ChannelOnline vs. IBM Digital Commerce

It would be ideal for a small solution provider looking for an entry level option to handle many of the company's functions at the same time. If customer relationship management, sales reporting, having a indexed eCommerce site, or having the ability to connect to 3rd party solutions is important to you; I would not go with ChannelOnline

I think WebSphere Commerce is well suited for customers looking to sell products online that need robustness and scalability as a priority. It provides a complete order cycle out of the box, or you can integrate with your existing order fulfillment. Online shopping models like digital subscriptions or a marketplace are not well suited as it requires a lot of customization

Incentivized

• Detailed product information
• Product reviews
• Supplier Relationships

• Websphere commerce provides efficient contract based pricing. Contract based pricing greatly helps in handling prices for different business
• Catalog filtering is one other strength of websphere commerce, as it helps to filter the show only those products that the customer is entitled to
• Extended site model is one other strength of WCS as it greatly helps in having multiple e-commerce sites for different demographics, for branding etc

Incentivized

• Sales Reporting Features
• Product Documentation and Training
• Customer Relationship Management
• Account Management
• Supplier Integration
• New Release Information
• Search Engine Indexing
• Custom Solutions

• The e-Marketing spots contain content associated with marketing activities to target customer segment - needs some improvement. The algorithm to set up the priority of each of the Web Activity with in eMarketing spot is little bit confusing.
• The catalog load can be simplified.
• WebSphere Commerce is a huge application - someone needs to spend at least 5-6 years to learn about the whole application.

Incentivized

Updates aren't valuable and don't see us ever being ahead of the competition with this solution. Feature enhancements that are released are just attempts to stay relevant with other ERPs in the industry. If you're trying to take your company to the next level this isn't going to be your solution unless you're a very small company

The scalability and various configurations of the product allows for a wide range of e-commerce site features. It provides a storefront to begin with so it helps with speeding up development.

Incentivized

The interface is pretty easy to use and get used to. It's the lack of account, product and customer management usability that hinders ChannelOnline

We are down for 5-20 minutes once or twice a month

Support Staff is very nice and friendly. Most are knowledgeable but other than phone support they're lacking in every category

IBM Digital Commerce was a lot more customizable and had a good engine for us to make enhancements. We were not locked down to certain integrations and we were able to utilize a lot of the features outside of the box vs using a prescribed set of features and functionality that other tools would force us to use

Incentivized

New features are released twice a year. Often these releases are fixing bugs and will rarely be an enhancement that will take your company to another level of effectiveness

• It handles most business functions so the value is definitely there.
• Account Management is really inconvenient and will cost you hours of pay if you're in a business with a relatively medium-high employee turnover.
• It won't easily integrate at all with your website.
• Lead Management is pretty much non existent.
• Quotes and orders are fairly easy to manage so employee efficiency could rise.
• Training and readily available documentation on ChannelOnline is weak. This is especially true for new features.

• For our clients in the apparel industry, the flexibility that WCS provides to scale up really helped their online business to grow tremendously.
• Our client in the restaurant industry can't quite leverage what WCS has to offer though as it doesn't really fit their shopping model.
• Another positive impact is that it allows our clients to streamline their commerce system in interacting with their backend.

Incentivized