IBM Digital Commerce vs. Optimizely Configured Commerce

Websphere commerce is well suited if multiple sites are required based on geography, for branding, large customers. It is well suited for B2B model to handle different pricing and catalog filters for each business. It is not well suited if there are multiple external systems that drives the pricing an d promotions. WCS should be the master for pricing and promotion

Incentivized

I think that there are a lot of companies (us included) that are looking for a solution to fit into their current needs, versus looking for a solution that is going to solve all of their problems. For us, Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud fits into the former in that situation where we have specific ERP needs, specific data needs, usability and user management needs, etc. and Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud just happens to fit in there the most.

Incentivized

• Scalability. Since WebSphere Commerce is based on WebSphere Application Server, it's fully scalable just like WAS.
• Support. Their support team is a pleasure to work with. They get back to you quickly and are knowledgeable of their product, so I learn a lot from them about things that are not covered in detail in their documentation.
• Robust. The software is robust once it's up and running since it depends on WAS.
• Sample store & sample data. It's really fast to get a store up and running based on the sample store & data they provided.

Incentivized

• Edit Pages - A visual editor with custom widgets allows a quick way to edit the website
• Manage users - in the back end editing and managing users is very easy
• Data - the whole system allows us to track users and collect data fairly easily

Incentivized

• It still uses EJBs, need to move to latest technologies for persistance
• Promotion module customizations needs to more easy
• Grouping of products based on the shipping methods/shipping dates etc functionality needs to be added

Incentivized

• It deployed with a major bug in Guest checkout. It is now fixed, but we lost a lot of business because of it.
• The pricing API is not working.
• Support for multi-warehouse product availability would be helpful. If we have the product in stock in any warehouse, we should be able to book the order.

Incentivized

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

Quite flexible and easy to use for daily marketing user tasks, like updating page listings, promotions, and copy. More in-depth tasks like managing product attributes, rearranging product taxonomy placement, and CMS editing are not user-friendly and require a careful and detailed process to follow.

Incentivized

It's a mixed bag. The team has been very nice, but there has been an underlying feeling of condescension because we have complained or "caused trouble" over the inadequacy of the CMS component. Also, support for modifications or UI changes has been terribly slow. Understandably, COVID has made life hard for everyone, but there is an expectation that we complete our work immediately, but their team will "put it in queue" when we have a request or find a bug. Further, we certainly feel that we were sold a list of capabilities that we have not seen come to fruition. Finally, the change of ownership 3 times (Insite -> Epi -> Opti) over our implementation period has been both confusing and disruptive.

Incentivized

Compared to some other software that our clients have considered, a lot of them choose WebSphere Commerce because of the ability to scale easily. Some of our customers are coming from a PHP based ecommerce platform that doesn't allow them to scale up and they're hitting the limit of their ecommerce system

Incentivized

We selected Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud (when it was Insite Commerce) as they were specifically focused on manufacturing clients and the storefront and data management were very robust. The business model and cost were more in our price range as well, so an overall better value for the solution. The ability for the product data to be updated once on the catalog side as well as on the CMS website side was the benefit we saw with a small team of resources to support the product. However, there are definite drawbacks to having not gone with a more turnkey website CMS.

Incentivized

• We were able to roll out Commerce in record time thanks to a good understanding of the tool and our required processes.
• We were able to roll it out on several websites in quick secessions due to the platform's features.
• We were able to plan a solid road map given repeatable projects.

Incentivized

• Higher AOV - online customers are buying more than they did before
• amount of pressure it's taken off branch employees who no longer have to give prices or inventory info for every customer request
• But we are spending a LOT of money on custom development to get exactly what we need / want

Incentivized