Optimizely Commerce Connect vs. Shift4Shop

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

At this point I would recommend looking elsewhere - 8 years with a platform and finally have to switch due to the unreliability is not something a business likes to do! They should sell the platform to a company that actually cares about owning an ecommerce builder. Research Shift4 - the parent

• 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

• 3dcart is a more basic website tool that can get customers started quickly.
• It only has a certain amount of options, making it an ok tool to use if you don't need a particularly large website.

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

• 3dcart does not connect to many of the POS systems my clients use so we need to manually update inventory daily/weekly.
• There are many modules available to do many different things, but it makes you feel like you are being tickled and died to death to get the site to do exactly what you want. Also can be confusing if you don't know what you actually need.
• It's a little difficult/confusing to upload products with multiple variations - ie: color and size - especially if there are multiples colors and multiple sizes.

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

Because they are, in my experience, unable to maintain a working environment . Client contact us telling us the site is not letting them place orders . We have to check multiple times a day our store is still working . In my experience, they have removed email support , and we had to find a 3rd party to use it with our store at an extra cost , let alone the resource to make it happen. In my experience, they basically abandon you and send you instruction on how to make it work .

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

If you are looking for ultra basic interface ...

regular updates braking our site

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

You always manage to fins someone, but, in my experience, resolving issues are not an easy task. Why do we pay for a service , and then spend time trouble shooting constantly with them ?? In my experience, they eliminate features , send you an email what you can use instead, with instructions most people cant do without an IT guy . It feel more like an open source than a true integrated service.

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

Initially it was difficult to manage the UI to the client, and then hard to change anything , unless you used the boring and too generic templates . Their template selection is very limited , that are basically all the same with different background images and colours . If you are unfortunate to have been a long-time client, you will have to completely rebuild your store, because old templates are not supported anymore

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

I would put 3dcart (now Shift4Shop) on the same level of AspDotNetStorefront. Its primitive, old hat, but still works. Lightspeed and Pinnacle cart are a little better, as they are a little more polished but also not as fine-tuned as an Enterprise System. Squarespace and WooCommerce are very simple to use, but also require some additional integrations to make fully functional. BigCommerce has most of the functionality built in for an ecommerce site, but comes with an enterprise price. If you're on a budget, you're better with going off something widely supported, but budget-minded.

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 have seen an increase in sales of 440% since starting with 3D cart.
• We find that the 3D features of promotions, coupon codes, rewards points all make customers want to come to us or come back to us.
• They made mobile conversion pretty easy, and our mobile traffic went from 33% to 54%.

Incentivized