Ecwid allows customers the ability to create an online store to any webpage or social media profile. Boasting hundreds of thousands of merchants in 175 countries as users, Ecwid aims to provide everything needed to reach customers wherever they are: in-person, through a website, Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, or Google Shopping. In addition, Ecwid’s point-of-sale integrations, email marketing integrations, and dedicated mobile app allow sellers to manage marketing merchandising, and sales - any…
$5
per month
Intuit Mailchimp
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Mailchimp is an email marketing and marketing automation platform. Beyond just tracking how campaigns perform, Mailchimp takes it a step further by analyzing data from over half a billion emails to show why campaigns perform, driving informed decisions.
$0
per month
Optimizely Commerce Connect
Score 6.4 out of 10
N/A
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.
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 …
Ecwid is absolutely perfect for any business that is looking to start out with online sales and mobile point-of-sale. Many times, business owners may have limited experience in setting up a website or point-of-sale. Having to spend on this expertise with a limited budget can be frustrating. Ecwid allows you to have great results even if you are a novice.
For any E-commerce related needs, like you need to see a list of customers who have added products to cart but did not purchase, this can be done really easily, but if your e-commerce provider provides integration, then it is best suited. Most of the systems in the Market provide out-of-the-box integration. Their API is also very easy it can be integrated to any language. You can integrate it into your custom developed system and use the features, like adding customers to specific lists. Also, if your lists become really big, then their system can get a bit slow to respond via API, so you might need a strategy for how you are gonna fetch the data using API.
Our experience may be unique because we opted for an Optimizely 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.
Clarity - there has been very little confusion and need to reach out to Customer Support for help
Consistency - no big, crazy updates or changes have been made to the format of Ecwid during my time using it, so I know when I log in to preform my business tasks I can always locate what I need and accomplish what is at hand easily
Simplicity - everything is so clear and straightforward. It's like e-commerce for dummies.
Mailchimp allows you to manage your mailing list really well. You can subscribe people, unsubscribe people manage the mailing list directly into segments, and what not.
Mailchimp has features where you can create campaigns based on your mailing lists and send out newsletters to your subscribers based on a multitude of parameters that you can setup. Such as send email daily, weekly, monthly and they also have event based mails that you can send out.
Mailchimp also has a feature where you can design your emails. The look and aesthetics are very important when sending emails to your subscribers and all those needs are addressed here.
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.
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.
The value given by Ecwid is unmatched. When combined with the ease of use of the product, it is a no-brainer to continue to use the product. The only thing that could cause us to switch is if some feature we needed which is not available which is unlikely based on the feature list we reviewed when making the decision to go with them.
We've had Mailchimp for about ten years, I want to say. I started with the company about four years ago, and I don't see us ever diverting to another source. It's easy for us to use, and we have all our clients already built into the database. I imagine we'll use them for as long as we have the company.
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.
I gave a 9 instead of a 10 only because I haven't figured out a function or two. I believe it has less to do with Ecwid's overall usability and more to do with my own understanding and skill level, but regardless, it may also have something to do with the limits of Ecwid's functions.
The interface is a bit complicated, and I need to spend some time to learn new functions and understanding how it works. I don't like working with email templates because of the limited customization options. However, functions like AI for generating emails, segmentation, and analytics still work well and are very useful.
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.
I have, in the 4+ years that I've used Mailchimp, never seen an issue that restricted the use of their software/tools. I don't know of a single time when they're system crashed or went down. I could be wrong, but I honestly haven't experienced any issues with outages, errors or unplanned downtime
I haven't noticed any slow speeds from Mailchimp or their tools. I think the landing pages load quickly and look nice. The email reports and editing operates smoothly and doesn't take time to load. Additionally, when I use Mailchimp in conjunction with Zapier + Hubspot I don't notice any drag between any of these tools
I have always received the support I need in a timely manner. I enjoy receiving emails every week on trending business topics and new suggestions. They often serve as a reminder for me to include new e-commerce tools into our strategy. And I've always had great experiences with reaching out to the support team with specific questions.
Website tools were easy to use and understand so a novice can easily meet or exceed their client's expectations! Loved that we were able to totally customize so that the e-mail we created conveyed our client's overall messaging consistent with their branding! Client love that we can provide turnkey services to support their sales and marketing teams!
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
It's pretty easy to get up and running! There's a slight learning curve on a few things, but once you find where everything is located, you can import your list and send your first email. It really makes our clients feel great to see how quickly they can get that first email out.
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
We sell a product that requires certain controls to sell and most of the companies we researched had specific policies preventing us from selling on their platform. We aren't selling anything dangerous, they are parts of ammunition (the shell casings) and not entire ammunition rounds. Most other vendors restrict the sales of firearms and ammunition, but even when just selling a part used to create ammunition, we were still restricted. I'm not really sure why they restrict sales of products like ours from different vendors. Ecwid had no such restrictions and were happy to confirm that for us.
I don't think they are comparable; we use Google Ads to put our website at the top of the list when someone googles certain words. We use meta business to manage our social media. Google aims to gain customers, while Mailchimp is used to interact with both existing and new customers.
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.
Mailchimp over the years I've used it has grown in leaps and bounds. They have added so many additional features than were previously available. They are truly an all-in-one marketing platform now. If you're a small operation and just want to add email to your marketing efforts, they're there for you. If you're a larger operation and want to start sending postcard advertisements, they can do that. If you'd good with that and want to kick up your marketing by going social, you can do that on their platform. They are truly able to be as small as you need, but also get quite large in whatever it is you'd like to do through their system.
One of my retail web store clients was sending out email specials and notices about once a month. After clicking the send button, we would watch Google Analytics and the current site users would light up immediately. Often, the current site visitors would pop up to 20, 30 or more after the email was sent. On a normal day, seeing 1 or 2 online users would be OK.
Pretty much in all cases, we could see an uptick in positive activity after sending out a Intuit Mailchimp email to a list.
