TrustRadius Insights for Optimizely Commerce Connect are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Ease of Use: Users have found the platform easy to use for various tasks such as Job Management, Contact Management, and User Impersonation. This has ultimately saved them significant amounts of time and money. For example, users have mentioned that the intuitive interface allows them to quickly locate essential features without extensive training or support.
Reliability: Reviewers appreciate the platform's reliable uptime, ensuring uninterrupted access to critical features. The intuitive user interface further enhances efficiency in performing tasks quickly and effortlessly. Some users have specifically noted how the consistent uptime has prevented workflow disruptions and enabled them to meet deadlines effectively.
Integration Capabilities: Customers value the platform's seamless integration with other systems like ERPs, PIMs, CRMs, and MAPs. This integration ensures a smooth customer experience by streamlining processes across different platforms. For instance, users have highlighted how easy it is to connect Episerver with existing systems, resulting in enhanced data flow and overall operational efficiency.
We are a large ISV, implementing Enterprise Level Commerce Solutions on the Optimizely Commerce Connect Cloud platform. Our implementations range from national to multinational retailers and services organisations in a wide range of industries such as Medical, Energy, and Heavy Industry.
Pros
Product catalog management
Product integration
Extensible Web UI
Cons
More out of the box integrations
Likelihood to Recommend
Middle to large companies with a build budget of 1mln+. Customers requiring integration with CRM and ERP systems, or highly tailored UX.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
Optimizely is used as our CMS for managing contacts and products and for displaying our web catalog and processing transactions. It takes in data from both our ERP system and our PIM system. We also utilize it for managing, implementing, and connecting our Punchout System. We have automated SQL api jobs that run to connect up our CMS to our ERP/PIM
Pros
Job Management
Contact Management
User Impersonation
Cons
Product List Management
Brand vs Manufacturer vs Supplier Management
Likelihood to Recommend
Optimizely works great for systems that will work alongside a PIM that have product catalogs of 2 million SKUs or less. The ability to connect Optimizely to PIM systems and ERP systems using jobs and then easily diagnose and troubleshoot those jobs is a strength of the system. Businesses that house over 2 million SKUs or that do not have a PIM system may find that the solutions are not for them.
Optimizely Commerce Connect is a great digital experience platform (DXP) that enables companies to create a digital-first environment by combining commerce and commerce. Whether selling products or services, Optimizely Commerce Connect provides tools for marketers to manage and update a site, leverage tools to drive personalization, and grow sales.
Pros
CMS
Shopping cart
Customization
Personalization
Cons
More out-of-the-box features
Likelihood to Recommend
Great for B2C and B2B solutions when trying to develop specific business rules. The tech stack, combined with a good partner development firm, will help companies hit their desired solution. It comes standard with search tools and the ability to tie into personalization tools. The ability to tie into other modules or platforms gives it a leg up compared to competitors.
We are using Optimizely Commerce Connect to manage all of our websites across the company. It has been great and easy to organize when working across different brands/websites.
Pros
Easy to use
Easy to upgrade
Saves us time and money
Cons
I don’t have any at this moment.
Likelihood to Recommend
Optimizely Commerce Connect is ideal for any business or company looking to centralize their digital needs.
The console is being used to consume our PIM data and display it on 2 different websites (multichannel). The first site is B2B and has been live for almost 2 years, the other is B2C and will launch in the next couple of months. Optimizely Commerce Connect also pulls in pricing and other elements from the ERP to display on the website and aid in the order-taking process.
Pros
The uptime appears reliable.
It provides an easy plug-in for AD 360-spin images.
The UI is intuitive.
Cons
Media library search in the console is impossible as it times out.
Error report email needs to give detailed information as to what the exact error is upon job failure.
Better handling of large amounts of data coming in from the PIM. 50k XML files a night is not usual, but it does happen on occasion. It just happens when you have 400k SKUs. Data clean-up is ongoing.
Out-of-the-box solutions for cross-selling, replacement parts, clearance, overstock, was/now sale pricing should be considered as a site is brought online instead of treated as an 'enhancement'.
The ability to consume category, attribute name, and sort order info provided from the PIM should also be an out-of-the-box function and not a 'future enhancement'.
The settings have to be the same for products on both channels, which is not ideal!
Likelihood to Recommend
Our experience may be unique because we opted for an Optimizely team to implement our website/console set-up and connection to our PIM and ERP. The experience may have been different with a 3rd party or it may not have. That said, we have been live with our primary website for almost 2 years and I still do not consider it was ever "done". We have been going back and forth on functionality issues and bugs since launch. I have low confidence that changes made the previous day will 100% be online the next - so my team rechecks the work they did the previous day to ensure everything is online. The addition of a second channel and enhancement requests have compounded the issues. I feel this product would work fine with singular or less complex market SKU offerings.
VU
Verified User
Strategist in Product Management (501-1000 employees)
Optimizely Commerce Connect is used by the company to publish catalogs/products to be sold on the B2C market.
Pros
Bulk updates
Related items
Variants
Warehouse management
Cons
Product search in a catalog
Products without variants
Likelihood to Recommend
With Optimizely Commerce Connect, adding catalogs/products is very easy to do. Products are easily translated. I would love to see a search engine in the Catalog UI.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (51-200 employees)
Optimizely Commerce Connect is the platform upon which we have built a direct-to-consumer eCommerce website. It represents our brand to the end consumers and also facilitates the sale of products. All departments within the organization have a stake in the platform, but the primary interactions are within the Digital Marketing team, IT, and Product. Optimizely has given us an excellent balance between out-of-the-box functionality, and customization opportunities, which together allowed us to produce the eCommerce site we envisioned at an efficient pace, and to maintain and expand it on an ongoing basis.
Pros
Building blocks: develop in reusable pieces, rather than developing every page individually
Dynamic capabilities: data-driven and dynamic generation of content, rather than static
Headless platform: integrating with other systems and channels is easy.
Cons
Promos out-of-box capabilities are limited.
Catalog audit history could be expanded.
Talent pool for development could be expanded.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Vice-President in Information Technology (201-500 employees)
Optimizely Commerce Connect was brought in to replace our previous CMS. It was used largely by the eCommerce team as well as marketing, analytics, and SEO. Optimizely Commerce Connect gave the e-commerce team more freedom to make content changes on the website that previously had to be coded through IT.
Pros
Personalized CMS experience based on company's needs.
Easy to make content changes and updates that did not have to be coded using HTML.
Cons
It was a difficult platform to learn and get used too. This could just be because we customized the tool a lot for our own use but some things related to my role in particular with managing products would actually take me longer to complete than in our previous CMS.
We weren't able to schedule ahead past one homepage change.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Optimizely Commerce Connect works better as a content management tool for websites that are more editorial versus in the retail field. Managing a large catalog of products was difficult in the tool because it was a very slow process to load everything and using the search tool didn't help very much. I was with Episerver for about 2 years before moving on to a different company but during this time we weren't able to completely transfer from the previous CMS to Episerver due to technical issues.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Product Management (201-500 employees)
As an agency Episerver Digital Commerce is one of the many platforms we recommend and implement. It addresses the need for a commerce platform with strong CMS capabilities.
Pros
Content management.
PIM-like admin screens.
Reusable asset management.
Cons
Simpler import functionality (look at PIMcore/Akeneo for examples).
Break out of the very limiting page tree model. Look at Sitecore's use of placeholders to decouple content and presentation. Also more content types than just pages blocks and media.
More DAM integrations.
*well documented* web APIS to support headless.
Likelihood to Recommend
Suitable for a e-commerce site with a reasonable # of skus (<10,000) and non-technical product information managers. Less appropriate for more than 10,000 skus, complex import mappings.
We are an Episerver partner and implement both CMS and Commerce solutions for clients and provide consultation services regarding the product.
Pros
Integrates with a top class CMS system.
Has easy APIs for implementing complex solutions.
Great platform for creating great UX solutions for visitors - performs well and is easy to implement a great website for visitors.
Integrates with many other Episerver products (Find, Campaigns, CMS, etc)
Cons
The UI is slowly being rebuilt into the main Episerver UI - there are still many features that require use of the old Commerce Manager UI which feels very outdated and is a poor UX.
Some confusing API's that allow developers to get confused - some API's are oddly split up which leads to confusion of what other functions might exist.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for a large majority of B2C and B2B websites. There are not many reasons not to use it unless there is something extremely unconventional with the proposed solutions product/order/inventory/pricing/promotion handling.
