Optimizely Commerce Connect

Score6.1 out of 10

53 Reviews and Ratings

What is Optimizely Commerce Connect?

Optimizely Commerce Connect is a PaaS e-commerce backend solution coupled with Optimizely's PaaS CMS to help e-commerce organizations, of any type, create highly customized websites and buying experiences with a two-in-one content and commerce solution.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

the customizable checkout workflow, used to tailor the customer checkout experience.

where catalogs, custom attributes, UOM, catalog restrictions, and multiple sites are managed at once.

an example of a personalized promotion based on user web activity, used to drive conversion and increase average order value.

Optimizely Commerce Connect's personalization

1 / 5

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
Branding
Storefront is part of a unified customer experience of the brand across channels (social media, physical store, website, etc.)
Category average: 7.7

Inventory management
Includes tools or integrations for managing inventory.
Category average: 7.7
Shipping
Includes tools or integrations for order fulfillment of physical products.
Category average: 7.7
Bulk product upload
Admins can upload products in bulk using spreadsheets.
Category average: 7.5

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Return on Investment

Customers achieve massive commercial advantage for using this platform

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Sitecore Digital Experience Platform

Jack Bland

Digital Data Manager at BlackHawk Industrial (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Return on Investment

Quick User Management
Quick Implementation for PIM Data
Ease of troubleshooting jobs

Usability

Chris Osterhout View profile

Vice President of Business Strategy in Professional Services at WSOL (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

It integrates extremely well. It is very uncommon in today's digital ecosystem that e-commerce platforms stand alone. Most of them are ERPs, PIMs, CRMs, MAPs, etc., that power them. Episerver is built to allow for this level of integration and it makes the experience for the customer seamless.
It's pluggable. Unique to Episerver is the ability to tack on their other SaaS products with ease. If you want to add AI, you simply plug it in and it simply works.
It's fast. WIth eCommerce, speed is of the utmost importance. If the site is slow, users will abandon.

Cons

APIs - Their APIs are improving and if you are utilizing Epierver FIND, it's like a dream to work with. If you are aren't, there is definitely some room for improvement under the hood.
Commerce Manager - this is a legacy part of the product that is constantly being phased out (which is great). When it is gone, there will be a lot of happy folks :).
Developer documentation. As with any platform, this is an area that is continually being improved.

Alternatives Considered

Sitecore Experience Commerce and Oracle CPQ Cloud (BigMachines)

Tim Hardy View profile

Software Architect in Information Technology at Premier Designs, Inc (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

Episerver has a robust discount engine. This engine, combined with "visitor groups" allow our marketing department to categorize customers and offer a variety of discounts to targeted customers at specific times.
Episerver has a full-featured, storefront experience that can handle everything you might want for an e-commerce website.
Episerver offers A/B testing that can be helpful for trying out new content ideas and tracking the results.

Cons

Custom development with Episerver is painful. At some point, you will need to customize something Epi does or integrate with it in some way. This will be a painful experience. The codebase is poor. The entire EpiCommerce solution is untestable. It's not just difficult to create unit tests for, it's near impossible to create tests for any of your code that involves any of their code.
The database schema is obtuse. Dealing with epiCommerce database schema is very difficult and will be very costly the moment you need to integrate with it in some way. In addition, the epiCommerce database has very little referential integrity.
It takes a lot of work in order to get basic cms features working. Adding a page type, defining new content, adding a custom field - all of these things require code changes and server deployments. E.g. you have to create a new asp.net controller to handle a new content type. The admin interface will not present it otherwise.
The entire Epi system is designed for vendor lock-in. The old, obtuse codebase pretty much requires you to use a vendor to help with implementation. There is no concept of intuitive custom development and integration.

Alternatives Considered

nopCommerce and Umbraco CMS

Other Software Used

JIRA Software, Bitbucket, GitHub

Return on Investment

Our rocky implementation was very costly to our organization
The untestable nature of epiCommerce has cost us a lot in development time and fragile integrations
The difficult database schema has cost us a great deal of development time for maintenance and new feature development

Jared Wooden View profile

Technical Director in Information Technology at Wire Stone, part of Accenture Interactive (10,001+ employees employees)

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.