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Optimizely Customized Commerce

Optimizely Customized Commerce
Formerly Optimizely Commerce Cloud

Overview

What is Optimizely Customized Commerce?

Optimizely Customized Commerce is a headless PaaS commerce solution built to scale commerce results for enterprise brands.

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Recent Reviews

A great platform

8 out of 10
December 19, 2018
Incentivized
We are an Episerver partner and implement both CMS and Commerce solutions for clients and provide consultation services regarding the …
Continue reading

Episerver Review

8 out of 10
October 11, 2017
Incentivized
We are an implementation partner of Episerver selling EPI licenses and solutions. Our clients include both CMS and commerce domains. We …
Continue reading
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 20 features
  • CMS (25)
    8.9
    89%
  • Website integration (24)
    8.7
    87%
  • Product catalog & listings (25)
    8.5
    85%
  • Product management (25)
    4.8
    48%
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Pricing

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Unavailable

What is Optimizely Customized Commerce?

Optimizely Customized Commerce is a headless PaaS commerce solution built to scale commerce results for enterprise brands.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee required

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

Salesforce Commerce Cloud (formerly Demandware) is a cloud-based eCommerce solution that touts flexibility and scalability for enterprises. It features merchandising tools, such as sorting, filtering, and image zooming.

What is Wix?

Wix is a free, hosted website builder, designed to be user-friendly and customizable without requiring coding from the user. It is well-known for its eCommerce solution, which allows users to build an online store.

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Features

Online Storefront

Features for creating an online storefront with a browse-able product catalog.

7.5
Avg 7.7

Online Shopping Cart

Features that facilitate the collection of items so that customers can purchase them as a group.

8.7
Avg 7.6

Online Payment System

Features related to processing online payment for eCommerce purchases.

8.8
Avg 8.3

eCommerce Marketing

Features related to marketing for eCommerce websites

7.1
Avg 7.5

eCommerce Business Management

Features related to business management and administration of eCommerce operations

8.1
Avg 7.8
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Product Details

What is Optimizely Customized Commerce?

Optimizely Customized Commerce is a headless PaaS commerce solution built to scale commerce results for enterprise brands. Customized Commerce is used to:

-Deploy branded headless content and commerce experiences using a single solution to modernize a brand
-Personalize, segment, and target experiences to consumers to maximize engagement and spend
-Leverage multisite capabilities for global brands and or brand expansion
-Use WYSIWYG editors and visual tools to manage enterprise-grade commerce experiences
-Integrate to external systems or compose unique solutions with Optimizely

Optimizely Customized Commerce Features

Online Storefront Features

  • Supported: Product catalog & listings
  • Supported: Product management
  • Supported: Bulk product upload
  • Supported: Branding
  • Supported: Search & filter
  • Supported: Mobile storefront
  • Supported: Product variations
  • Supported: Subscriptions & downloads
  • Supported: Website integration
  • Supported: Visual customization
  • Supported: CMS
  • Supported: Customer service tools

Online Shopping Cart Features

  • Supported: Abandoned cart recovery
  • Supported: Tax calculator
  • Supported: Shipping calculator
  • Supported: Integration with Amazon
  • Supported: Integration with eBay
  • Supported: Checkout user experience

Online Payment System Features

  • Supported: PayPal integration
  • Supported: Returns & refunds
  • Supported: Single-click checkout
  • Supported: eCommerce security
  • Supported: Credit card transaction fee
  • Supported: B2B features

eCommerce Marketing Features

  • Supported: Promotions & discounts
  • Supported: Personalized recommendations
  • Supported: SEO
  • Supported: Product reviews
  • Supported: Social commerce integration
  • Supported: Customer registration

eCommerce Business Management Features

  • Supported: Multi-site management
  • Supported: Order processing
  • Supported: Inventory management
  • Supported: Accounting
  • Supported: Shipping
  • Supported: Custom functionality

Optimizely Customized Commerce Screenshots

Screenshot of Customizable checkout workflow to tailor customers checkout experience and increase conversions.Screenshot of Catalogs, custom attributes, UOM, catalog restrictions, and multiple sites are managed at once.Screenshot of Personalized promotions based on user web activity to drive conversion and increase average order value.Screenshot of Customized Recommendations ReportingScreenshot of Personalization

Optimizely Customized Commerce Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android

Optimizely Customized Commerce Downloadables

Frequently Asked Questions

Optimizely Customized Commerce is a headless PaaS commerce solution built to scale commerce results for enterprise brands.

BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce (Magento Commerce), and Salesforce Commerce Cloud are common alternatives for Optimizely Customized Commerce.

Reviewers rate CMS highest, with a score of 8.9.

The most common users of Optimizely Customized Commerce are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(53)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 26)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Optimizely is used as our CMS for managing contacts and products and for displaying our web catalog and processing transactions. It takes in data from both our ERP system and our PIM system. We also utilize it for managing, implementing, and connecting our Punchout System. We have automated SQL api jobs that run to connect up our CMS to our ERP/PIM
  • Job Management
  • Contact Management
  • User Impersonation
  • Product List Management
  • Brand vs Manufacturer vs Supplier Management
Optimizely works great for systems that will work alongside a PIM that have product catalogs of 2 million SKUs or less. The ability to connect Optimizely to PIM systems and ERP systems using jobs and then easily diagnose and troubleshoot those jobs is a strength of the system. Businesses that house over 2 million SKUs or that do not have a PIM system may find that the solutions are not for them.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Optimizely Commerce Cloud is a great digital experience platform (DXP) that enables companies to create a digital-first environment by combining commerce and commerce. Whether selling products or services, Optimizely Commerce Cloud provides tools for marketers to manage and update a site, leverage tools to drive personalization, and grow sales.
  • CMS
  • Shopping cart
  • Customization
  • Personalization
  • More out-of-the-box features
Great for B2C and B2B solutions when trying to develop specific business rules. The tech stack, combined with a good partner development firm, will help companies hit their desired solution. It comes standard with search tools and the ability to tie into personalization tools. The ability to tie into other modules or platforms gives it a leg up compared to competitors.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Optimizely Commerce Cloud to manage all of our websites across the company. It has been great and easy to organize when working across different brands/websites.
  • Easy to use
  • Easy to upgrade
  • Saves us time and money
  • I don’t have any at this moment.
Optimizely Commerce Cloud is ideal for any business or company looking to centralize their digital needs.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The console is being used to consume our PIM data and display it on 2 different websites (multichannel). The first site is B2B and has been live for almost 2 years, the other is B2C and will launch in the next couple of months. Optimizely Commerce Cloud also pulls in pricing and other elements from the ERP to display on the website and aid in the order-taking process.
  • The uptime appears reliable.
  • It provides an easy plug-in for AD 360-spin images.
  • The UI is intuitive.
  • Media library search in the console is impossible as it times out.
  • Error report email needs to give detailed information as to what the exact error is upon job failure.
  • Better handling of large amounts of data coming in from the PIM. 50k XML files a night is not usual, but it does happen on occasion. It just happens when you have 400k SKUs. Data clean-up is ongoing.
  • Out-of-the-box solutions for cross-selling, replacement parts, clearance, overstock, was/now sale pricing should be considered as a site is brought online instead of treated as an 'enhancement'.
  • The ability to consume category, attribute name, and sort order info provided from the PIM should also be an out-of-the-box function and not a 'future enhancement'.
  • The settings have to be the same for products on both channels, which is not ideal!
Our experience may be unique because we opted for an Epi core 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Optimizely Commerce Cloud is used by the company to publish catalogs/products to be sold on the B2C market.
  • Bulk updates
  • Related items
  • Variants
  • Warehouse management
  • Product search in a catalog
  • Products without variants
[With Optimizely Commerce Cloud,] adding catalogs/products is very easy to do. Products are easily translated. I would love to see a search engine in the Catalog UI.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Optimizely Commerce Cloud is the platform upon which we have built a direct-to-consumer eCommerce website. It represents our brand to the end consumers and also facilitates the sale of products. All departments within the organization have a stake in the platform, but the primary interactions are within the Digital Marketing team, IT, and Product. Optimizely has given us an excellent balance between out-of-the-box functionality, and customization opportunities, which together allowed us to produce the eCommerce site we envisioned at an efficient pace, and to maintain and expand it on an ongoing basis.
  • Building blocks: develop in reusable pieces, rather than developing every page individually
  • Dynamic capabilities: data-driven and dynamic generation of content, rather than static
  • Headless platform: integrating with other systems and channels is easy.
  • Promos out-of-box capabilities are limited.
  • Catalog audit history could be expanded.
  • Talent pool for development could be expanded.
Very strong fit for mid-sized organizations that need more flexibility and customization as compared to canned or template-based offerings, but also want the efficiency and externalization that comes with a pre-existing, cloud-hosted platform (as compared to a full custom offering). Works well with a PIM and more mature catalog data in order to fully leverage the dynamic data capabilities.
Chris Osterhout | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
As a client partner, we look for best of breed solutions for our clients to solve their business needs. We use and recommend Episerver Commerce to any client that is looking for a solution including content management and commerce. Having a single, unified platform to work with not only eliminates the data silos that often exist between commerce and marketing but allow for a more personalized and contextualized experience which drives order volume and increase customer retention.
  • It integrates extremely well. It is very uncommon in today's digital ecosystem that e-commerce platforms stand alone. Most of them are ERPs, PIMs, CRMs, MAPs, etc., that power them. Episerver is built to allow for this level of integration and it makes the experience for the customer seamless.
  • It's pluggable. Unique to Episerver is the ability to tack on their other SaaS products with ease. If you want to add AI, you simply plug it in and it simply works.
  • It's fast. WIth eCommerce, speed is of the utmost importance. If the site is slow, users will abandon.
  • 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.
At least in my opinion, if you are looking for a .NET eCommerce platform that works on-prem or in a PaaS model, Episerver is the only platform on the market that performs well in those scenarios. If you are a mom and pop shop that is selling 10 t-shirts online, there are certainly more cost effective solutions on the market to handle that business need.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Episerver was brought in to replace our previous CMS. It was used largely by the eCommerce team as well as marketing, analytics, and SEO. Episerver gave the e-commerce team more freedom to make content changes on the website that previously had to be coded through IT.
  • Personalized CMS experience based on company's needs.
  • Easy to make content changes and updates that did not have to be coded using HTML.
  • 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.
I think Episerver works better as a content management tool for websites that are more editorial versus in the retail field. Managing a large catalog of products was difficult in the tool because it was a very slow process to load everything and using the search tool didn't help very much. I was with Episerver for about 2 years before moving on to a different company but during this time we weren't able to completely transfer from the previous CMS to Episerver due to technical issues.
Jared Wooden | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As an agency Episerver Digital Commerce is one of the many platforms we recommend and implement. It addresses the need for a commerce platform with strong CMS capabilities.
  • Content management.
  • PIM-like admin screens.
  • Reusable asset management.
  • 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.
Suitable for a e-commerce site with a reasonable # of skus (<10,000) and non-technical product information managers. Less appropriate for more than 10,000 skus, complex import mappings.
December 19, 2018

A great platform

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are an Episerver partner and implement both CMS and Commerce solutions for clients and provide consultation services regarding the product.
  • Integrates with a top class CMS system.
  • Has easy APIs for implementing complex solutions.
  • Great platform for creating great UX solutions for visitors - performs well and is easy to implement a great website for visitors.
  • Integrates with many other Episerver products (Find, Campaigns, CMS, etc)
  • 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.
Well suited for a large majority of B2C and B2B websites. There are not many reasons not to use it unless there is something extremely unconventional with the proposed solutions product/order/inventory/pricing/promotion handling.
Tim Hardy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are a Direct Sales company that employs Sellers to sell our products to others. We use Episerver Digital Commerce to provide an e-commerce portal to each of our Sellers. Each Seller gets a website that they can give to their customers to allow them to buy products online. We also give them an admin portal to manage their business. Within our company, we use Episerver to manage content, products, pricing, etc. It is used by many different departments within our company. We use the content management features of Episerver, epiCMS, as well as the e-commerce features, epiCommerce.
  • 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.
  • 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.
Episerver Digital Commerce may be a good fit for you if you do not have your own development team, do not need any custom development, and the out-of-the-box experience takes care of all your business needs.

If you need significant custom development and value testable, discoverable software, then Episerver Digital Commerce will not be a good fit for your organization.
October 19, 2017

Episerver with Ease

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Episerver in running our online commerce site.
  • Easily add new products
  • Easily update products
  • Easily find products
  • Not always intuitive
  • Slow initial setup
Good for a basic setup of eCommerce where products get removed and added often or frequently.
October 11, 2017

Episerver Review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
We are an implementation partner of Episerver selling EPI licenses and solutions. Our clients include both CMS and commerce domains. We have developed multiple sites with Episerver. The websites are mostly used as online order taking tool that serves the B2B industry.
  • CMS capabilities. It supports the marketing strategy pretty well.
  • Custom pricing (qty based or market specific). Very useful in B2B domain.
  • It supports plug and play architecture pretty well. Makes it easy to build solutions on top of it.
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
We're an agency, promoting Episerver and implementing digital experiences through the Episerver products. It's frequently global organizations, wanting to leverage the Episever product as a global marketing tool for digital marketing and e-Commerce. Looking at some very general client cases, we see they are benefiting from a low time-to-market on content and a seamless integration between CMS and Commerce. It makes the life of any merchandiser or marketer easier, as they can contribute to shared work across these sometimes isolated business units.
  • Authoring Experience - it's easy to learn and understand. We frequently do demos and training sessions as part of our deliveries, and it resonates well with the teams.
  • Development Experience - we find that developers like working on Episerver, as it's almost considered a developer-first platform. Continuous releases, cool features and a solid code API makes it fun to work with.
  • Time to market - from project definition to project delivery, we manage to get there quicker on the average Episerver project compared to competing platforms.
  • 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.
Well suited:
- Digital Marketing
- e-Commerce

Less suited:
- Financial and Portfolio Management platforms
- Intranets
Nadia Lotter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Episerver is our e-commerce platform used by the e-commerce team. It's essentially in delivery for our B2C business and integration with our CORE ERP system. Having previously been on Magento, we were looking for a more intuitive e-commerce platform. One with a robust personalisation engine that focuses on content and was easier to use and integrate with. Episerver addresses all those needs, as well as being a stable platform hosted with Azure. We really struggled with Magento performance in the past.
  • Personsaliation
  • Content Management
  • Account Management
  • 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
It's well suited for all personalisation and front end requirements. The commerce engine, however, is clunky and difficult to use and a lot of what we would expect to be best of breed user experience for a commerce catalog management is not out of the box with EPI. We have had multiple customisations to the platform and for a retailer, there should not be so much customization required as it's extremely costly to manage. The VM/merch tool is non-existent and we really need this.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Episerver Commerce to manage product libraries for several brands in a consumer facing environment, additionally, we use this in a customer/closed user group only facing role. We needed a framework that was flexible, supported multiple brands, languages, and currencies, as we're a predominately MS software user, this .NET package was a good fit for us.
  • Very hard to call out any example of what Episerver Commerce delivers particularly well compared to other platforms
  • Visitor groups is useful for targeting content
  • Integration with inRiver PIM in DXC environment
Episerver Commerce is an all rounder; a good solution that can be built on. Integration and good partner support have been painful.
Josh Eason | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Episerver Digital Commerce powers Feizy.com. Feizy is one of the country’s largest manufacturers of fine hand-knotted, hand-tufted and power-loomed rugs. Administered by our marketing team and enabled by our IT group, the Episerver platform is Feizy's first foray into a rich, shoppable experience -- allowing our customers instant, self-service access to real-time inventory, pricing and account status. We are deeply dedicated to our customers, especially the design community; as artisans supporting other artists, Feizy chose Episerver for the robust toolset that would allow us to quickly and fully make our product discoverable and shoppable to the designer segment.
  • Quick and easy access to make real-time content updates
  • Comprehensive tracking and reporting of administrative and transactional events
  • Seamless integration with other popular platforms for card processing, shipping and distribution, ratings and reviews and more
  • 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.
Episerver is excellently suited for SMBs and larger companies alike. It's particularly well suited for a company like ours: lean and nimble, moving quickly and that requires an easy to use platform that can meet changing business demands.
Gary Anderson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Episerver Digital Commerce as our primary website CMS and product information systems. We drive a global website with all regions and multiple languages for all product groups. EPi creates a single place where we can manage and distribute content globally and consistently. This allows oversight by a small group and flexibility for our authors to drive personalization and increased customer focused materials.
  • Manages our product data
  • Personalizes content based on persona type
  • Manages international sites including by region and language.
  • 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.
Well suited to global organizations, especially B2B who aren't focused on transacting online, but more focused on presenting a broad portfolio range. For companies with a smaller set of products and product types, I believe that the personalization would work better and be able to drive specific customer experiences around products and solutions.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Episerver is used as our e-commerce platform. The platform is managed by an e-commerce department that sits in between sales, IT, and marketing. We service multiple product types. Books, e-books, journal subscriptions, live events, online training, and membership. Episerver also serves as a central my account area for members to access and manage all of these purchased products. It has centralized the selling and management of multiple product types on one platform.
  • Content Management - Since Episerver was previously a content management platform, the tools to manage content are easy to learn and use.
  • 3rd Party Tool Integration - many opportunities to integrate 3rd party tools and plugins that cover many areas including email marketing, analytics, and site personalization.
  • Adequate ability to integrate with our backend CMS and accounting software.
  • 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.
Episerver is particularly suited to selling simple straightforward products online. It is a well-functioning e-commerce platform that is easy to update and maintain. It is also mobile optimized which is huge. But complications come in with more complicated products. And if you have a robust telephone customer service center. Products that need a lot of customization and/or many different product types. If you are experienced in the e-commerce/IT world you know that the further away you get from a base installation (more specific code customizations), the harder it is to upgrade and take advantage of plugins provided by Episerver and third parties. You know. Scope creep. No platform in the world is immune to this problem and neither is Episerver.
Ted Davis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used as the organization's primary CMS for its multiple digital portals.
  • Easy to correct or update dynamic content.
  • Easy to restructure a page.
  • 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.
The platform is best suited for e-commerce where blocks of content are fixed and interchangeable. It's less suited to a site with lots of dynamic content, experiential needs, and customization requirements.
Paul Alkema | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Episerver is being used by our B2B company's front-facing website. We use it to manage roughly 3,500 product groups, 300 categories, and 31,000 SKUs.
  • Manage content
  • Add properties easily
  • Versioning
  • Multilingual support
  • 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.
It's well suited for small websites.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
One of our e-commerce websites currently runs on Episerver Digital Commerce. Episerver was implemented a couple years back to replace an older e-commerce website that had poor functionality and very limited flexibility. It was put in place to improve the current e-commerce experience as well as put the business in a position to grow and expand its digital offerings.
  • Flexible architecture that provides a solid foundation for a custom website.
  • Continuous release cycle that allows for quick innovation and advancement of the core platform.
  • Solid product offering outside Digital Commerce, with strong CMS and search options.
  • 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.
Episerver is well suited for customers that need both a strong CMS and strong commerce offering. Most platforms skew in one direction or the other, either focusing on a shopping cart or content. Episerver provides a very solid offering in both categories, which makes it a great choice for a business that needs both but wants to avoid integrating two different platforms together.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's used as a CMS platform for our public marketing and e-commerce websites. It is used by our consumer interactive group as well as e-commerce group. The number one problem it addresses was speed to make changes and roll out new content. Our previous systems were not efficient at allowing business users to author and publish content in a timely manner.
  • Allows developers to create a highly customized platform without getting in the way.
  • Pays a lot of attention to customer feedback, and rolls that into a product road map in relatively short timeframes.
  • Provides a good UI to author content, which is always difficult to keep up if you have an in-house system.
  • 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.
Episerver is a great platform for any team with .NET MVC experience. It is one of the few enterprise CMS/E-Commerce platforms that is truly .NET MVC. This allows your development team to take full advantage of all the latest .NET capabilities. It does a good job of being able to handle multi-tenancy, and many of the authoring tools are simple and make sense.

I can't think of any scenarios where it could not be successfully deployed.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Episerver Digital Commerce is used as our B2B eCommerce platform as well as for a CMS-only site for one of our brands. On the B2B side, it allows more than 10,000 customers to purchase our products in a secure, private portal. It is managed and used primarily by our marketing department, but customer service participated in user management and IT participates in the integration of Episerver with other systems.
  • Web content management -- the interface is drag and drop and makes it very easy for business users to create product pages.
  • In site search with Episerver Find -- it is easy to promote attributes and make quick tweaks to fine-tune results.
  • Integrate with other systems -- we have integrated with our ERP, our product information management system, our digital asset management system and our marketing automation system to take advantage of investments we have already made in content and customer data.
  • 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.
I think it's very well suited to many scenarios, and it would be hard to beat it from an ease of use standpoint. I have not found an enterprise-level system that is easier for business users to use. It's great for web content management and catalog management via commerce as well as for personalization and the ability to serve up targeted content via user groups.
February 16, 2017

Episerver Experience

Kris Parchman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Episerver as our CMS and Commerce platform within Digital Marketing. It allows us to provide up to date product offerings.
  • We are on Episerver 8, but I have reviewed Episerver 10 and like the interface.
  • Compared to most CMS systems, Episerver is easy to use.
  • 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.
Episerver is suitable for B2B or B2C commerce.
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