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.
$89
per month
Optimizely Configured Commerce
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Optimizely Configured Commerce is a SaaS, headless, and composable e-commerce platform that helps manufacturers and distributors scale e-commerce growth using as much or as little out-of-the-box functionality as they prefer; saving organizations time to deploy meaningful buying experiences.
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Shopify
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Shopify is a commerce platform designed for both online stores and retail locations. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, and the Shopify POS application to power retail sales.
If you need to create a self-paced course, Kajabi works well, if you want something complicated, and want to check homework and communicate a lot with students, Kajabi must be used in complex with other resources like Slack and YouTube. But anyway it is a good platform to create a digital course.
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.
Shopify allowed us to handle matrix items and combined listings. Both of which we could not do on our previous platform. There was some customization involved but overall, it did what we needed it to. The one downside was that if we want to change anything we would have to reload the entire set of matrix items manually.
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.
It's base security and integration with trusted security partners (such as NoFraud) is a game-changer when it comes to reliability and a "hands off approach" for our IT department. The up-time is also very good.
It offers a wide range of verified plugins that are (for the most part) easy to install and use for any specific scenario you're looking for.
It's Analytics area in the admin is actually nice and offers a wide variety of reports that you can run.
The page builder is not as intuitive as other competitors. It takes too many click to get around the different elements and settings.
Better onboarding mechanism and explanation of where everything is located
I'm not sure why I need to create a event to use a simple countdown on a sales page, when I could simply choose the end date I want the countdown to go to for a specific price point offer
I would love it if Shopify built an in house app which helped us post UGCs and social proof from platforms such as Instagram, Youtube etc. more seamlessly on our website. Right now, we are able to do it through third party apps but the look and feel is just okay.
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
Nothing we have used in the past or have seen thus far even comes close to offering what we get with Shopify Plus, especially for the price. You cannot even come close to getting what we are getting at the price we pay. We are beyond thrilled and Shopify Plus meets and exceeds all of our needs and expectations. We love it!
The back-end system can be used efficiently and has flexibility. It doesn't have a lot of unnecessary functions or un user-friendly features. We have had no issues using the system and would continue to use it with the current functions and features. I would rate it as user-friendly yet flexible
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.
It is fairly easy to use Shopify regardless of what task you are attempting to perform. Most things are customizable to a degree without requiring coding ability. I have very limited coding experience and have still been able to navigate my way around changing features of the website that require edits to the code with the use of AI and trial-and-error. This previously wasn't possible with the WooCommerce platform.
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.
In terms of support I give Shopify a 9 out of 10 because they're always very friendly and thorough, and they personally can't solve my problem for me they always point me in the proper direction with the proper information I need to move forward
Shopify offered us several trainings to setup a Shopify store, how to build a brand, SEO, product photography etc. All this content have been super helpful in our journey.
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.
Big Commerce and SAP Hybris are two other platforms we've investigated and Shopify is by far easiest to use and customize. While it doesn't do everything out of the box, the apps do fill in many gaps. The cost however, is probably the biggest selling point against these other two options.
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.
It got the store up quickly so the client could start selling. She was previously selling products on Etsy and Facebook and wanted to consolidate everything onto one website, so the main thing Shopify solved was to reduce the store owner's time in managing all her products on multiple sites. Also, we had previously built a website on Wix with all the custom functionality and branding she needed - a truly great, high-end website - but it performed so slowly that it was unusable. So the speed at which Shopify can be set up and then works on the page is appreciable.
The website was manageable by the client - she could figure the system out herself after a while so she saved money on costs for hiring developers. She did have to hire developers to customize some of the plug-ins but costs are all relative; it wasn't a high investment compared to building a full e-commerce website. With the complexity and size of her product base and the functionality and branding she wanted to have in a website, and the potential of her business, she would have needed to invest well over $10,000 to get to where she really needs to be. In the end she kept the budget under $5000.00.
Costs kept climbing with plug-ins having to be added with everything. My client became more involved in building the website and began to try multiple plugins, and she did not have the skill base to evaluate the plugins functionalities so she chose plugins that did not do everything she needed, and then ended up paying the plugin developers to customize the plugins. So on one hand, it's pretty amazing to be able to bring up an e-commerce website as quickly as a week or so, but on the other hand if you need anything customized or deeper functionality in regards to product searching and filtering on the web page, and management on the backend, it quickly goes beyond the skills of the average person to manage, and above their expected budget as well. In the end my client really did not get anything close to the functionality for the website we had originally envisioned.
Shopify was the easiest way we could find to bring the client's products to a global market. We evaluated several other platforms and the functionality simple did not seem to be adequate, so Shopify seemed like the only solution that could do enough of what we needed and still stay within this client's budget. Really the problem in this project was not platform per se but that the budget wasn't large enough. Shopify managed to provide a solution for an ecommerce store with thousands of products on a tiny budget, so in the sense of pure functionality it provided the best value of all the platforms we evaluated. The solution still isn't big enough for this client's business though so, without having insights into this client's post-build sales results, my guess is that because her new website did not make her products easier to sort through, and she likely didn't have much more budget left to invest in SEO and other marketing of the website, her sales probably didn't increase substantially as a result of having built the website. So I think this project all in all did not likely have a high ROI.
