Likelihood to Recommend Excellent for marketplace sellers with a lot of products - or those with a high turnover of SKUs. Not well suited to the small seller with only a few SKUs to promote. Also probably not suited to someone who only cares about a single marketplace. The real strength of it comes from managing multiple marketplaces through a single system.
Read full review Global Sites; larger commerce organizations but not too large where the % rev-share would affect its feasibility in a feature comparison. Salesforce is rock solid in infrastructure and rarely has outages or issues; it scaled appropriately for holiday peak and was able to accomplish anything we put our minds to as long as we staffed development appropriately. The latter, however, is not to be overlooked. Developers are necessary and expensive.
Read full review Pros Complex, Yet Simple Navigational Interface: ChannelAdvisor is a beast, but navigating through their platform is relatively straightforward. The overall heirarchy is very well put together. One Feed to Rule Them All: With ChannelAdvisor, all we have to do is connect our inventory to their system once. Instead of having to construct and connect dozens of different product feeds to our internal inventory system, we simply connect to ChannelAdvisor and use the same single feed to build out all others' website templates. Product Mapping Made Easy: Mapping product attribute data across a multitude of unique online marketplaces and digital marketing sites can seem like a daunting task. ChannelAdvisor does a great job of simplifying this process, providing easy-to-understand and manage feed templates containing helpful descriptions and categorization. Business Rules and Lookup Lists: I use these all the time when "transforming" our raw inventory data to the specifications of any given feed. They are extremely helpful and super easy to build. Efficient Product Optimization: Instead of having to deal with the time-consuming task of making minute changes to thousands and thousands of skus, ChannelAdvisor allows you to automate these changes in a matter of minutes. It's much more scalable for our business. Read full review Traffic - When we have sales, our traffic will increase exponentially and their cloud can handle the huge uptick in traffic we receive without overloading our servers. Site updates - it continually monitors in the background for any upgrades or updates needed so we don't have to go in and do it ourselves. A real time saver! Integration - outside plugins and add-ons are easy to install with Salesforce commerce cloud as it allows a seamless integration of extra plug ins onto our site. Read full review Cons Lack of customization, documentation, tutorials, support for the premium webstore Lack of innovation. My client was told that the basic web store was being replace by the premium web store so they needed to upgrade. In my opinion the basic web store was actually much more flexible and robust than the premium web store. Now (it has been less than 2 years) they are making my client switch from the premium web store to "Shopify" and they are charging more money for this. My client was charged to upgrade each time and the process to upgrade was expensive, time consuming, and very convoluted. ChannelAdvisor needs to invest in their technology and migrate data for ChannelAdvisor changes technology. But the experience as an end user is very frustrating since the way of doing things keep changing and not always for the better result for the customer. Channel Advisor needs better support. Help Desk, knowledge base, etc. there are a lot of things you can do with ChannelAdvisor but it is my experience that nothing is very straight forward and there are many different potential problems you will run into and ChannelAdvisor points the finger at "Google" or "Amazon" or "Ebay" instead of helping solve a problem from end to end. It is quite expensive for what it does. I would not have advised my customer to use their product but they were so entrenched that they had no other choice. Read full review The UX within the Business Manager portion of Demandware, the primary interface for marketers, is generally a confusing, inconsistent mess. Particularly infuriating are the lack of consistency for search and sort behavior within the tool. A number of useful features, such as the ability to set schedules or tie features to unique customer segments, have seemingly arbitrary limitations imposed. Demandware's idea of leveraging the community to be a learning resource and a sounding board for new ideas and features is a nice theory, but in practice it doesn't work for businesses with a lot of customization. I'm left with the impression that individual support is not a priority. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Without ChannelAdvisor, our business wouldn't be where it is today so the idea of NOT renewing is out of the question. By not renewing we would have to hire more employees and have more of a workload for existing employees. By keeping costs low and employees effecient we have been able to grow exponentially.
Read full review A huge factor influencing our decision to remain on the Demandware platform is that our new parent company is standardizing all its luxury brands in the US on it. We are fortunate. However, even if we had remained an independent company, I believe we would continue on the Demandware platform for all the reasons outlined in this review. I appreciate the stability the platform has provided to our eCommerce site in the last three years as well as the continuous improvements and technological advances being rolled out that will allow us to keep the site fresh, engaging, modern and stable. I've heard many horror stories from colleagues on other platforms who struggle with the expense and complexity involved with making what should be minor and simple changes and updates to their sites.
Read full review Usability Overall it's going great. Hoping it can reach very good heights soon.
Read full review Reliability and Availability We have only had one instance where the platform went down in the time we have been using it.
Read full review Support Rating They are very responsive and a support technician will be assigned quickly. Even if there is further clarification needed for the ticket, or a solution is not immediately available, you feel that someone is there and staying on top of the issue. Most common issues are resolved quickly and satisfactorily.
Read full review In-Person Training The in-person training was thorough. Trainer was pretty dry, but covered everything really well.
Read full review Implementation Rating Better control of scope between the resources on both sides involved would allow for better change management.
Read full review Implementation went fairly smoothly.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Our brand is growing online at a rapid clip, and we wanted a platform that would scale accordingly. The feature that really sold us was the automatic workflows. If we want a certain type of product that's going to a customer in a certain state to ship a certain way, we could make that happen automatically without any human touch! Wow!
Read full review When I think of
Salesforce products, I sometimes think of them interchangeably as one big lump. It's hard not to be incredibly immersed in the ecosystem day in and day out and taking advantage of resources like Trailhead. While Microsoft Dynamics compares in quality and offerings, it doesn't offer the same engagement and resources as
Salesforce in its communications, social, and marketing, which makes a difference in terms of relevance and help. Commerce Cloud comes with the support you need to succeed and the tools you need to grow. In a high demand consumer world, we need products like this to keep up and get ahead. The minute we catch up, we're behind.
Salesforce helps you stay on pace and create the unique and personalized experiences customers everywhere expect.
Read full review Return on Investment We had zero ROI I found I found that 7 months into the contract we couldn't get NetSuite to connect with CA I believe they claimed they are fully compatible with SuiteCommerce. From what I've discovered it does not work. Read full review It created an impact on our processes greatly where we're now able to assist our users with lesser wait times and higher efficiency Content creation is very easy on the tool It also stores the versions of the processes making it easy to roll back a version if needed Read full review ScreenShots ChannelAdvisor Screenshots