Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review [WooCommerce] does really well for simple stores that don't have a lot of products. It's really easy to set up and get products added so people can purchase them online. It's not the best for really complicated stores with products that need a lot of customization; you have to find 3rd-party plugins to add additional functionality to your store and sometimes those can create conflicts between one another.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Keeps track of product inventory, including details of product variations such as colors and sizes if required. Keeps track of orders so that the shopkeeper has one place to log in and see the status and history of orders to her shop. Creates shop-related pages automatically. Once you add one or more products, they will automatically appear on your shop home page. Additionally, pages for viewing shopping carts and for checking out are automatically created. Read full review Cons 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 Read full review Because of how the Wordpress database is structured, WooCommerce isn't great for large or complex e-commerce sites. More out-of-the-box options would be nice within the base software. Because add-on plugins are developed by 3rd parties, sometimes you get conflicts that break things. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Despite very rare glitches, more connected to an excessive number of plugins, that affect the speed of the site, we are extremely satisfied with the platform, the ability to import and export products, even though we just export them, as we have our proprietary system for updating inventories. We love the ease of upgrading, enhancing, innovating, and the freedom we have to do whatever we want, which is a plus, when you consider Shopify can take down your whole store as they please, if they think you aren't abiding to their TOS or their ever changing set of rules.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review I gave it lots of points for being a simple product that instantly gives you a store. Very intuitive and simple for the client to update or implement. Loses LOTS of points when you want to do anything besides just sell stuff (coupons, etc) then it makes you pay big money for the add-ons and makes it difficult and time-intensive to develop your own.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review not muh support
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review We were pretty sure we wanted a
WordPress site so that we had more control over the site itself, having been burned by third-party vendor sites before. The fact that WooCommerce integrates so well with
WordPress was a big selling point for us.
Magento would have been too heavy of a lift for our small dev team and we didn't want to rely on
Shopify or
BigCommerce (though all of those products could have their merits for other projects or clients).
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Positive: low cost to start up, and allowed us to start selling right away. Negative: better plug-ins have a high cost of entry. For example if you want to do subscriptions you need a paid plugin for it. Positive: easily integrates with PayPal and Stripe. Justin Esgar CEO/President - 360° IT Consulting, Server Management, IT Security
Read full review ScreenShots Optimizely Configured Commerce Screenshots