Kajabi is a web hosting platform for online learning or membership websites, featuring landing pages and support for email marketing, video hosting, and codeless web building tools.
$149
per month
Optimizely Configured Commerce
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud (Episerver B2B Commerce Cloud, based on InsiteCommerce from Insite Software, acquired by Episerver in Decemver 2019), is an eCommerce solution built for enterprise-level manufacturers and distributors.
I wouldn't recommend Kajabi for someone that's starting to figure out what their product is going to be and who is the target audience. While one could argue the starting price point isn't high compared to having a brick and mortar store, it's also not practical pay between $100-$200 a month while the business figures out their offer. Kajabi is better suited for someone who has already tested their product, specifically courses, and can start selling it relatively soon after launching their Kajabi site. While Kajabi has come out with a coaching and community products, those are still in their infancy. The strength of Kajabi is in their course content delivery supported by the ability to have a simple website and email marketing system in the same platform.
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.
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.
The inbuilt themes are excellent but sometimes a small change is required to improve it - that then requires a code change which must then be reapplied if Kajabi issue an upgrade.
Once you get the "hang" of it, Kajabi is a very powerful platform. But it does take an investment of time. Kajabi also has a best-practice way of doing things and I feel that it is worth paying for skilled support to get through the setup quickly.
We are committed to it and once we get "really good" at using it, I think it is a excellent platform and links well to Hubspot. At present, we are still just barely scratching the surface with our use of its features
Kajabi is very usable. But it is complex and if you haven't used it for a few weeks you have to remind yourself how to do things. It is very important to treat it like any major system and be very disciplined about how you file things and name documents
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.
The Kajabi Support people are helpful, fast and knowledgeable. I usually call in a panic - because I have lost something, messed something or am on a deadline. Sometimes we speak, or we do a chat. Always my angst is eliminated. I often thank the person for being "so patient" with me. LOL
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.
These platforms are big complex pieces of software. Mor recently - Kajabi provides a done for you example which you can borrow and customise - but those were not available when we started.
ClickFunnels is a great tool for funnel automation, landing pages, and lead generation but when it comes to product delivery for content creators it lacks functionality as it reality it was not meant for that purpose. Originally, we used ClickFunnels for our funnels but we found out that we could do exactly the same with Kajabi, so we migrated all of our funnels to Kajabi
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.
When we used Kajabi to launch new programs we achieved the ROI of our monthly investment each time.
With Kajabi, the ability to offer old programs that have been offered in the past is easy to present to one-off customers or when not in a launch series.
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.
