Kooomo vs. Optimizely Commerce Connect

Going live with our first Kooomo shop has been a success. Having tried several other e-commerce platforms through the years it has been a great experience to go live in a very short time to market without any bugs or problems. The SAAS model has proved to be the best suited for us and Kooomo in particular, has met all our expectations.

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

• Know your store – Thanks to a friendly, modern and powerful backend I can handle more than customer orders.
• Lots of dashboards full of charts give me the ability to monitor (and export) on site traffic, turnover and merchandising performances based on a data range. I can also check customer care activity and orders statuses.
• Interesting marketing features - The system has a whole area dedicated to marketing, I can monitor my marketing campaigns, create new promotions and discounts, check customer registrations, customer reviews and more.
• Easy catalog management - even if you need to operate it manually. All information about products are accessible and fully editable. For each category you can manage meta attributes and their appearance in the menu tree.

• 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

• There is always room for improvement, most are solved with its seamless upgrades in the cloud.

• 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

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

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

• Kooomo allowed me to expand the range of services offered by my company and to realize consulting or marketing activities for new clients interested in the world of ecommerce.

• 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