Likelihood to Recommend If you're using the Adobe stack and tools to power your website, Target is a great solution to implement. I've utilized Target within two organizations, one running on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), and the other on Adobe Magento. I don't see how companies could harness the full capacity of Target without also having
Adobe Analytics integrated. This is their 'secret sauce' and might not be a good solution for companies who are invested in Google Analytics 360. Integration was straightforward but did require support from the Adobe team to implement successfully. While Target is a great tool for digital teams to support, you'll need your tech team aligned and available to support implementation.
Read full review Ultimately, if a company is looking for a solid industry-known E-Commerce system, Magento Commerce does exactly what it's intended to do. The headaches start when your company wants to start getting granular in customizations of the platform to meet specific business needs (which every company eventually has). This becomes a major issue down the road when trying to upgrade said customizations as the core software updates.
Read full review Pros This application gives us an incredible integration with Adobe Analytics that allows its operation to be the best and determine the performance of our website. It offers us an analysis based on user behavior and a web page customization option to adapt and meet the needs of those users. Read full review Magento Commerce Cloud allows us to develop our own custom solutions for problems that we need solved. Magento Commerce Cloud can also be integrated with many of the third part vendors that we use. This has made many implementations go very smoothly and tends to be much quicker than developing our own custom solution. There are many features available right out of the box. Many of them we have not implemented yet, but it is great to have them available to us when we are ready. Read full review Cons This is something a lot of testing tools struggle with, but I think the WYSIWYG ("What you see is what you get") editor - or Visual Experience Composer (VEC) in Adobe terminology - could definitely use some work. It's a struggle to execute many tests beyond simple copy, color, placement changes, and even the features that do exist are often clunky if not altogether broken. The interface itself can be a bit counterintuitive in certain parts. If you are familiar with other tools, it's likely middle of the road in this respect; think much easier to understand than Monetate for instance, but a far cry from the simplicity of an Optimizely. It can be a bit buggy from time to time. The worst example is the frequency at which the tool will fail to save due to an error, but not inform you of this until you try to save, at which point your only option is to log out, log back in, and make all of your updates once again. It can become an extreme pain point at times, and I personally have just gotten into the habit of saving every couple of minutes to avoid a massive loss of productivity. Read full review The platform is difficult to tune and can be slow. Even with expensive best in class hardware the platform performance can be an issue. Even with caching poor coding can lead to unacceptable performance and user experiences. The total cost of ownership for the platform can be quite high as a great deal of technical expertise is required to modify, develop, troubleshoot and maintain the platform. The costs of initial development are only a down payment on what a Magento store will cost. For mid size companies with substantial web revenues this can be overcome for smaller businesses the total cost of ownership may be prohibitive. Security of the platform can be an issue. Magento is often targeted by hackers and much of the security is the responsibility of the store owner. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have a team of people trained on how to use the application and it integrates well with the other Adobe products we use. Our future roadmap of testing will require some complex scenarios which we hope Target will be able to accomplish
Read full review Magento is well-supported by a big development team at eBay, which not only addresses bug reports very quickly, but also is constantly working on improvements to the platform. The wealth of Magento third party modules ensures that the platform will be up to date with future changes to Payment or ERP systems. Security is always a concern and with the Zend framework as a foundation, Magento has had very few security-related patches since I have started to work with it
Read full review Usability Can be difficult to learn, but once you understand Mboxes and the nuances of the system it's very user friendly
Read full review Magento offers lots of templates and themes to customize the look and feel of the store, and even optimize it for mobile phones. The have an extensive library of forms and templates.
Read full review Reliability and Availability i don't think we use the full functionalities of the tool, but to use the full functions, it's almost impossible (Too hard)
Read full review Performance The bottleneck is never the software program
Read full review Support Rating On several occasions, we have had the need to ask for help from the Adobe Target support team, and I must say that they have provided us with an excellent experience, as they take care of solving the problems quickly and with high precision
Read full review The technical service was impeccable. They were on point and were very knowledgeable.
Read full review In-Person Training The instructor that came to train us was awesome and this training was very useful. I would recommend it for anyone who is going to be using this software. I only mark it lower because it is an added expense to an already expensive product, and a lot of the training covered the "Target" portion of the software (which again, we didn't use)
Read full review Online Training The training was very easy to understand, however it would have been more useful to my development team than me. It was also primarily over-the-phone, which is never as easy to follow as in-person. We ended up scheduling and paying for an in-person training session to supplement the online/phone training because it wasn't helpful enough.
Read full review Great value for an flexible, open source platform.
Read full review Implementation Rating Implement using a global mBox on the page so you can change any and everything over the traditional method. Traditional method is good if you do not have technical web dev resources, do not know Javascript/jQuery, or you have money to blow on mBox calls. Global deployment reduces mBox calls and allows you to touch many parts of the page easily. A lot more customizable
Read full review Alternatives Considered We seriously considered another software but because we use so many other Adobe products this made the most sense for us. If you are not dependent on other Adobe software and are a smaller company, in my opinion, Target may not be the best fit.
Read full review Magento scales much better than any of the other software when it comes to very large e-commerce websites. But all the other options are more user-friendly for smaller sites as there is a bit of a learning curve in learning to manage Magento. Customization is better along with
WooCommerce and
OpenCart as self-hosted solutions vs.
BigCommerce and
Shopify which are hosted. Magento should be the first choice for large, extensive e-commerce solutions,but for smaller stores, I would recommend the others first.
Read full review Return on Investment We have been able to run specific A/B tests that have shown an increase in conversion, which in turn has led to very large banked sales numbers for the year. We have been able to prove that using and automated Merchandising process did not decrease conversion. This allowed us to greatly increase efficiency by opening up resource time. Read full review Magento definitely lets us get a return on our investment. Because we have developers who can customize Magento to our needs, we have been able to create a beautiful and effective website, run promotions, and serve up customized product display pages that are effective and beautifully branded. Magento has also caused a lot of time to be invested in doing something that seems simple, but without a lot of knowledge, end up taking far more time than could otherwise be better-spent. We have had to outsource some of our development work due to Magento being developer-focused rather than marketer/merchandiser-focused. I've used other website management software that is comparable to Magento's capabilities but is far easier to use, that even someone like me (with basic HTML/CSS skills) can customize the front-end without requiring a back-end developer to intervene. Read full review ScreenShots