Overview
What is Optimizely Customized Commerce?
Optimizely Customized Commerce is a headless PaaS commerce solution built to scale commerce results for enterprise brands.
Overall, Truly Recommend It, but It Requires a Good Partner
Good for the Price and Easy to Use!
Show Me - Don't Tell Me. Ask for a Working Demo!
A Very Flexible, Yet Easy Commerce Tool!
Flexibility Meets Efficiency
An insiders look at Episerver Commerce
Difficult tool to use for managing products
Epi Commerce rides the coattails of Epi CMS
A great platform
Episerver, a legacy enterprise CMS/Commerce solution that needs to improve their technology and recommend more reliable and professional vendors
Episerver with Ease
Episerver Review
Identified as Leader by Gartner - Agreed and deserved!
A great platform, but work to do on the commerce and catalog engine
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
- CMS (25)8.989%
- Website integration (24)8.787%
- Product catalog & listings (25)8.585%
- Product management (25)4.848%
Pricing
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
Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?
1 person also want pricing
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.
Features
Online Storefront
Features for creating an online storefront with a browse-able product catalog.
- 8.5Product catalog & listings(25) Ratings
Products are easy to browse; listings include descriptions, photos, 360-degree views, and/or videos.
- 4.8Product management(25) Ratings
Product catalog can be easily updated.
- 8.7Bulk product upload(21) Ratings
Admins can upload products in bulk using spreadsheets.
- 5.2Branding(23) Ratings
Storefront is part of a unified customer experience of the brand across channels (social media, physical store, website, etc.)
- 7Mobile storefront(20) Ratings
Customers can easily shop on mobile devices; storefront is responsive or mobile optimized.
- 7Product variations(21) Ratings
Products with variations or configurable options are easy to list and easy to browse.
- 8.7Website integration(24) Ratings
Integrates with an existing company website or blog.
- 8.6Visual customization(23) Ratings
Users can customize the look & feel of the storefront; storefront is visually attractive.
- 8.9CMS(25) Ratings
Beyond product catalog, includes basic content creation and management features such as blogging capabilities.
Online Shopping Cart
Features that facilitate the collection of items so that customers can purchase them as a group.
- 8.7Abandoned cart recovery(15) Ratings
Saves contents of abandoned carts and allows customers to purchase on a future visit; may send a reminder email to the customer and/or a report to the merchant to help convert abandoned carts into sales.
- 8.7Checkout user experience(19) Ratings
Easy for customers to view shopping cart and checkout; maintains a consistent, trusted look & feel.
Online Payment System
Features related to processing online payment for eCommerce purchases.
- 8.8eCommerce security(17) Ratings
Security measures are in place to prevent a breach of sensitive payment information.
eCommerce Marketing
Features related to marketing for eCommerce websites
- 8.4Promotions & discounts(21) Ratings
Includes tools for offering and redeeming coupons, promotional codes, and time-based discounts.
- 8.5Personalized recommendations(21) Ratings
Display or recommend certain products depending on the customer’s identity or shopping/browsing history.
- 4.4SEO(21) Ratings
The platform & templates help users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.
eCommerce Business Management
Features related to business management and administration of eCommerce operations
- 8.6Multi-site management(20) Ratings
Administrators can manage multiple storefronts or websites under one umbrella.
- 8.8Order processing(19) Ratings
Includes tools or integrations for order processing.
- 8.8Inventory management(15) Ratings
Includes tools or integrations for managing inventory.
- 8.8Shipping(16) Ratings
Includes tools or integrations for order fulfillment of physical products.
- 5.7Custom functionality(23) Ratings
Users are able to customize the functionality of their eCommerce operation with custom code or add-ons.
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is Optimizely Customized Commerce?
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
Optimizely Customized Commerce Competitors
Optimizely Customized Commerce Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Windows, Linux |
Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android |
Optimizely Customized Commerce Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(53)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-14 of 14)Overall, Truly Recommend It, but It Requires a Good Partner
- CMS
- Shopping cart
- Customization
- Personalization
- More out-of-the-box features
Good for the Price and Easy to Use!
- Easy to use
- Easy to upgrade
- Saves us time and money
- I don’t have any at this moment.
Flexibility Meets Efficiency
- 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.
An insiders look at Episerver Commerce
- 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.
Difficult tool to use for managing products
- 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.
Episerver, a legacy enterprise CMS/Commerce solution that needs to improve their technology and recommend more reliable and professional vendors
- 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.
If you need significant custom development and value testable, discoverable software, then Episerver Digital Commerce will not be a good fit for your organization.
Episerver Review
- 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.
Identified as Leader by Gartner - Agreed and deserved!
- 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.
- Digital Marketing
- e-Commerce
Less suited:
- Financial and Portfolio Management platforms
- Intranets
A great platform, but work to do on the commerce and catalog engine
- 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
Episerver - A good 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.
Know What You Want EpiServer To Do Before Buying.
- 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.
A strong CMS and commerce offering that continues to evolve and grow
- 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 - One of the best .NET CMS Platforms
- 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.
I can't think of any scenarios where it could not be successfully deployed.
Using Episerver Digital Commerce for B2B
- 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.