Optimizely Commerce Connect vs. ShipperHQ

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

ShipperHQ is almost too heavy-handed for our use case. We are only a single-origin shipper so we don't need the advanced functionality of multi-origin or drop-shipping. It is suited much better for organizations that have multiple origins or that use drop-ship facilities, or even a company managing multiple different eCommerce websites. We opted to go with it because of its great reviews, combined with less than stellar reviews of the competition.

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

• It is easy to batch process orders.
• It quickly calculates rates to compare.
• It is easy to keep track of orders for future review.

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 user interface is a little tricky. It is not as easy to navigate as other shipping apps.
• I wish that ShipperHQ had the functionality to print shipping labels and manage shipments. We currently have to use a different third-party app for shipment management.
• I would also like to see the option for adding shipping rules if shipping management was integrated.

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

I give ShipperHQ a 10/10 because the software does exactly what it says, and has a rock-solid support team to help get everything set up. The features are pretty easy to use and implement.

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

I'm not giving a 10/10 because I did need a little hand-holding to get through the initial setup. Overall, it's not that difficult to use once you understand how to apply custom dimensional rules.

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

Their support is the primary reason I elected to purchase a premium. They helped a lot with the initial set up.

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

USPS only allows you to use their services (obviously). It was sluggish and often offline. The shipsaver insurance saves us money. We had to guess shipping costs for items instead of entering their weights and sizes ahead of time. It integrates with our e-commerce site. Glad we have it now.

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

• ShipperHQ is reliable and requires little to no maintenance, which for a small crew like ours is invaluable.
• ShipperHQ also offers the option to display either retail shipping rates or our discounted rates to our customers. This is handy because we can display those discounted rates, which results in higher conversion and fewer abandoned carts due to high shipping costs.
• One negative, however, is that since ShipperHQ lacks the ability to manage shipments, we have had to use another third party app which increases overhead.

Incentivized