Having one platform is a game changer when it comes to personalizing and contextualizing the customer experience. You can personalize what customers see on non-commerce pages based on what types of products that have purchased. This makes digital marketing even more powerful than ever before. Sharing a single editor experience saves organizations with cross training and upgrades. Overall, after using a single platform, I can't imagine trying to run two of them anymore.
It was nice to be able to share a CMS with other departments that we regularly worked with. Episerver was able to solve a few issues we've had before where every content change and homepage change had to be coded by another department instead of our team quickly making the change.
If our needs would have been completely met by both products, having their single integrated platform would have been a great experience. Since we've needed tight integration with a lot of custom code, the difficulty in integrating epiCommerce and epiCMS from an api, combined with a complete lack of apis for certain features, has proved to be very costly to our organization.
Obviously having the eCommerce platform and CMS under one roof is ideal. Most eCommerce platforms offer some degree of CMS capability. Episerver is one of the best in this category, though.
I think it will have a great impact. Currently Episerver has a native solution for CMS and a commerce solution bought from Mediachase. Episerver's native APIs have more caching capabilities and are tied more towards the other CMS features. We would love to let the commerce solution and database go away.
More seamless collaboration between departments splitting focus of merchandising and marketing. Time to market on campaigns gets way lower, as the coordination between these groups are in a single environment.
CMS and Episerver Digital Commerce integration is essential. Episerver products are much improved since v6. There is still potential improvement in integration, however having a fully rounded e-comm engine as an offering alongside the CMS is a major bonus and definitely ahead of some competitors.
