CommerceV3 is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that will both build and host store platforms.
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Duda
Score9 out of 10
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Duda, the eponymous platform from the company in Palo Alto, is a web design platform for companies that offer web design services to small businesses. The company serves customers from freelance web professionals to digital agencies, all the way up to the large hosting companies, SaaS platforms and online publishers.
I believe CommerceV3 (CV3) is best suited for small to mid-level catalog companies. You would want to make sure to integrate CV3 with your back end system or you'll be doing a lot of manual entries or manipulating data for table uploads. You can easily manage the templates in CV3 with a basic knowledge of HTML and work up from there
Duda is great for agencies. There is a good client management area. It's even good for small businesses. They can choose a template and build out their own site. It's easy to customizes a website from a barebones template. There are many customizations in the each widget. The pricing is good for all size businesses. There is no tech headache with updates and backups.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
CV3 provides us a plethora of marketing tools to customize offers and campaigns to our customers. I've used BigCommerce and Shopify and neither comes close to the capability of fine tuning sales, offers, and discounts by product, category, customer and more.
The purpose of partnering with any e-commerce platform is to provide a secure site and stable checkout process for our customers. CV3 has been amazing at keeping our site up and running through peak traffic and attempted hacks. The checkout process has been rock solid and also integrates seamlessly with PayPal. I've used Amazon Payments in the past without incident, but decided to end that option due to Amazon's policies.
CV3's architecture on the back-end is designed to be plain and simple which provides an easy-to-use interface to streamline our work. The template driven structure to manage the front-end will become a favorite for most programmers in no time at all. In fact, I'm not a programmer, but do customization and design changes almost on a daily basis with ease. Any changes made to a template may be viewed on a staging server before pushing live. Templates, as well as other data may be downloaded any time for backups. Exports and imports of product data is simple and powerful allowing me to change massive amounts of data easily.
Customer support is always a contentious issue with most providers, however, CV3 has by far been the best I've encountered in over 30+ years of experience with software vendors. They are very responsive and escalate the issue to the proper person without having the redundancy you experience with so many other companies. They understand the issue the first time, and tell you the truth.
Any e-commerce business is about shipping. CV3 has the most powerful tools to control shipping. It will challenge the most creative minds on how to best merchandise products based on weight, dollar amount, global geographical location, dimensions, category, exception rules, by carrier, all the way down to the sku level which can have it's own set of rules. It gets complicated, but it works great and ties in with the promotional features as well.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
An area I'd like to see enhanced is the sku level pricing calendar. You can set specials prices to start and stop at certain dates and times, but it's fixed to certain years. You can't have your chosen items go to seasonal pricing every year at the same time, you have to change the years each year.
There are multiple product setups: basic, parent with children, and sub-products. Each type exports on the same datasheet all intermingled and this can be tedious isolating the different types for editing and re-import.
Vendor and Brand are data points on each item, but they are not controlled by a table. We end up with the same vendor or brand misspelled multiple times.
There is no FTP capability (PCI issue?) and no blog site with the parent domain. These have to be handled using a separate sub-domain.
The shipping calculator for customers should be available anywhere there is a shipping option presented during checkout.
Faster live times. Currently, it takes about 5 to 10 minutes to see template/product changes pushed to the live cdn.
Again, this platform has to be one of the easiest web development sites I have ever used in my life. From creating pages to linking buttons, hiding pages, and more, it makes it so much easier to develop websites for clients, including forms and custom membership login portals. It really is the best.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
In my view, CV3 meets our needs better by allowing us a much easier way to manage the front end the way the templates are structured. BigCommerce recommended using an FTP tool to download, modify, then upload. Shopify has some very sophisticated templates, which, in my mind, required a senior level programmer or lots of outsourcing for even minor changes. Neither of the other systems come close to CV3's marketing capabilities through their promotional tool without any add-ons. Shopify, for example, is stripped down and if you want a certain feature you have to find one of their approved partners, sign-up, integrate the feature and hope it works. To purchase all the features we're currently using in CV3 you'd have quite a list (and expense) of partners. Examples would be enhanced shipping capabilities or the ability to customize a product purchase. CV3 has features specifically geared for a catalog company, like request forms and capturing key codes. Plus, built-in rewards program, wishlist, gift certificates, bulk email, and data feeds for Google Shopper, Channel Advisor and SingleFeed.
I can't speak to why my agency selected Duda, but I can say from personal experience that building a website in Duda is much easier, and backed by better support than any other website builder I've used. Duda allows me, as a web designer, to still create great looking and unique websites. I find that other platforms, while they may provide nice templates, make it very difficult to deviate from the guardrails they put in place. Through the years, even the most basic site that I've built in Duda is significantly better than those built in other platforms
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
One positive impact has been the use of product reviews. This feature has helped us weed out bad products and promote good ones while allowing customers to share their experience.
It's a fixed fee user agreement which favors increasing sales.
The stability of the checkout process has helped conversions and lowered support.
Having integrated inventory with our back end has helped meet customer expectations.
The promotional capabilities of CV3 has allowed us to provide new and different offers keeping customers engaged.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
