Some Gains with EvolutionX But Support and ROI Still Lacking
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use EvolutionX to bring our in-store offerings online, making them available for delivery or in-store pickup. It's a vital communication tool for our customers, keeping them informed about new products and current promotions. Additionally, it allows customers to conveniently view and pay their orders, invoices, and statements online. The website enhances our professional image and builds customer trust—something that's increasingly expected in today's market.
Pros
- Easy use for those that have never built a website before.
- Pulls live data for pricing and stock qty from spruce.
- Someone from EvolutionX is assigned to the account to assist with questions and issues that might arise.
Cons
- More store themes or improved ability to alter the theme.
- Improved menu creation functions. Menus feel basic and hard to create multiple drop down menus from the menu bar. This would help better organize information for easy access to the customer.
- Make easy for store items to be pulled by google for googles online marketplace. We have found no way to get our items to pull in the google merchant center. Google has recently made some changes that have helped here but still a vast majority of items are not being pulled.
- We enjoy using groups and badges but it feels like unnecessary steps to get them all placed. Creating the group, then creating the badge seems like it could all be done in one area. It would be nice to be able to assign multiple groups to the same badge if needed.
- Configurable product groups and master products are also great functions but are time consuming to set up, it would be nice to see this somehow streamlined into one screen to get all set up. Currently you have to bounce between three screens just to get things working.
- Improved Product Management. Adding in a sequential edit function and easier filtering to find and isolate products needing to be edited.
- Move the "location" selection away from the top of the screen. This is lost to shoppers, they either are just not seeing it or it is not easy to understand that you click to change. I find homedepot.com places this right next to the search bar and that seems to be highly effective. It would also be nice to add the closing time for the selected location next to it as well, similar to how homedepot is doing it.
- Improve the shipping functions. This has been a difficult pinch point, really seems to be keeping people from pulling the trigger and ordering. We switched to a UPS api for a bit, but the rates where outrageous and way over what we actually paid. I am sure it comes to rate negotiated with UPS, but with many companies already offering pre negotiated rates we would rather opt to use an API from shippo or pirateship that displays already low rates. Being able to easily trim down your shipping radius would be nice. Store to door delivery we say 30 miles, but had to individually find and place rules for each zip - this seems like it could be better handled with a radius and a computer pulling the needed data for that radius.
- Don't automatically opt customers in for added paid services. I may not have the best understanding of this new ada requirement and this new audio thing but from what I read it seems everyone is automatically put on it and we have to get in and cancel in order to avoid the extra charge. This I dont even believe was sent in an email but only on the EvolutionX messenger. I will be honest, we deal with so many different messengers / social platforms that adding this in as the main point for communication does not work for us and will always be an afterthought. We do always have email open, this would be the easy way to reach the customer in my opinion.
Likelihood to Recommend
EvolutionX is great at getting a large catalog online in a hurry. Though the editing may take some time, the pull is a great feature to get you started. EvolutionX will give you the most professional looking site right out of the gate vs the competitors we have viewed. The person assigned to your account is a nice benefit and are very helpful and efficient this is an even bigger plus for those with no coding experience. EvolutionX may not be the best option for a small business, though the website may make you look like the big dogs it doesn't function as well yet. The cost of the service is high compared to what the customer gets from it after the initial set up and is the main reason why this isnt the best solution for a small business. It would be nice to see the price to be able to scale down or up in price with how well the site is doing after a set amount of time.
