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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.
customized recommendations reporting
Optimizely Commerce Connect's personalization

1 / 5

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

  • Branding

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

    Category average: 7.7

Areas for Improvement

  • 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

Optimizely Commerce Cloud

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

Optimizely is a powerful tool for scaling up your E-Commerce solution

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

An insiders look at Episerver Commerce

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)

Episerver, a legacy enterprise CMS/Commerce solution that needs to improve their technology and recommend more reliable and professional vendors

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

Epi Commerce rides the coattails of Epi CMS

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.

Alternatives Considered

Magento Open Source, Pimcore, Sitecore Experience Commerce, Sitecore Experience Platform, Sitecore Web Content Management, WooCommerce and SAP Hybris