SAP Commerce Cloud vs. Volusion

For a straight forward B2B shop with a simple frontend the whole SAP Commerce Suite is pretty robust yet fairly expensive. It is still not a true and full blown headless solution so if your enterprise is on a MACH strategy then this product would not be the foundation for it. If a company wants to build rich CX frontend experiences, then Spartacus is probably not the best and a custom frontend would be recommended, in that case you compromise on the advantages of a full blown solution from one vendor

Incentivized

For a small business in need of a few more tools than basic platforms, Volusion is a good option. However, if you want infinitely customizable [tools] or to have multiple integrations extracting your orders and products data, then Volusion is quite limited. Additionally, if you lack in-house development teams, Volusion is a good product that is friendly for users who are not necessarily tech-savvy.

Incentivized

• Centralized Data Management: SAP Commerce Cloud excels in centralizing data from various operational sectors, which is pivotal in the chemicals industry. This feature allows for better oversight and management of complex supply chains, regulatory compliance, and customer interactions. Having a single source of truth for crucial business data minimizes discrepancies and promotes informed decision-making.
• Real-Time Data Processing: The real-time data processing capability of SAP Commerce Cloud is invaluable. It aids in timely adherence to regulatory changes and helps in meeting customer demands promptly. In a sector where regulations and market conditions are ever-evolving, real-time data processing is fundamental for maintaining compliance and ensuring customer satisfaction.

Incentivized

• Easy to Use. Non-technical employees can be simply trained. If you can use a social network, you can manage the backend of Volusion.
• All-In-One -- without any add-ons, Volusion is a turnkey solution for eCommerce. No programming knowledge is required, no modules are needed (unless you have very advanced needs), and it features everything from website text, products, email marketing, customer accounts, shipping calculations, and back-end payment and order processing.
• Allows for inventory tracking (such as Small, Medium, Large or Male/Female)
• Allows for kitting (creating product bundles, up-sells, add-ons, and more)
• Easy to customize -- with a little HTML knowledge, you can easily customize the free templates included in Volusion to create a personalized, dynamic web presence without the need for hiring expensive designers
• Provides a great experience for the customer. Everything from search results, product display, shopping carts, wishlists, and the actual order process are delivered in a professional manner that will keep your customer feeling confident about making their purchase.
• Easily integratable with Google Analytics with Sales Goal tracking -- this allows you to see where customers are coming from, what they are looking at, what they are purchasing, and when they are abandoning their carts.

• Some procedures in the CMS are usually very slow, specifically in the CMS Cockpit; I cannot use most of the templates or manage certain content. For this reason, I try to find other alternatives, but they are not as efficient as CMS Cockpit should be.
• There are some functions that are a bit outdated, more like the user interface; it is worth mentioning that this is a very important tool because it is the first contact that customers have with the software and the company as such.

Incentivized

• Feature implementation. While they have a ton of features, they're often released haphazardly in my opinion. Sometimes it seems like they don't have testers. Typically, I'm unable to use new features until about 6 months after they're released (and over a year after I asked for them) because it takes that long to get the quirks smoothed out well enough for us to use them. It seems that they often don't understand programs that they integrate with well enough to do a proper implementation.
• Timeliness of features. This can be taken with a grain of salt for many looking to compare. I'm a super-experienced user with many, many needs. We're often limited when it comes to Google (and other platform) beta programs, and even just early adoption because I have to wait for Volusion to catch up. What's tough is that I often NEED them to make a change in order for me to move forward, it's not my own limitation (but that's what you can expect when you use a third party software to run your site rather than your own team of developers).
• Customer service in regards to live chat. While I LOVE that they have live chat (I'm needy, I constantly need support) - the operators are rude 75% of the time. They come into the conversation assuming I have no idea what I'm talking about and have a 'customer's always wrong' attitude. I'm sure it's frustrating to deal with ecommerce customers who don't know the first thing about websites - but I'm not one of those and I deserve respect. Our conversations nearly always begin with "Clear your cache" and "I don't see the problem" from the operator and end in "Oh, you're right. Well I don't know." from them. I will say I've dealt with one or two who actually know what they're talking about. Live chat is useless when the operators know less about the software than I do.
• Slow to updates. They are often way behind when it comes to development and code. Example: They use jQuery v 1.4. We're up to 1.10 now and I'm experiencing issues for which the blame has been passed back on to me. I'm keeping up. They should be too. For me personally, the quality of development should come first. THEN worry about all of those features.
• New live editor. It's seen a lot of scrutiny, which you'll find easily by Googling. My problem is that I don't need a WYSIWYG. I write in html. You have to pass through the WYSIWYG to get to the html editor. This has caused my javascript to get executed, so once I get to the html editor, I have to re-write my script because it's now shown as the execution. That's poor development. They should have an option to disable.
• Inability to access pages in FTP. If you are someone who needs customization and writes in html, have fun. You can't actually access your product or category pages unless you do it through the content editors. You can absolutely access & edit your template and css files. But if you need a unique header in a product page - say a script to run, you'll have to put it in the template - adding overhead to ALL of your pages. The only workaround is hard-coding pages as "articles," which can make a mess of things.

I truly enjoy leading Hybris development projects and participating in new feature development for the platform. I see huge potential for growth and hope to be instrumental in bringing Hybris to the bleeding edge of presentation layer technology.

When you spend so much time with a product like this and not only have you witnessed its growth, but you almost feel like you are next those that make the decisions of building features a certain way, you can't help but want to stay and be a part of their continued growth. It's simply a great product. Can it improve? By all means! But it will only improve because of users and avid resellers like me.

Besides SmartEdit and Product Catalog, the rest of the application is very good. Including the customer support in case of a need. There are 3rd party offerings for a better content management or Product Management but these not only require additional expensive licensing, they also bring additional development efforts and dependencies to external companies

Incentivized

I know what to do to add a new product, promotion or do an analysis of sales.

Incentivized

We have the right to open a ticket or submit request to SAP support teams for all the problems we have experienced. They also provide solutions for critical issues within 48 hours. In addition, the product has support documents such as a user guide and admin guide. In addition, there is a strong community of users. In this way, we can access solution of some specific problems that we have fallen on from there.

Incentivized

You have to wait on hold for at least 45 minutes every call—the tech support person never knows the answer right away so they put you on 10 minute holds only to come back and say they're still looking for answers. The chat function could take days to get a response. Our "Dedicated Account Manager" never checks in or answers, nor are they ever in the office when we call. It's like they try to be as unavailable as possible until you forget why you even called in the first place. Insane.

Incentivized

Scalability of the product was good Seamless integrations were helped in reducing the implementation for the development team to integrate with the SAP ERP Product framework helped customer to customize and adapt the new features which were developed basis business processes and ease of customer experience. Deployment and creation of the build becomes very easy with the CCv2 setup.

Incentivized

It is best to use the built-in features and recommended services for the most turn-key experience (ie. Skipjack for payment processing so that it can all be done from the Volusion backend).

We selected SAP Commerce Cloud over Spryker because SAP Commerce Cloud offers more robust and comprehensive capabilities that align with our business needs.We already had a team who was skilled in hybris (old SAP Commerce) and experience with hybris in the past was good

Incentivized

I've also used Shopify as a base platform, as well as Magento. Both are better. My company has looked into moving there twice since I've been here, and the only thing stopping them is the complications of making such a move. I think Shopify offers similar value for the money with a cleaner albeit more minimalist look. Both are better options in my opinion. I would only recommend Volusion if someone had used it before and doesn't plan on making it a crucial part of their business plan.

Incentivized

Its easy to update my catalog and inventory. I have added more SKUs and expanded to international shipping. My items resonate to worldwide markets and I now have the opportunity to sell to them. SAP Commerce Cloud should allow me to scale the company and really touch worldwide. I may also add other products to the portfolio.

Incentivized

• Order value has increased, sales volume has increased, and IT costs have been greatly decreased.
• Infrastructure costs are decreased since human work is eliminated, saving time and energy; order values are also raised as a result of smooth and effective storefront administration.

Incentivized

• Increased product database efficiency. It's really easy to import and export products/categories. Has likely saved us hundreds of hours.
• Integration with other platforms. Integrations with comparison shopping feeds, email auto-responder tools and fulfillment tools is quite easy. This saves us on the cost for custom integrations.
• Because it is a hosted solution, Volusion takes care of all the PCI and other security compliancies. Not having to monitor this and update ourselves saves money and gives us piece of mind.

Incentivized