Demandware - the good and the bad.
March 18, 2014

Demandware - the good and the bad.

Kevin Daniele | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction

Demandware is our web platform on which we host our Magazines.com and Cleanerfilter.com businesses. It is used across the entire organization and give us the ability to change out products, influence promotions, and do A/B testing to see how our actions influence our customers buying behaviors. As a merchandiser, I have the ability to easily monitor product real estate and change out products based on customer demand. I do wish that the A/B testing platform was more robust.
  • Changing out Products. You are able to rank products by different categories, create new categories, and easily monitor how they are doing. This is great from a product merchandising perspective b/c you are really able to affect all the touch points from a sales perspective.
  • It does not play well with other applications. We have tried to implement a couple of tools (Ex: Qualtrics with Pop Ups), and the intricacies within Demandware make it difficult to combine these two
  • It is also hard to manipulate the banner spots without Development help. There are specific templates that you have to work with in Demandware. If you want to change anything about the template (Ex: Add a banner placement in the right sidebar), that requires dev code to implement.
  • I believe that with the team that we have in place, that we are able to work within the nuances of what Demandware presents, and it has allowed us to definitely improve our product merchandising plan. It has also given us some tools that allow our sales agents to provide the best customer service.
This is the first time I have had experience with a platform like this, so I do not have sufficient experience to compare Demandware to anything.
I think that it is a very time intensive program. If we are able to find a web hosting tool that allows us (the marketing team) to make easy changes to the templates to be more responsive, then we would definitely look into that tool. It just takes us so long to get things implemented due to the necessity of the development work.
I think it is key to understand your level of coding expertise or how big your development team is. If you are have little code experience or a small (or non existent) development team, then I would not recommend this program for you. It is a fairly high maintenance tool die to the fact that all pages have specific templates, and it takes a lot of work to change those templates out.