Olo vs. Shopify

After using a previous integrator, I can safely say I would recommend Olo above the competition. Olo successfully consolidates all platforms for order ingestion thus simplifying the entire process of digital ordering. Trying to do it any other way would simply be foolish. The technology works and there is a great support structure behind the scenes to make sure that if there are any questions, feature requests, or advancements that they get added to the development queue.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Olo makes the guest experience easy and understandable while placing their orders. They can easily customize their order, modifying each item to their liking using the guidelines we at our restaurant have given.
• If there are issues with our equipment, Olo is quick to respond and get us back online.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• hard to set up 3rd parties on Rails - providing access and adding pricing information
• bug in searching orders - have to first deselect all before selecting store
• need to add group ordering - but they said they are working on this
• store hours are too difficult to update. please make them editable all at once

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

It's quick, responsive, easy to navigate and has all the functions necessary to get the job done

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

Olo's usability is great. The only area that keeps them from being a 10 is menu management. Menu management is absolutely workable, but it could be better. The rest of the system works well and is very usable and user-friendly. To the extent that their menu management has opportunities, the Olo Expo product helps this out with the people that need it the most, and thus why they score a 9 overall. Without Olo Expo, I'd score it an 8.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Shopify support is always available when you need them.

Incentivized

Shopify website speed is quite impressive. Even if we integrate couple apps, it does not hamper the site speed.

Incentivized

No product is ever perfect and support is there to help when that is the case. The vast majority of time the Olo support team is quick, transparent, and resolves the issues. However, I can't say that they are absolutely perfect (but few support teams are). The only thing keeping them from a 10 is the LVL1 support teams will often not read a ticket fully and see that the troubleshooting steps they are about to give have already taken place.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

not sure

Incentivized

Just start now and make the switch, the sooner the better. You will love it and it is really a simple process

Incentivized

Revel is my POS provider and they want to charge way to much for online integration so I have not tried it. What I have tried is each companies own apps on their tablets. I would rather have 3 or 4 different tablets that are good at what they do for their respective company then use your "all-in-one" solution that honestly is much worse.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Shopify has basic to high-end plans. The plans grow with the brand`s growth and I love that about Shopify.

Incentivized

• Time savings for employees has been a positive impact.
• Our takeout business has increased from less than 10% to over 30% in the last 2 years, we could not have been as successful with this increase without the help of Olo.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized