Optimizely Commerce Connect vs. Sana Commerce Cloud

Our experience may be unique because we opted for an Optimizely 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.

Incentivized

Its suited more for B2B-focused or mid-size companies that want to have a more robust platform for their eCommerce and don't want to invest that much (like the case of Magento and other big names). If you want to make constant UX and design enhancements and tests, you'll have a couple of headaches. It's not that bad but; you wont be able to do it all without customizing and spending good money on it.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Quote Workflow--pretty simple and easy to understand and implement
• Easy-to-learn admin tools
• Very flexible/customizable initial configuration

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

• The service could be much better. It's expensive and hard to monitor because they only check cases twice a week (if you don't have a pre-plan).
• The language and different time schedules have been an issue for tech problems. They're in Holland and Ukraine and we're in Mexico, and is really hard to find developers who know the platform to hire as an extra resource.
• You can't import SKUS to populate a landing page programmatically.

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 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.

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

Optimizely Commerce Connect 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.

Incentivized

Sana Commerce is not as robust, flexible (or expensive) as Magento but is better (and more expensive) than Shopify. It is well balanced and you can customize according to your clients' needs. They are constantly upgrading their platform so you can keep your eCommerce up to date, but you must consider an extra cost to adapt it to the latest version.

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

• The ROI was 18% more than expected
• Our traffic has increased by 250%
• Some of our clients think our site is too complex

Incentivized