Adobe Business Catalyst is an all-in-one cloud-hosted system for building and managing web content and online stores. It has a built-in CRM framework in addition to sales, service, and marketing features including eCommerce and Email Marketing tools. It is scheduled to be shutdown in 2021.
$10
per month
Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Bloomreach is a Commerce Experience Cloud, that aims to enable brands to deliver customer journeys so personalized, they feel like magic. It offers a suite of products that aim to drive true personalization and digital commerce growth, including: Discovery, offering AI-driven search and merchandising; Content, offering a headless CMS; and Engagement, offering a CDP and marketing automation solutions. Together, these solutions combine unified customer and product data with…
The service provision is good the accounts customer service is poor so I would struggle to give BC a better than average review, if only they could offer customers a better accounts service then the value would be much higher.
Bloomreach is a very powerful tool that is also easy to learn. The interface is very intuitive to work with for novice and advanced users. Most Bloomreach clients are ecommerce businesses, but the tool is also very suitable for a utilities company. Our main uses are making smart email and SMS campaigns to keep our customers informed and engaged.
Probably one of the easiest e-commerce platforms to work in, it does take setup, but compared to a lot of other e-commerce solutions, this is probably the best one that I have seen that can be designed and implemented custom.
Their template system works very well and allows you to create and re-use templates across Adobe Business Catalyst.
Their pre-built modules are great, giving people a great way to use common web elements without having to use a plug-in or find some solution, it is simply built in and generally works exactly as you would expect.
Adobe Business Catalyst is more of an all-around solution, providing elements that most smaller companies would have a hard time figuring out, since it includes the ability to build websites, send and track e-mails, analytics. It really is a powerful tool that would typically require a fair amount of coding knowledge and expertise but with the system already built, it can be easily modified and edited by those with limited or no coding knowledge at all.
All in one. We have experience working with other CDP/Marketing suites and it is really difficult to connect their different modules. Bloomreach Engagement has been built to be a single product which makes everything easy to use
Fast and real-time. Other platforms struggle with getting real-time volumes or segmenting based on real-time events, that is not the case with Bloomreach Engagement
GCP partnership. Being deployed over GCP and having BigQuery as raw data export makes really easy to expand and connect with existing stacks
Multi Client Management: The dashboard for managing multiple clients as a reseller is a little difficult to get to. There is also no very easy way for me to manage multiple clients at once. I have to log into and out of individual client accounts to do billing or management.
Lack of Server support: There are certain server protocols and languages that are not supported using BC. For example I cannot build a custom php database and upload to BC. I am required to use their tools.
Simplifying how data is presented, the dashboard can quite often be confusing. Having a more intuitive interface and the ability for different reporting would be beneficial.
I'd like more of an overview dashboard that I could build and access on the home screen, to look at top-level metrics.
Easier to use segmentation, and quicker to build features within.
Actually with Business Catalyst there is no renewal; once you are a partner, you are a partner for as long as you like. It is an investment in your business not simply a product you purchase...and as an investment in partnership with Adobe, both are committed to each other's success.
So far, Hippo is our ideal tool given its use of open standards which helps us to have a clear overview of what's coming next in the future Hippo releases. We are very confident in the future-readiness of the product
Overall it is a "plug and play" interface. The majority of the work is done in other software interfaces. Managing billing, user roles and custom reports are all that you need to manage in the actual BC user interface. For my business this is an incredible benefit as I have to leave my preferred software less.
In my time working with Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud, I always liked to work with it. It is crucial that you get support from experts from the beginning to show you how to work with the vast amount of options and activities to choose from. The learning curve is also well-rounded because of its user-friendly interface and highly skilled customer support.
99% of the time the site is available for when we need to use. With any cloud based software there will be occasion that there is an outage but this is communicated effectively and dealt with quickly. This has never got in the way of what we need to do in our day to day work and wouldn't be thought of as a problem
The search API is very fast (150ms), even considering we have nearly 2 million products in our catalog. The console pages where you do your configuration, add ranking rules and synonyms are sometimes a bit slower to load, but your customer would not notice any of that. The reports pages are also not the fastest, but definitely okay
The support provided by Adobe is excellent. Though the knowledge base, forums, blogs and online chat questions most all answers can be found. In the event that you are unable to find an answer or you have a unique situation simply post a question to the forums. These forums are regularly monitored by Adobe and its users.
Generally speaking, Bloomreach's support team is great. They go out of their way to come up with solutions and workarounds for problems or issues and then clearly present them. However, they can sometimes take a while to get back to us, plus some of their solutions are far from ideal and highlight underlying improvements that could be made to the product. They do seem quite receptive to this though and are happy to take notes from such interactions.
As far as the CMS for BC goes, there is none out there that compares. In the past we have utilized Joomla, Wordpress, Mambo, Drupal, Concrete 5 and others. None of them were as easy to use and train on that Adobe's Business Catalyst. Our alternative to BC is WordPress when our clients want a less expensive solution. For the most part that works OK but we have had issues with plugin incompatibility among other issues. We lost at least two clients because of similar issues. The other great part about BC's solution is that we can still work with our favorite site creation tool - Dreamweaver. The whole process continues to be more and more simplified with added features to the system. No other solution (that we've found) offers such an easy way to create custom web sites that are easily editable by our clients.
It's way more comprehensive than any other mail provider I've used and has a lot more functionality. A huge step change for our business that has brought us to the forefront of personalized marketing. Mailchimp is lightyears behind this approach in particular. The other two applications are actually part of Bloom.
Easy to use, very clear guides and instructions and available support. Omni channel marketings, everything is in one place. Better Understand and Activate Your Customers. It allows us to create personalized, real-time marketing campaigns that will drive real results. Get your hands on your customer data, then use that data to engage these customers with relevant and consistent messaging across all channels, at scale.
As someone who uses it on behalf of other clients, our ROI with BC is definitely positive. We needed a mid-range CMS without huge licensing costs to satisfy mid-range clients who have some dynamic needs but doesn't need the expense or liability of enterprise level products. Without it we would have lost possible customers or taken bigger hits on projects because of the costs involved with satisfying their mid-level needs
Our clients are all usually very positive about the BC platform and are able to use it themselves which lessens our Support time/cost.
To use the Web App element,. which we do on almost every site, you need to pay for the highest plan. This brings along with it many features most of our clients would never use. A more basic plan with that Web App capability would be a big improvement on our costs.
