MindTouch is a customer experience management platform with content management and help authoring capabilities. Formerly known as MediaWiki, it is optimized for building knowledge bases for customer self-service and agent assistance purposes.
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Orderwave
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Orderwave is a web-based hosted application that is designed to automate and streamline operations for e-commerce, catalog, and direct marketing sales channels. Key features include: Subscription and Continuity Management Inventory and Warehouse Management Payment Processing Shopping Cart Robust Reporting Shipping Solutions Partial Order…
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Pricing
MindTouch
Orderwave
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MindTouch
Orderwave
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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We have custom pricing available based on features needed, number of users, order volume and currencies supported.
I would recommend MindTouch to anyone who is looking to create and host their documentation for a product that has multiple types of users. Our business modal represents customers on the buy-side as well as the sell-side and we are able to easily organize documentation to service both types of users.
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
Good privacy settings for each page. I can set a new article to semi-private until it's approved to go live. And I can send a link to that page out for review.
Good tracking on each page history.
Ability to view and restore previous page versions.
I like the category search bars that only search the current category.
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).
User experience. The product's UX is fragmented and it's hard to figure out how to do some certain very simple, important things.
Many aspects of the product don't really meet industry standards for technical communication. They seem to have been cobbled together by people who don't fully understand what technical writers do. Product updates really don't address these issues. Folks in sales and support sometimes imply that the authoring platform MindTouch has created is the only way to do create documentation, which is counter to the experience of those of us who've been in the industry for any length of time.
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. :)
We've put lots and lots of content into the MindTouch system, of course, so that makes it harder to opt out, but we're also very pleased with their rate of development and weekly pushing of improvements, as well as their response and solutions to our questions and input All in all, a winning combination.
MindTouch has many formatting options but some procedures (like editing a template) are not easy to figure out. We needed to create several custom templates for our content and found the MindTouch user documentation on this process somewhat contradictory and incomplete.
MindTouch is a hosted site, so as a heavy user there are times when I notice that pages are slow to load, or something happens like Amazon Web Services crashing the entire east coast for a few hours, that you do notice even if it isn't actually the fault of the MT tool itself. It's the risk of using a hosted tool, but the benefits are pretty amazing and outweigh these performance issues.
Mindtouch support is awesome. Support agents are friendly and helpful. Some can benefit from ongoing training. Overall the support experience is very good. One area they can possibly improve is visibility into product feedback. Seeing or getting insight into requests or votes for features would be an added customer experience.
Written documentation and videos are very good and have helped on numerous occasions when I've had to look up how to accomplish a certain task. The reason I have not given a full score is mainly because there have been some inaccuracies in the documentation because updates to the MindTouch framework have slightly changed the way things work. But this is usually the same type of challenges I face when making documentation for the software solution we develop. So all in all I'm very satisfied with both the personal webinars and the online documentation MindTouch provides for their service.
Just know that there is so much more involved than adding your content. There are so many pieces to launching your site -- especially if you are moving from another platform. If you are not a person who typically works in the "website" realm, do your homework, ask your web people, engineers, etc., because there's a lot to do that you won't know about until you are unexpectedly smacked in the face with it. Learn from my mistakes! We are very happy now, but it was a long road getting to launch day for us
I will be brief. DealerTeam is built upon Salesforce and we try to support native apps. We used Desk.com first for basic Help Ticket management. The product did not satisfy how our customers were looking for information. We upgraded to Service Cloud with Knowledge Base and spent one year writing content and developing our support agency. Again, our customers were upset about submitting help tickets and waiting for answers. They wanted access to self-help while working with a customer. Today we continue to use Service Cloud with MindTouch integration and have found complete success. There is simply no other solution I know of that is a flexible and easy to use as MindTouch when it come to providing customer success and product support
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
Time to publication can be very quick, provided there are not multiple changes in flight at the same time for the same page.
We have seen a tremendous increase in customer traffic and SEO.
MindTouch allows us to custom-brand the look and feel of our site to match our company's marketing and branding. This instills trust in our content.
The relative simplicity of the platform enabled us to hire the best people and best writers we could find, without worrying so much about specific past expertise in a complicated publishing platform.
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.
