IBM Digital Commerce vs. nopCommerce

I think WebSphere Commerce is well suited for customers looking to sell products online that need robustness and scalability as a priority. It provides a complete order cycle out of the box, or you can integrate with your existing order fulfillment. Online shopping models like digital subscriptions or a marketplace are not well suited as it requires a lot of customization

Incentivized

nopCommerce is an ideal solution for businesses that want to tailor the customer journey for discovering and purchasing products. The nopCommerce solution is designed to adapt to you, not the other way around. The platform works best when you partner with a solution provider like ourselves. It also works well if you have a team of in-house .NET developers. A one-person shop will likely find less value in a platform like this if they're looking to spin up a small ecommerce site with just a few button clicks.

• Websphere commerce provides efficient contract based pricing. Contract based pricing greatly helps in handling prices for different business
• Catalog filtering is one other strength of websphere commerce, as it helps to filter the show only those products that the customer is entitled to
• Extended site model is one other strength of WCS as it greatly helps in having multiple e-commerce sites for different demographics, for branding etc

Incentivized

• As I came from Microsoft .Net technical experience with more than 15 years in IT industry, the nopCommerce .Net based open sourced framework is the best eCommerce framework in terms of architectural perspective - such as incorporating with Entity Framework code first approach, Domain Driven Architecture, using ASP.Net MVC, Unit Testing, ...etc.
• When my client asked for an eCommerce portal, the whole team was struggling from designing a database to identifying the requirements. nopCommerce has everything we need. All the industrial standard eCommerce features are included. It saves hours of database design, application design and also the client's requirements are easily fit into nopCommerce's features.
• The cost of nopCommerce- the last time we paid was a $200 one time cost for using the production site. It was ridiculously cost effective. As it is opened source, the whole community is supporting and constantly making this framework better and better.
• I set up a web site within a week using nopCommerce to sell my own products online. It was so easy to use, deploy, and set up.

Incentivized

• The e-Marketing spots contain content associated with marketing activities to target customer segment - needs some improvement. The algorithm to set up the priority of each of the Web Activity with in eMarketing spot is little bit confusing.
• The catalog load can be simplified.
• WebSphere Commerce is a huge application - someone needs to spend at least 5-6 years to learn about the whole application.

Incentivized

• More community templates would be great.
• Some of the pricing can be a bit tricky, especially configured items... there is a likelihood of mispriced items with the current structure

Incentivized

The scalability and various configurations of the product allows for a wide range of e-commerce site features. It provides a storefront to begin with so it helps with speeding up development.

Incentivized

I have asked numerous questions and the team treats my random questions as if they are critical to the continued success of their product. They really take each users' questions to heart and strive to solve them. I cannot commend them enough on how fast they respond to questions as well as the follow-through given to things thay may or may not even be a part of their platform.

Incentivized

Go for a plugin based development if you would like to extend nopCommerce. This approach will make it easier for you to upgrade the software.

IBM Digital Commerce was a lot more customizable and had a good engine for us to make enhancements. We were not locked down to certain integrations and we were able to utilize a lot of the features outside of the box vs using a prescribed set of features and functionality that other tools would force us to use

Incentivized

NopCommerce offers you more flexibility where it comes to customization and scaling your application. The customization and extension is easy as well as the theme and plugin structure adds a large value to the overall system. The API's introduced by nopCommerce makes it more efficient when it comes to integrations and developing a mobile application on top of your eCommerce platform. The customer owns 100% of the source code without any extra fee.

• For our clients in the apparel industry, the flexibility that WCS provides to scale up really helped their online business to grow tremendously.
• Our client in the restaurant industry can't quite leverage what WCS has to offer though as it doesn't really fit their shopping model.
• Another positive impact is that it allows our clients to streamline their commerce system in interacting with their backend.

Incentivized

• It has been our sole platform for developing online stores for the last 9 years and our business have been growing year to year.
• The disadvantage of nopCommerce is that it is not as well known as other competitors, which makes it more difficult to sell.