IBM Digital Commerce vs. Spryker Cloud Commerce OS vs. WebFronts

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

Spryker is very well suited (B2C and/or B2B) for big companies with complex and individual business models or also if your company needs a certain level of customization. Very good fit, if you need a scalable system. It is rather not the perfect fit for small companies or companies with very basic E-Commerce needs.

• 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

• Data Importers - Spryker is able to cope with large chunks of data ingest e.g. from PIM or ERP. Its integrated Middleware of handling this data.
• Scaling - Modern architecture makes it possible to scale flexible.
• Internationalization - Role our your shop with different assortments, pricing and products with out of the box features.
• Pricing - Spryker supports custom pricing out of the box (volume prices, gross/net prices, customer specific pricing).
• Order Management.

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

• Content - content administration is not a strong part of Spryker, although it improved over the years. I still see room for improvement in the world of bigger CMS systems being able to also do "commerce".
• Backoffice-usability - for non-technical users the first few days, weeks and month[s] can be full of surprises. An extended documentation, or more intuitive handling on the backoffice could serve every party on Spryker.
• Off-the-shelf internationalization - Spryker right now comes with an initial data set in English and German, which is for a German based company already a pretty stable starting point. Extension on the base data for Europe-wide used countries would be very helpful - French, Italian, Polish, Russian, etc.

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

Spryker's usability depends a lot on custom development. Therefore, I would like not to consider usability as something that comes with Spryker Cloud Commerce OS. Spryker Cloud Commerce OS; however, brings all the tools needed to design a solution with great usability.

Support suffered from Spryker Cloud Commerce OS's rapid growth. Contacts, department heads, and support systems changed frequently. Support processes as well as documentation are rather poor. One notices that they are putting more effort into the customers recently, but in the course of growth, there is still a lack of focus here. As a customer, I would like to see growth at a slower pace and a phase of stabilization.

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

If you compare Spryker with commerce solutions on the market, you will notice that the focus is not on the front end. Spryker assumes that the store is only one of many possible channels through which customers order today and in the future. To understand the differences, one must therefore take a look at Spryker's architecture. This is divided into the Spryker [Cloud] Commerce OS (the backend with all process-related components), the front-end modules for B2C and B2B, as well as the integration modules (middleware) and interfaces (Glue API).

• 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

• Extending the reach and visibility of the brand through content and commerce.
• Increased customer satisfaction through better accessibility (self-service) and easy access to important product information (CAD data, technical documentation, etc.).
• Rapid deployment thanks to packaged business capabilities and clear development leads to fast ROI and low TCO.

Incentivized