Optimizely Customized Commerce is a headless PaaS commerce solution built to scale commerce results for enterprise brands.
N/A
Paddle
Score 5.8 out of 10
N/A
London-based Paddle offers an ecommerce and subscription management solution for software companies seeking a streamlined demonstration of their services and centralized management of their different service levels and cloud-based offerings.
Our experience may be unique because we opted for an Epi core team to implement our website/console set-up and connection to our PIM and ERP. The experience may have been different with a 3rd party or it may not have. That said, we have been live with our primary website for almost 2 years and I still do not consider it was ever "done". We have been going back and forth on functionality issues and bugs since launch. I have low confidence that changes made the previous day will 100% be online the next - so my team rechecks the work they did the previous day to ensure everything is online. The addition of a second channel and enhancement requests have compounded the issues. I feel this product would work fine with singular or less complex market SKU offerings.
I wouldn't recommend them to anybody because their support is getting worse and worse and their business processes require you to contact support whether you want to or not. You will be forced to contact support and then wait for days to get any meaningful response that's not a copy/pasted sentence from FAQ.
Episerver has a robust discount engine. This engine, combined with "visitor groups" allow our marketing department to categorize customers and offer a variety of discounts to targeted customers at specific times.
Episerver has a full-featured, storefront experience that can handle everything you might want for an e-commerce website.
Episerver offers A/B testing that can be helpful for trying out new content ideas and tracking the results.
Super easy to implement SDKs across supported platforms that support modern interface paradigms.
Real team members that provide backend support for merchant issues. We had issues addressed quickly and taken seriously whenever we needed anything.
Help with navigating VAT transparently. We never worried that we were messing up in this complicated area of international sales.
Great first line customer support reduces the need for an extensive customer support organization on our end. They dealt with all purchase related issues as well as lightweight technical issues (e.g pointing users to FAQs, update links, etc.).
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.
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.
The administrative interface is largely intuitive and relatively easy to use. The complexity of business needs and ability to customize can affect this (i.e. you have to set up and develop with the user in mind), but the basic structure is largely solid. There are some areas of redundancy (such as Commerce Manager overlapping with other administrative areas) that can sometimes cause confusion or offer some functions in one place, whereas other related functions are managed on a completely different page.
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
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
Optimizely Commerce Cloud offers a very wide range of features for admin users. There is less a need for an IT specialist or programmer to be involved when changes need to be made.
We tried using Stripe before Paddle, but it was a pain integrating it and it lacked the licensing. Paddle allows us just to add a payment button and don’t ever think about payment methods, we don’t have to make a separate button for card payments and another one for PayPal. Paddle does all this in their checkout process.
