Orderwave vs. PG Forsta HX Platform

If you manage orders of physical goods, Orderwave works just fine! They integrate with many e-comm platforms and are generally well-suited to those who sell products on their site, who want to send automated order receipts and confirmation emails, and for accounting purposes to tally up total sales (including taxes, shipping costs, etc.). The fact that they also integrate with our email platform makes it extra useful so I can really hone in on segmentation and order history. That's pretty invaluable to me, as an email marketer. If you don't sell goods, I can't see it being appropriate

Incentivized

They have done a good job at helping us maintain the integrity of the project while transitioning to a completely new platform. Our Voice of the Customer program happens to consist of multiple surveys within one "master" so I guess logistically it could be considered complex

Incentivized

• Order management is clearly important when you run an e-commerce platform. As I can only speak from a marketing perspective (not business intelligence or finance), please know I may be limited in what I know/share. It's seriously a ridiculously useful piece of software. Anyhow. Orderwave allows me to pull in order information into Listrak, our ESP (email service provider). With this information, I can segment on SO many levels such as order total, number of orders, date of last (or all) purchase(s), what was purchased, over what period of time X items were purchased.... the options are limitless.
• Because I do a lot of testing with my emails - testing the whole customer experience from receiving an email to completing an order - I need the ability to review order information (name, address, items purchased, S&H info, tax info, etc. etc.). While our admin manages all the customization of that order receipt, I'm able to quickly make any changes necessary in the back end, like if I'm seeing a pricing discrepancy between what is advertised on our site and what the final order purchase was (usually due to the way we set up a bundle product and not an issue with the platform).
• It's really, really easy to see if we have available inventory of select SKUs that we are about to promote. It also gives me an idea if there is an issue with syncing between SAP and Orderwave, or Orderwave and Magento (our e-comm platform).

Incentivized

• Confirmit has a fairly shallow learning curve allowing someone with no experience to be able to create a simple survey with not much time invested in training.
• Confirmit also has the flexibility to be used in very advanced ways. Whether modifying the display/page content's layout or modifying input types with jQuery, it is incredibly adaptable.
• Confirmit (with v. 18) now collects data in a true SQL database which is far more robust and easy to administrate than some other methods of data storage.

Incentivized

• I'm not the biggest fan of their email platform, but it does exactly what it needs to do... I just like drag & drop email builders. In addition, I've found that at times the code editor doesn't expand very large, so I often have to copy & paste into a separate code editor (such as Sublime Text) to edit a few lines of code. While the WYSIWYG editor opens in a new window allowing it to more easily expand, I don't get that with the code editor (at least not in Chrome on Mac).
• Support documentation is still a little difficult to manage, but I have noticed truly significant improvements and am more easily able to find the things I need. Our AM is able to help me when I can't find something, which is a big help. I'm sure in time it will improve more.
• The overall look and feel feels old. Like the email platform, it does exactly what it needs to do and it does it well without issue. But the innards feel like Windows XP in 2018. The walls are sturdy and supportive; it just needs a new coat of paint. :)

Incentivized

• Ensure correct data collection. This is Confirmit's main goal, and which sometimes fails to succeed.
• Integrated data back-up service. It would be great if we could look at the data from a couple days previous.
• Interactive layout creator. Current layout creator is really "squared" as we say, it needs more flexibility with all the incoming technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3.

From my point of view Confirmit has been a key tool in our organization. Without it we can't deliver what we do at this moment. Confirmit has proved that is a reliable, stable and easy to use tool. The few issues we found (as far as I know) were sent to Confirmit support team and fix them. Patching the product has been done faster and without large downtime of the product

Confirmit is a very technical tool, it takes time for someone to get used to the interface, even when it could definitely be more intuitive or user friendly, this is part of Confirmit's strenghts that makes it one of the most robust data collection technologies out there.

The support team is responsive and I can tell that they are actually trying to help get to the heart of the issues before making us try every possible solution available. They ask the right questions and test things before coming back to us with proposals. I like the support team at Confirmit.

Incentivized

Should let the professionals handle implementation, don't have only the operations team at your company do it.

Incentivized

I wasn't involved in the purchasing decision of Orderwave, but I am familiar with IBM Order Management (used in the past) and much prefer Orderwave. It's cleaner and the information I need is more direct an apparent. Despite it's 'old' look, it's far more effective and far easier to use. I need easy. My day is spent between 10+ applications and if something isn't easy to use, I just won't use it. Orderwave lets me do my job well

Incentivized

Forsta has a strong product functionality and performance. Integration capabilities are fantastic and it has strong customer focus. Pre-existing relationships also helped in cracking this deal. People at Forsta are helpful and customer centric. Although cost is not highly competitive but it comes close to value for money. Competitors have quite a few functionalities but there are additional charges levied for them.

Incentivized

• It has really helped us with business intelligence and gathering more information on who our customers are, what they have (or haven't) purchased, and how we can more effectively market to them. The BI has also helped our telemarketing side (with the call center) better understand what products are most frequently ordered over the phone vs online.
• Managing stock levels is super easy and allows our marketing team to more effectively merchandise and promote products. Without this, we would just be guessing what we should promote.
• I think one of the biggest ROI pieces has been the customizability of the Order Confirmation email. We have a dynamic tool that our email provider offers that serves up products based on what the customer has ordered, viewed, and abandoned, so we can dynamically populate those products in the Order Confirmation email. Orderwave helped us create a custom variable that we could use with our ESP's dynamic code, and we've seen an increase (~3-4%) in sales from the Confirmation email.

Incentivized

• I love Confirmit, the only negative is that my experience using any other program is always terrible in comparison.
• I had Confirmit rep come into the office and was disapointed that they didn't have much informaton on how to use it as a researcher in marking research, perhaps employing more internal marketing researchers would help that.

Incentivized