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 I have a gorgeous website that I made myself, thanks to Squarespace. I'm able to integrate marketing emails, SEO, analytics, online carts, pretty much instantly. If you want to get started fast, it's really great. I think if you want to customize square space and you're having trouble, it would be most helpful to hire a square space designer. That's what I would have done in retrospect.
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 Stupid simple to use. I know very creative people who cannot code and this is probably the easiest ever platform for them! Pretty website templates and great functionality with showing off portfolios. They've already figured out what are the problems that non-coding people have when creating websites and they've figured out a simple solution for all of it. 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 As a wine company it would really love it if Squarespace had an easy plugin for wine club subscriptions. Squarespace would be awesome if it could automatically take your photos that you upload on the site and optimize them for the web and for the website. I do wish we could have more than two contributors for the basic website costs. 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 Unless our website requires significantly more functionality in the future, I can't see us terminating our contract
Read full review Usability It's simple to use for someone who is really good with computers as well as those who are not. I've been using my personal squarespace for years and have also helped clients build a starting page which they are later able to manage theirselves.
Read full review Support Rating Help is available directly from the back end and uses full sentence searching to find answers to questions others may have asked before. With a ton of articles and support questions documents, it is very likely that your question has been answered. If not each page has the ability to open a direct email to support. Each case has a number and can be followed. Responses are often quick and have links and directions clearly stated
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 Overall, as a designer, it makes perfect sense for small to large businesses to use a site such as SquareSpace. Costs are relatively reasonable with the ability to go in and do custom code.
The issue is certain aspects of it, depending on the plan, you can't do. So, if you want to do API to the site, you need to use the top-tier program to do so. Even at custom code, you won't have access to the API section.
As well, like all templates and themes, everybody is using the same style too.
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 The key positive impact on my overall business objectives is how simple Squarespace sites are to implement new information. Whenever our services change, we can quickly update pages or even change how the website flows, in a very short window of time. This allows me to get back to more urgent work sooner. Our Squarespace site for Club Swim Show helped present our web series to potential partners; Club Swim Show went on to partner with a popular swimming magazine and reach a larger audience through that magazine's hosting thanks to the professional design of our original website. Squarespace does not bring in customers to my storefront, which is fine for me, since I sell things infrequently and it is not my main business, but might work against someone who is expecting a Shopify or Etsy level connection with buyer markets. Read full review ScreenShots