KalioCommerce vs. Optimizely Configured Commerce

KalioCommerce is a good choice for mid market companies. IT support required would depend on your particular implementation, of course, but in our case our ecommerce team working with Kalio is able to deal with 95% of the work

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.

Incentivized

• They make it easy to create pages for each product.
• They have a variety of customization options to tailor to the needs of your website.
• Changes can be made from one part of the site, to the entire site, with ease.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Because Kalio has a growing client base, I find them a bit understaffed. The speed at which our company was growing, we needed to lean on them more, but they weren't always able to deliver because of the sheer volume of requests compared to their staff.
• It's difficult to physically write code within the space they have provided. I find that I have to copy and paste the code into a different text editor to read it better.

• Need the ability to look at more of our user data
• Need the ability to refresh our sandbox environment with production data in quicker, more efficient ways
• Classic CMS is very limited in ways end users like myself can edit widget content

Incentivized

KalioCommerce is not simply a software solution, it's an entire organization focused on helping our business grow and improve. They are an extension of my eCommerce team, and their insights and support help us move quicker in an ever changing field. That, in combination with a platform that has proven to be flexible, dependable and intuitive makes renewing a no-brainer.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Having used Magento and Joomla in the past to manage websites, the KalioCommerce platform allows access to much deeper levels of the platform to better customize it for our needs. In addition, the platform is much more robust, able to handle complex, huge product catalogs, and is more flexible in terms of integration with other tools and services.

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.

Incentivized

• Increased employee efficiency
• Better customer service.
• Easier, hassle-free product management.

• 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.

Incentivized