Digital River vs. Magento Open Source

Well suited if you are wanting to implement a solution with minimal staff or resources to support a large project such as E-Commerce software delivery.

It's well suited for large eCommerce stores as it requires much effort to set up and the development cost for setting it up is high. It's less appropriate to use Magento where you are looking for quick development and launch of the store. Also, it is required to have a developer or sometimes the entire tech team to manage an e-commerce store, so you may need to hire a few PHP developers.

Incentivized

• Digital River's email marketing arm has always been top notch. They are very connected with their customers, quick to alert us to any problems they are experiencing and respond if we bring something to their attention.
• The Global Commerce platform has grown leaps and bounds in the last few years. Its great having a cloud based ecommerce platform that can be accessed securely from any computer in the world.
• Worldwide payments continues to be a Digital River strong point. They are continually investigating and and doing the work necessary to new countries and locales to their platform.

• Magento is perfect if our web design client likes a specific pre-made template and wants a fast solution.
• Magento allows us to customize its open-source code to create additional features and functionality.
• Magento saves small businesses time and money if they only need a simple solution.

Incentivized

• Their flexibility and customizability are lacking. Changes to our cart or store require a lot of lead time discussions and development time.
• They have many strange UI implementations for things. One search bar is a wildcard match, while another is a string match. One setting might break your product, or be editable once, but you cannot change it after that one time.

Incentivized

• Not the simplest of solutions to use or maintain from an end-user perspective
• Other platforms are better with regards to SEO in our experience
• Fairly sluggish and slow compared to other platforms without the correct server specification and performance optimization work.

N/A I wasn't the person that implemented or recommended Digital River. But from an eCommerce standpoint I liked the organization overall and would recommend it.

It's the dominant force in the SMB open source market. With the continued support of eBay/PayPal, Magento will continue to evolve and should be a market leader for some time.

We evaluated our ability to expand internationally with our current e-commerce platform and decided we could get to market faster with Digital River

In looking at a different platform to migrate to from Magento 1, we looked primarily at Big Commerce, Shopify and Shopify Plus. Our host was very negative about Magento 2, but we determined after a couple years it was due to the fact it had even more complexity (and very different) than Magento 1. Shopify Plus was attractive, but the cost factor for two sites led us back to Magento 2.

Incentivized

• Definitely positive impact in local markets
• Positive impact in email marketing
• Some positive experience with tailoring it for our business objectives

Incentivized

• Delays in development leads to missed timelines and opportunity loss.
• High cost of development and maintenance may currently outweigh the growth.
• Better handling of customer and order information makes for better customer service.
• Excellent API has been a boon for integration with our ERP

Incentivized