Cin7 Orderhive was a SaaS based solution for order, shipping and inventory management functionalities. Acquired by Cin7 in 2021, it was discontinued in 2023.
$95
per month
Plone
Score10 out of 10
N/A
Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Plone can be used for any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops, and internal websites.
Setting up was covered by a dedicated account rep. It was a smooth and relatively easy process. Problems started a year in when I lost my dedicated account rep. Customer service would refer to the instructions when a question was asked. Sadly they didn't understand the question most of the time.
The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.
Around 18 months ago I started conversations with Orderhive as a potential vendor to run a large portion of our ecommerce business. It seemed promising, and the idea that the Plus (now called Enterprise) solution was customisable was the reason I decided to select Orderhive.
There was a significant amount of due-diligence from my end. It took me around 6 months to get my head around what features the software currently had, and what we would need to have Orderhive complete as a customisation.
This in itself was also quite a bit of work - there were a number of revisions to the contract documents, created by a non-technical sales representative. My concerns started around this point when I was unable to speak with a technical representative to discuss, in more detail, how each feature would work.
Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management.
Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on.
Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy.
shipping, I would like to be able to handle returns more easily.
I would like to be able to handle stock differently according to order delivery dates. Order hive reserves qty for all the orders we place, I would like to be able to decide which orders reserve stock and which ones shouldn't.
Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend.
Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right.
Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation).
Extremely poor, it is not a user-friendly automated time-saving system like what was promised. It is clunky and the development team is slow and creating very poor and unreliable results.
Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small.
The new user interface in Plone 6 is even better, it is super fast, has lots of different blocks for enhancing the page, has flexible layout system and is easy to extend with more features.
Our Plone sites are very robust. We have critical systems on Plone and we have been running sites on Plone for over 20 years with very little unexpected downtime.
Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.
The worst I have ever experienced, they are arrogant, rude and often abusive. They then blame us when we get angry due to the poor quality of the product and the extremely bad customer service.
Sadly I can't give Cin7 Core a review, because they haven't been able to resolve connection issues and it's been 3 months. But I'm done with this company
Drupal: Plone is cheaper, so with Drupal is more complex to reach the required ROI. However, Drupal has a lower learning curve WordPress: For our necessities it has a more expensive learning curve than plone. Joomla, is easier to use. However, it have some issues on security and web content where Plone is much better
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
There has been a negative ROI in this case. Not only have we paid a deposit toward the customisation of our orderhive implementation, there has also been a massive sunk cost of approximately 18 months of my time and effort.
The impact Plone has had at the University of Oshkosh is as follows: this software allows student workers to learn about IT departments and CMS's in a user-friendly way. It gives many students great jobs that look great on their resumes.
Since there are great training manuals for Plone, there is increased employee efficient in the workplace. Training doesn't take long, and if there's ever a question, the Plone manual is a great tool to refer to.
If an employee using Plone quits, its easy to find someone to replace them with quick training and great resources.
