Optimizely Commerce Connect vs. Oracle Commerce

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

As a techno functional person, one thing I can say is that their usage of APIs make the platform so innovative and solely based on some of the APIs it has evolved much faster than its competitors. It has suited most of its users who are buyers of client products and services just because of personalized experiences across all channels, thus amazing the buyers and bagging their mind shares. The Oracle CX Commerce platform has boosted subscription footfall and is a blessing with its flexibility and all roundedness.

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

• It uses an effective algorithm to provide users with product recommendations based on other products they’ve previously viewed.
• It comes with a decent support platform, where Oracle is attentive and provides help diagnosing issues that may arise within the environment.
• Oracle CX Commerce comes with a developer tool known as the DCU Tool, which is very helpful when it comes to pushing changes from environment to environment. The DCU Tool is also a good resource to use for source control.

Incentivized

• 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

• Integration with other Oracle web products, particularly Responsys. The more we can leverage our red apps together the better.
• Development of new services, such as Experiments and AI Apps, requires extensive trouble shooting by the customer. We can spend months working with Oracle to get these services to work correctly. On the plus side, Oracle is clearly committed to solving the issues we find and works aggressively to resolve problems.
• Upgrades to the application always seem to require a patch or two. This frequently extends the upgrade schedule, effecting our implementation plans and our own site enhancement schedule.

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

Oracle Commerce Cloud is definitely not my favorite platform to use, however our company has gotten very comfortable with the way our website operates using it so I do not see us switching to a different product any time soon. Over time, I’ve grown to have a love/hate relationship with this product, but as I learn more about what it offers I come to appreciate its functionality more

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

Prior to taking on Oracle CX Commerce, we went ahead and evaluated Shopify. Shopify has an extremely similar concept overall. However, My organization ultimately went with Oracle [CX Commerce] because of how user friendly the solution is ,and how detailed its offerings are. Oracle has so many extra features compared to Shopify that allows us to create a much more personalized experience for our clients.

Incentivized

• 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

• We were able to drive sales for one of our clients up by 50% over the course of a 6 month window by revamping their online web store with Oracle ATG.
• Sharing data and communication improved greatly between legal/finance and marketing.

Incentivized