Commercetools is generally a very flexible, smart platform for eCommerce business. It's an API enabled, cloud solution that makes integration seamless and quick to deploy. It's also a modern platform that utilizes API query languages like GraphQl. It lacks some functionalities in pricing and geographic variations of product portfolio but the platform is constantly improving and new functionalities are added.
Our experience may be unique because we opted for an Epi core team to implement our website/console set-up and connection to our PIM and ERP. The experience may have been different with a 3rd party or it may not have. That said, we have been live with our primary website for almost 2 years and I still do not consider it was ever "done". We have been going back and forth on functionality issues and bugs since launch. I have low confidence that changes made the previous day will 100% be online the next - so my team rechecks the work they did the previous day to ensure everything is online. The addition of a second channel and enhancement requests have compounded the issues. I feel this product would work fine with singular or less complex market SKU offerings.
Episerver has a robust discount engine. This engine, combined with "visitor groups" allow our marketing department to categorize customers and offer a variety of discounts to targeted customers at specific times.
Episerver has a full-featured, storefront experience that can handle everything you might want for an e-commerce website.
Episerver offers A/B testing that can be helpful for trying out new content ideas and tracking the results.
Pricing - Commercetools has pricing limitations with respect to customer/SKU combination. If an organization provides lots of custom/contract pricing for customers, Commercetools has difficulty mapping it in. They are working on this to make it more flexible.
Geographic variations in product portfolio - Commercetools has central product master that doesn't provide product activation/enabling based on different geographies/elevation/sales office structures. Some creative mapping skills are needed to overcome this limitation.
Data mapping limitations - Commercetools lacks in out of the box data mapping limitations to full fledged ERP platforms. Extensive data mapping workshops are necessary to fit the functionalities of an ERP platform from order, to delivery , to warehouse operations and billing.
Support. Episerver used to have direct support and access to the tech team to discuss and resolve issues. The new support portal is not enough for developer needs.
Quality Assurance. We find issues in the Episerver code that should have been resolved in QA before release.
Sales. Episervers sells the framework as a solution while showing Alloy. While it helps Episerver sell more, it puts the implementation partner into trouble as the client thinks they bought the solution. Episerver does not provide a solution. It provides a framework that you can build a solution on.
Really want to be able to spend more time and resources on rolling out new things with Episerver but at the moment we seem to be fixing alot of issues and pain points with the way our system was setup.
The administrative interface is largely intuitive and relatively easy to use. The complexity of business needs and ability to customize can affect this (i.e. you have to set up and develop with the user in mind), but the basic structure is largely solid. There are some areas of redundancy (such as Commerce Manager overlapping with other administrative areas) that can sometimes cause confusion or offer some functions in one place, whereas other related functions are managed on a completely different page.
We had an incredible team at Episerver Supporting us with the go live, reviewing our integration, and pushing our integration partner to deliver a quality product
Fully understand what is OOTB feature of the platform before proceeding to develop. Then implement a customization of key features once you can prove they are working as OOTB to make them more user friendly and productive for the business. Eg pre order and e gift card
Optimizely Commerce Cloud offers a very wide range of features for admin users. There is less a need for an IT specialist or programmer to be involved when changes need to be made.
