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IBM Digital Commerce

Score9 out of 10

22 Reviews and Ratings

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What is IBM Digital Commerce?

IBM Digital Commerce is an e-commerce platform that is designed to deliver omni-channel shopping experiences, including mobile, social, and in-store. In June 2019, IBM Digital Commerce was acquired by HCL Technologies.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features IBM Digital Commerce has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 22 ratings of IBM Digital Commerce's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Product catalog & listings

    Products are easy to browse; listings include descriptions, photos, 360-degree views, and/or videos.

    Category average: 8.3

  • Product management

    Product catalog can be easily updated.

    Category average: 8

  • Bulk product upload

    Admins can upload products in bulk using spreadsheets.

    Category average: 7.5

Areas for Improvement

  • Custom functionality

    Users are able to customize the functionality of their eCommerce operation with custom code or add-ons.

    Category average: 7.9

  • Order processing

    Includes tools or integrations for order processing.

    Category average: 8.2

  • CMS

    Beyond product catalog, includes basic content creation and management features such as blogging capabilities.

    Category average: 7.3

Reviews

What users are saying about IBM Digital Commerce.
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WebSphere Commerce developer since the beginning!

Incentivized
Joel OngView profile
WebSphere Commerce Consultant in Information Technology at Zobrist Consulting Group, Inc. (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Scalability. Since WebSphere Commerce is based on WebSphere Application Server, it's fully scalable just like WAS.
  • Support. Their support team is a pleasure to work with. They get back to you quickly and are knowledgeable of their product, so I learn a lot from them about things that are not covered in detail in their documentation.
  • Robust. The software is robust once it's up and running since it depends on WAS.
  • Sample store & sample data. It's really fast to get a store up and running based on the sample store & data they provided.

Cons

  • Business tools are quite difficult to use especially for non-technical users. The steps involved in creating promotions or loading a catalog are often difficult for non-technical users to use.
  • Business tools are often very difficult to customize (Accelerator, Sales Center, Management Center). It requires a lot of steps [when] trying to make simple changes.
  • Being that WCS depends on WAS, it's always behind the curb from the latest WAS version.

Return on Investment

  • For our clients in the apparel industry, the flexibility that WCS provides to scale up really helped their online business to grow tremendously.
  • Our client in the restaurant industry can't quite leverage what WCS has to offer though as it doesn't really fit their shopping model.
  • Another positive impact is that it allows our clients to streamline their commerce system in interacting with their backend.

Other Software Used

WebSphere Application Server, DB2, VMware ESXi

IBM Digital Commerce at a glance

Incentivized
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Flexibility in the framework for customization and expansion.
  • Includes a great set of out of the box features.
  • Has a somewhat challenging technical learning curve for business users.
  • Quick turnaround time on websites.

Cons

  • IBM could benefit from a user community for ideation.
  • Customization still has some steep technical challenges if you want to make large expansions.
  • It requires a dedicated technical support team.

Return on Investment

  • We were able to roll out Commerce in record time thanks to a good understanding of the tool and our required processes.
  • We were able to roll it out on several websites in quick secessions due to the platform's features.
  • We were able to plan a solid road map given repeatable projects.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Other Software Used

Akamai, Amazon Web Services, Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS)

Review of Websphere commerce from a developer eye

Incentivized
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Websphere commerce provides efficient contract based pricing. Contract based pricing greatly helps in handling prices for different business
  • Catalog filtering is one other strength of websphere commerce, as it helps to filter the show only those products that the customer is entitled to
  • Extended site model is one other strength of WCS as it greatly helps in having multiple e-commerce sites for different demographics, for branding etc

Cons

  • It still uses EJBs, need to move to latest technologies for persistance
  • Promotion module customizations needs to more easy
  • Grouping of products based on the shipping methods/shipping dates etc functionality needs to be added

Return on Investment

  • E-commerce implementation using Websphere commerce greatly helped in increasing online sales
  • It greatly helps in building the brand value
  • Websphere commerce license cost is a bit high compared to other e-commerce tools

Other Software Used

JIRA Software, IBM Sterling Order Management, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System

Expensive but Stable and Dependable

Incentivized
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • WebSphere Commerce Payment plugin integrates well with third party payment processors for credit card processing.
  • The in build promotion engine within WebSphere Commerce can handle different types of promotions that a business decides to set up for the customers.
  • WebSphere Commerce is a robust eCommerce processor for B2B and B2C channel.
  • Order Capture / Order Processing available within WebSphere Commerce is highly scalable.
  • The Contract module available within WebSphere Commerce is very suitable for B2B channel.

Cons

  • The e-Marketing spots contain content associated with marketing activities to target customer segment - needs some improvement. The algorithm to set up the priority of each of the Web Activity with in eMarketing spot is little bit confusing.
  • The catalog load can be simplified.
  • WebSphere Commerce is a huge application - someone needs to spend at least 5-6 years to learn about the whole application.

Return on Investment

  • Performance/ highly scalable
  • Less down time
  • We process 100,000+ orders in a day during peak time

Very versatile and powerful commerce platfom for mid to large sized enterprises

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • The scalability and various configuration of the product allows a wide range of e-commerce site features.
  • It provides storefront to begin with so it helps speeding up development.
  • It provides supporting modules for admin use of the site management.

Cons

  • Moving forward with version 7 this solution is becoming more complex.
  • IBM introduced data service layer to access data which is more complex to understand and use.
  • Overall this solution takes sometime to be familiarize with.

Return on Investment

  • For sure increased employee efficiency when third party merchandising solutions are used.
  • It makes easy to maintain site with all available admin tools

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