MindTouch vs. Narvar vs. QuickBooks Commerce

If a company doesn't want to make their knowledge base public-facing, you lose a lot of the value of using MindTouch in a closed environment. MindTouch is not ideal for extremely structured content management scenarios that are strong DITA advocates. Companies that require localization might not be good fits either.

Incentivized

If you're not on a platform that has a branded post-purchase landing page or in-email estimated delivery date script, Narvar provides this experience. It's a nice-to-have for any brand that wants to provide a seamless, branded shopping experience for their customers. Narvar's grown rapidly and it seems they are increasing costs, which may be prohibitive and hard to justify for smaller companies.

Incentivized

Using TradeGecko requires to the company to make compromises. Which compromises depends on the business, what they are using for other 3rd party applications and what they sell. You need to be very good with excel since you are able to upload and modify most files, which gives you major control over your data. They however need to modify the way in which new inventory items get loaded, as it is quite awkward if you use variants. 'Reports' as has been described prior has improved dramatically and most if not all can be downloaded in CSV/Excel format. This allows you to build your own reports with the data from the system. If your business is very complex in nature, TradeGecko probably isn't the system for you. If you are doing thousands of transactions a day, again this is not the system. However, if you are a small to smaller mid-sized business, the system, its cost and the 3rd party applications make it worth a first second and third look.

Incentivized

• MindTouch helps to easily organize our help articles to ensure that our end user is receiving the proper information.
• The MindTouch platform is extremely easy to navigate which reduces the turnaround time for our team to publish new material.
• The editor tools supplied through MindTouch make styling our documentation a breeze.
• The contextual help tool allows our customers to consume documentation based on the page they are viewing in our platform.

Incentivized

• Narvar offered us a turn-key solution that we had up and running in less than a month.
• Narvar offered several out of the box widgets (solutions) to help build/customize content (calendar view, milestone icons, SMS messaging and personalize content based on items purchased).
• Narvar's solution is scalable/expandable to include returns (once we are ready).

• Interface with WooCommerce.
• Interface with Xero.
• Maintain Perpetual Inventory (less than 0.001% difference in value of inventory in TG and Xero).
• Works with ShipStation extremely well.
• Works with major EDI vendors (with reservations).

Incentivized

• When we do have a support issue, we frequently need to go through multiple people, contacts, ways of explaining things, etc,. before someone on their end actually understands our problem. It's rare that the first person we talk to understands the big picture or appreciates our use case.
• The draft functionality is a promising start but lacks some key features that cause us regular frustration. For example, you can only create one draft of a page at a time. This is fine if changes come to you in perfect sequential order, but it makes it impossible for us to update a live page while a draft exists. More specifically, if we're working on updating content on a page for a new feature being released next month, but then we notice a typo today, we can't fix the typo in production without first deleting the draft or doing some hacky workaround of temporarily copying/pasting the source HTML of the draft page and saving it someplace else.
• Existence of, or integration with, true source control would be a huge win, but it's something currently lacking in the product. MindTouch's content reuse feature is helpful in the right situations, but it's not robust enough to scale well for lots of content.
• Version history of page changes is not 100% reliable. Sometimes items don't show up at all or there is a delay before the diff is visible. Also, creating a draft does not register at all in the page version history.
• In-site search is poor, unless you know the *exact* title of what you're looking for. We tell our customers to use Google, not the MindTouch search. Google is excellent at searching our MindTouch site.

Incentivized

• Pricing is much more expensive than competitors.
• UI Design is often lacking.

Incentivized

• - Couldn't integrate with existing QBO account. Had to set up a new QBO account and transfer all data, create lots of journal entries - was very time-consuming and labor-intensive. Caused some financial discrepancies to resolve.
• - Have to process returns on Amazon and Shopify orders manually
• - Tax-inclusive is not allowed - European sales are tax inclusive - can't import order with VAT included. Looks like the software is suitable for US only. Have to create such orders manually in Commerce and then manual journal entries in QBO
• - Supports accrual accounting method only. In cash - it's a mess
• - Support - not knowledgeable enough - I could only call for support (now they have chat) and they always had to get with the back-end and every call was not less than 1 hour. At the end I would get a link for the training materials
• - Inventory not synching timely sometimes - I have a screenshot proving that inventory on our Amazon account was 0 but Commerce still had quantities, I had to manually press synch
• - Shipping line from Shopify orders is not coded to Shipping income account but goes together with Sales of product income account
• - When partial of the PO is received, not able to create a bill for the partial. There're only 2 settings: either bill created at the time of PO creation (for the whole PO amount - which increases your AP right away) or at the time the whole PO received. It works only when PO is shipped as a whole.

Incentivized

We've put lots and lots of content into the MindTouch system, of course, so that makes it harder to opt out, but we're also very pleased with their rate of development and weekly pushing of improvements, as well as their response and solutions to our questions and input All in all, a winning combination.

Incentivized

TG works well for us.

Incentivized

The site is responsive across multiple devices and screens. It has a clear path to contact support. The articles are searchable. Site users do have trouble navigating the site and finding what they need. That may be due to the architecture of the site, but it'd be nice if MindTouch offered more solutions are this. Our content is organized by product line. And many of those product lines have overlapping training content, so we have extensive duplicate content.

Incentivized

TG is good and easy to use, but could be improved

Incentivized

MindTouch is a hosted site, so as a heavy user there are times when I notice that pages are slow to load, or something happens like Amazon Web Services crashing the entire east coast for a few hours, that you do notice even if it isn't actually the fault of the MT tool itself. It's the risk of using a hosted tool, but the benefits are pretty amazing and outweigh these performance issues.

Incentivized

It's good. Pretty solid. We got a lot of input to get up and running, but did a lot of the setup and customization work ourselves, because of our high standards. We've gotten good response and results on specific projects related to customization and our CSM is also pretty responsive. Overall, I think that the jobs of CSMs and support folks would be easier if the product weren't wonky in some ways. They seem to have to do more "workarounds" for basic functionality that should just work out of the box

Incentivized

Once it's set up, it doesn't require much support. We used to have quarterly or bi-annual touch bases with an account person to review our rating and customer usage but haven't heard from them in a while - either because we're too small or they got rid of this interaction. Can't say we miss it though because we can see our rating and feedback, and there is only so much you can do within the confines of the platform without adding on new functionality.

Incentivized

Support team just sends links to blog posts that are often out of date.

Incentivized

Written documentation and videos are very good and have helped on numerous occasions when I've had to look up how to accomplish a certain task. The reason I have not given a full score is mainly because there have been some inaccuracies in the documentation because updates to the MindTouch framework have slightly changed the way things work. But this is usually the same type of challenges I face when making documentation for the software solution we develop. So all in all I'm very satisfied with both the personal webinars and the online documentation MindTouch provides for their service.

Incentivized

Just know that there is so much more involved than adding your content. There are so many pieces to launching your site -- especially if you are moving from another platform. If you are not a person who typically works in the "website" realm, do your homework, ask your web people, engineers, etc., because there's a lot to do that you won't know about until you are unexpectedly smacked in the face with it. Learn from my mistakes! We are very happy now, but it was a long road getting to launch day for us

Incentivized

I will be brief. DealerTeam is built upon Salesforce and we try to support native apps. We used Desk.com first for basic Help Ticket management. The product did not satisfy how our customers were looking for information. We upgraded to Service Cloud with Knowledge Base and spent one year writing content and developing our support agency. Again, our customers were upset about submitting help tickets and waiting for answers. They wanted access to self-help while working with a customer. Today we continue to use Service Cloud with MindTouch integration and have found complete success. There is simply no other solution I know of that is a flexible and easy to use as MindTouch when it come to providing customer success and product support

Incentivized

At the time, Narvar had no other competitors to my knowledge. We looked at building this functionality in house which had a 3 month estimate. Everyone involved happily welcomed the tool.

Each of the applications has a specific place. We select and implement the best solutions for our clients based on their budget and requirements. This is often determined by integration requirements. We like to say that every application with do a different 95% of what you need it to. There will always be a different 5% to forgo between applications.

We tried to migrate to MindTouch for 5 months and failed, remained with Zendesk

Incentivized

• Our operational efficiently has improved significantly. Prior to Mindtouch, we managing duplicate content in two separate authoring solutions. Delivering content predictably and consistently was difficult and stressful for writers. In Mindtouch, we were able to optimize our content (remove redundancies) giving us more time to test, review, and improve content quality.
• Traffic to our knowledge center is increasing monthly.
• Internally, SMEs and customer-facing teams are recognizing the value Mindtouch brings through self-service knowledge. These SMEs want to contribute more to content, either as contributing writers or collaborators with tech writers.

Incentivized

• Not sure we could attribute ROI to this tool.

Incentivized

• No real ROI - we're stilling pulling reports from multiple platforms.
• Positive - segregation of wholesale and DTC orders in Shopify.

Incentivized