IBM Digital Commerce vs. Optimizely Configured Commerce

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

The eCommerce catalog side has a lot of benefits to it and has been much easier to work with and customize than the CMS side. It is this integration and using both for a branded marketing website that has the user journey from browsing and leading into the eCommerce side that has been the bigger challenge, outside of the overall stability of the releases with the bugs we have encountered. I think the solution is well suited if you are mainly a catalog site. We, however, sell machinery and solutions that are not sold via the eCommerce site and we need to showcase them on the website. However, we have a core industrial catalog of consumable products that support the machine and solutions purchases which are very well suited for the eCommerce catalog. It is the CMS/Catalog integration that has caused a need for more customizations to the platform and as a result increased costs to maintain, lowering our overall ROI from the solution. We are also a bit hamstrung by having to rely on our development partner to make changes that our digital agency is better suited to do for us in the CMS. It is requiring extra cost and resources as a result. If more functionality could be surfaced, it would be much better.

Incentivized

• 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

• Integration Jobs/Connections - Providing a good out-of-the-box solution to hook into ERPs and common endpoints.
• Design and Development Partner Network to work with - If you have customizations in mind, the Optimizely partner network will give you the chance to find a suitable partner to meet your needs.
• Good layout/flow/settings breakdown - There are a lot of "redundant" settings, but the more management access, the better.

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

• Need the ability to look at more of our user data
• Need the ability to refresh our sandbox environment with production data in quicker, more efficient ways
• Classic CMS is very limited in ways end users like myself can edit widget content

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

Quite flexible and easy to use for daily marketing user tasks, like updating page listings, promotions, and copy. More in-depth tasks like managing product attributes, rearranging product taxonomy placement, and CMS editing are not user-friendly and require a careful and detailed process to follow.

Incentivized

It's a mixed bag. The team has been very nice, but there has been an underlying feeling of condescension because we have complained or "caused trouble" over the inadequacy of the CMS component. Also, support for modifications or UI changes has been terribly slow. Understandably, COVID has made life hard for everyone, but there is an expectation that we complete our work immediately, but their team will "put it in queue" when we have a request or find a bug. Further, we certainly feel that we were sold a list of capabilities that we have not seen come to fruition. Finally, the change of ownership 3 times (Insite -> Epi -> Opti) over our implementation period has been both confusing and disruptive.

Incentivized

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

I was not very involved with this process. It has been 3 years since we made a decision and I can't even remember the name of the other companies we were considering. I was in a different role then so I was less involved with the eCommerce department. I do remember really liking the people we were working with. That played a huge role in our selection since we would be working with them for years on the site.

Incentivized

• 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

• Automation of updates and integration with ERP has saved time and provides reliable data for the website in sync with ERP
• Integration with external PIM has saved time and provides reliable sync with content data for the website. Changes and improvements have been slow and difficult.

Incentivized