

Incentivized

We picked iSpring Market because of cost, maintenance, and easy of use.

• For our clients in the apparel industry, the flexibility that WCS provides to scale up really helped their online business to grow tremendously.
• Our client in the restaurant industry can't quite leverage what WCS has to offer though as it doesn't really fit their shopping model.
• Another positive impact is that it allows our clients to streamline their commerce system in interacting with their backend.

Incentivized

• We have saved thousands of dollars a year in licensing fees compared with other products we used.
• We have eliminated the need for contractors, to build content for iSpring Market, saving tens of thousands of dollars, because we can publish directly into the system using iSpring Suite.
• We get 80% fewer help desk requests for enrollment and payment compared to the last two products we used.