OpenCart vs. Optimizely Commerce Connect

OpenCart is great for web developers familiar with PHP who have clients who want very specific eCommerce functionalities. OpenCart is "open-source," meaning its source code is open to the public and downloadable and editable by anyone. This makes customizing its functionalities possible with nearly an infinite variety of possibilities. If you are not tech savvy and don't like to read documentation and configure advanced settings, then OpenCart is not the best solution for you.

Incentivized

Very strong fit for mid-sized organizations that need more flexibility and customization as compared to canned or template-based offerings, but also want the efficiency and externalization that comes with a pre-existing, cloud-hosted platform (as compared to a full custom offering). Works well with a PIM and more mature catalog data in order to fully leverage the dynamic data capabilities.

Incentivized

• OpenCart is open-source software, free to use. Free is always a plus for software.
• Good basic set of features that provides for a quick setup of a simple e-commerce website.
• Administration is fairly user-friendly and makes it easy for a non-technical user to find things.

Incentivized

• Web content management -- the interface is drag and drop and makes it very easy for business users to create product pages.
• In site search with Episerver Find -- it is easy to promote attributes and make quick tweaks to fine-tune results.
• Integrate with other systems -- we have integrated with our ERP, our product information management system, our digital asset management system and our marketing automation system to take advantage of investments we have already made in content and customer data.

Incentivized

• Sometimes developer skill is required to work on admin module.
• Add-on modules are often necessary, and you need to purchase them separately
• Hard to update it to new versions, and it is constantly updating
• Though it is smooth to use, it works on a read-edit-delete system. Deleting data is very critical.

Incentivized

• Support. Episerver used to have direct support and access to the tech team to discuss and resolve issues. The new support portal is not enough for developer needs.
• Quality Assurance. We find issues in the Episerver code that should have been resolved in QA before release.
• Sales. Episervers sells the framework as a solution while showing Alloy. While it helps Episerver sell more, it puts the implementation partner into trouble as the client thinks they bought the solution. Episerver does not provide a solution. It provides a framework that you can build a solution on.

Incentivized

Really want to be able to spend more time and resources on rolling out new things with Episerver but at the moment we seem to be fixing alot of issues and pain points with the way our system was setup.

Incentivized

The job functionality is one of the strongest benefits Optimizely offers. It allows a savvy user to quickly go in to a given job, see the job history to find errors and then even take the steps of a job, copy the code and paste it back into your source to diagnose a potential issue.

Incentivized

We had an incredible team at Episerver Supporting us with the go live, reviewing our integration, and pushing our integration partner to deliver a quality product

Incentivized

Fully understand what is OOTB feature of the platform before proceeding to develop. Then implement a customization of key features once you can prove they are working as OOTB to make them more user friendly and productive for the business. Eg pre order and e gift card

Incentivized

Both platforms are feature-rich. I chose OpenCart because I found a theme that suits me. Plus there were many third-party extensions that I was interested in and they can be integrated with OpenCart.

Stibo STEP MDM was a powerhouse. It seems we could do anything we could dream up, but we also had an in-house IT dev team to support it. The cost was the reason we went with Optimizely Commerce Connect. We did not explore HubSpot for this project.

Incentivized

• At the time of starting a business, OpenCart helped us with easy setup and catalog management. We have stared and deployed e-commerce sites very easily.
• The websites didn't look good at first (we modified later) and that impacted our business as our clients received a lot of orders.

Incentivized

• Positive: We have a usable website - better than what we had before and we are seeing a constant increase in adoption.
• Positive: Counter associates are using the website to help customers.
• Negative: Too much time being spent QCing previous work.

Incentivized