Likelihood to Recommend 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
Read full review In my experience, Podia has been well suited in every way! I am a small company with a couple of independent contractors, and I don't know how to build my own website. I am not very techy. I get lots of compliments on how my website looks! I have had some people support me with setting up my group emails for my email list and setting up automations, and these techy people complained that they needed to do more customization in the email formatting and programming, so I switched to
Mailchimp for those needs. Otherwise, I have been very happy with Podia and I am grateful to have a platform that offers so many services/features. It's affordable and user friendly. My clients and students are happy using it, too
Read full review Pros 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 Read full review Web Builder Storefront Digital course creator Bundling workshops/programs easy to update and add to my website customer service is awesome Read full review Cons 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. Read full review I sometimes wish there was more that I could customize on my website and digital programs I wish their email service (for broadcasts/group emails) had more features and customization I would like to use my brand font Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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
Read full review Kajabi had lots of features all in one place. I liked their digital course creator program. I liked the ease of their their membership site program/host, too. It had an app for my clients to use. There were some problems with not being able to customize the look of pages, but they allowed coding/programming if you had training, so I sometimes hired someone to do that for me. I couldn't figure out how to use their website builder, so I didn't do much there. When it came down to it, I could use Podia and it was cheaper and easier to use.
GoDaddy was my website host for a few years. I did a lot on there. It was my website builder and host and I liked it. It was easy to use. My website looked great. It had more features than Podia with blogging and connecting to social media. I had a storefront but it wasn't great for selling digital products. Back then, it wanted to show my inventory and shipping options, which don't apply for services and digital products. I did a little with my digital courses on there, but in the end, I liked other sites better for this. It didn't work out.
Weebly was just a starting point for me when I create my first digital course. I liked how it looked and it was easy to build, but there are better options for this sort of thing now.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Increased sales by $8000 from January to June (Added 2 more programs quickly and easily) Saved almost a thousand dollars in the first year in costs by switching to Podia Improved customer satisfaction by using 1 site instead of 4 Read full review ScreenShots