CommerceV3 is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that will both build and host store platforms.
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Optimizely Commerce Connect
Score 6.5 out of 10
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Optimizely Commerce Connect is a PaaS e-commerce backend solution coupled with Optimizely's PaaS CMS to help e-commerce organizations, of any type, create highly customized websites and buying experiences with a two-in-one content and commerce solution.
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Pricing
CommerceV3
Optimizely Commerce Connect
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CommerceV3
Optimizely Commerce Connect
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
$1,995 per store
Required
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CommerceV3
Optimizely Commerce Connect
Considered Both Products
CommerceV3
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose CommerceV3
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, …
Alderich Web Solutions worked great for us however when it came to diagnosing and fixing issues with the website we had to rely on the support with little ability for us to "get under the hood" and look at the issue for ourselves. After switching to Optimizely, having this …
Stibo STEP MDM was a powerhouse. It seems we could do anything we could dream up, but we also had an in-house IT dev team to support it. The cost was the reason we went with Optimizely Commerce Connect. We did not explore HubSpot for this project.
Optimizely Commerce Connect 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.
Optimizely is more flexible and more customizable, but also more efficient from a development standpoint. Salesforce Commerce Cloud has more capabilities but is more prone to become complex, and also generally more expensive. Magento is a comparable alternative but with less …
Just depends on the use case. Some clients are more heavily weighted towards a marketing CMS and don't need a ton of complex technical functions of their eCommerce platform. For these we recommend Episerver.
Episerver did not have a headless CMS offering when we implemented. They may offer one now, but they are very late to the game in offering an API-based CMS experience. If you use an Angular or React front end, and you want to communicate with this incredibly expensive product …
Episerver's plug and play architecture is the winning factor comparing to AspDotNetStorefront. We did not choose Magento because it was not built on .Net.
Coming from a Software Engineering background, Episerver was the preferred system as it was an attractive platform from a developer's point of view. Today, I consult solely on Episerver solutions and still prefer the platform for multiple reasons (some already covered earlier …
Episerver was by far the most user friendly content platform allowing our business to easily manage the content with ease resulting in an overall productivity increase and time for the team to spend less time doing content management and more time managing the personalization …
During the evaluation, Episerver was by far the most flexible as far as features and implementation go. Some of the more SaaS-based products don't allow for the level of customization needed for our clients, clientele. While the other platform boasted similar features, they …
Overall, Episerver seemed easier to use from a user perspective and easier setup. There was also preexisting resources with Episerver experience. Factoring in costs it became an easy solution.
I did evaluate other products in addition to Episerver. The other finalist was Magento, which has a very robust cart and a large market share. I have used that platform in the past and overall had been happy with it's performance. I ultimately selected Episerver because it was …
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
Very strong fit for mid-sized organizations that need more flexibility and customization as compared to canned or template-based offerings, but also want the efficiency and externalization that comes with a pre-existing, cloud-hosted platform (as compared to a full custom offering). Works well with a PIM and more mature catalog data in order to fully leverage the dynamic data capabilities.
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.
Web content management -- the interface is drag and drop and makes it very easy for business users to create product pages.
In site search with Episerver Find -- it is easy to promote attributes and make quick tweaks to fine-tune results.
Integrate with other systems -- we have integrated with our ERP, our product information management system, our digital asset management system and our marketing automation system to take advantage of investments we have already made in content and customer data.
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.
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 job functionality is one of the strongest benefits Optimizely offers. It allows a savvy user to quickly go in to a given job, see the job history to find errors and then even take the steps of a job, copy the code and paste it back into your source to diagnose a potential issue.
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
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.
Stibo STEP MDM was a powerhouse. It seems we could do anything we could dream up, but we also had an in-house IT dev team to support it. The cost was the reason we went with Optimizely Commerce Connect. We did not explore HubSpot for this project.
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.
