Episerver Commerce Cloud Reviews

APIs - Their APIs are improving and if you are utilizing Epierver FIND, it's like a dream to work with. If you are aren't, there is definitely some room for improvement under the hood.

Commerce Manager - this is a legacy part of the product that is constantly being phased out (which is great). When it is gone, there will be a lot of happy folks :).

Developer documentation. As with any platform, this is an area that is continually being improved.

It was a difficult platform to learn and get used too. This could just be because we customized the tool a lot for our own use but some things related to my role in particular with managing products would actually take me longer to complete than in our previous CMS.

We weren't able to schedule ahead past one homepage change.

Custom development with Episerver is painful. At some point, you will need to customize something Epi does or integrate with it in some way. This will be a painful experience. The codebase is poor. The entire EpiCommerce solution is untestable. It's not just difficult to create unit tests for, it's near impossible to create tests for any of your code that involves any of their code.

The database schema is obtuse. Dealing with epiCommerce database schema is very difficult and will be very costly the moment you need to integrate with it in some way. In addition, the epiCommerce database has very little referential integrity.

It takes a lot of work in order to get basic cms features working. Adding a page type, defining new content, adding a custom field - all of these things require code changes and server deployments. E.g. you have to create a new asp.net controller to handle a new content type. The admin interface will not present it otherwise.

The entire Epi system is designed for vendor lock-in. The old, obtuse codebase pretty much requires you to use a vendor to help with implementation. There is no concept of intuitive custom development and integration.

Simpler import functionality (look at Pimcore/Akeneo for examples).

Break out of the very limiting page tree model. Look at Sitecore's use of placeholders to decouple content and presentation. Also more content types than just pages blocks and media.

More DAM integrations.

*well documented* web APIS to support headless.

The commerce engine is not robust enough and we find this is not very user-friendly at all

The promotion engine could use a more user-friendly approach and is very complicated to use

Additional flexibility in setting up content blocks and web templates

Increased options on managing persona's and personalization rules

Increased number of potential systems to integrate with.

Episerver Digital Commerce is brimming with valuable, useful tools. Organizing them all in an intuitive user interface is a challenge for any solution platform, and Episerver is no exception. Once you know your way around the system, it's easy to find what you need, but the initial journey can be a bit overwhelming. Be sure to partner with a qualified provider willing to handhold you through the integration and launch.

Page building workflow/process is cumbersome and slow.

Customizing existing blocks/modules a challenge.

Ongoing fixes of issues and development for new builds is expensive and slow.

Developer support. Episerver has one guy named Quan on the forum and he only responds after US hours.

Commerce manager needs a facelift. It looks terrible.

Commerce needs a better API that you can use to import and extract data from in console applications or other third party applications.

I wish that there was a built in spelling checker for errors.

It would be nice if Episerver automatically translated content to another language when I click "translate."

It would be nice if Episerver had a built in integration with Mixpanel or Google Analytics.

The UI is slowly being rebuilt into the main Episerver UI - there are still many features that require use of the old Commerce Manager UI which feels very outdated and is a poor UX.

Some confusing API's that allow developers to get confused - some API's are oddly split up which leads to confusion of what other functions might exist.

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.

Best of Breed - focus has always been to be best of breed, rather than having lots of branded offerings like Sitecore. We're sensing that shifting slightly and Episerver is therefore suddenly less adaptive within an existing IT landscape. Acquisition of Optivo and Peerius is a great example, as it's now getting natively integrated, hence giving customers the impression that their existing Marketing Automation or Product Recommendation platforms (like Salesforce or Apptus e-Sales) aren't a great fit. Not an immediate observation, but more a thought on the direction applied currently.

Integration with inRiver PIM in DXC environment

Not always intuitive

Slow initial setup

Cloud hosting -- generally the hosting service is good, but we do experieicne significant slowdowns when a new instance spins up.

Customizable promotions -- the promotions function offers many out-of-the-box options, but, for us, required a lot of customization to create the types of promotions we regularly use; this may be because our focus is B2B.

General out-of-the-box B2B features -- we are able to use Episerver quite well for our B2B needs, but our implementation partner had to do a fair bit of custom development to get us there.

Lack of a phone center customer service module. There is not a front end where customer service can enter and manage orders and member accounts. This necessitates a separate custom platform with the same capabilities as Episerver to service members who call in to the customer service center. So any upgrades to Episerver have to matched in the separate CS platform. This is not just a shortcoming of Episerver. It is a blind spot for all ecommerce platforms and industry. Often we are limited in our ability to upgrade Episerver because of this missing component.

Slow. It works fine. But you always want it to be faster and more responsive. On both sides of the equation. Within Episerver itself and the use of the platform by the end user. This is also a problem with all ecommerce platforms and in the industry. Most integrations are just happy to make it to the first step. Our ecommerce platform is up and working! Yahoo! Much less time and energy is given to the next step - optimization. That is because this is a very complicated step. It involves Episerver, your IT department, your software vendor partner, your hosting company, and your PIM/database. Reasons for a slow site are hard to diagnose and hard to fix. Throw in the fact that slowness can also be for reasons on the side of the end user. Best effort may only be getting the platform to work in your environment. Getting a platform to work WELL in your environment is a whole other beast that very few companies have the capability to do. To add to the complexity of this there is almost no way to judge a coding vendor's capability to do this. Something you have to figure out over time. And it also depends on a lot on your internal IT departments capabilities and culture. So a difficult problem all around.

A more detailed product roadmap could be provided to customers.

For on-premise (non-cloud) instances, technical support typically comes from a partner. There are somewhat limited support options for in-house teams without a partner.

Licensing usually goes through a partner. You can license directly from Episerver but there's limited access to directly downloading license files or local developer licenses.

Tight coupling to database schema makes it difficult to deploy code with no downtime. This is on the product road map to fix, however.

The e-commerce portion of the product still has some older implementation frameworks, so functionality between CMS and commerce is not always consistent.

Can be too cumbersome from a navigation standpoint.

Difficult to set up new users and manage user security/authority.

It's expensive.