Highly capable and customizable, but with a similarly high TCO.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We currently use Optimizely as our B2B product ordering website for our customers. We deployed it to help ease the ordering and reordering process for our customers. Our old site used legacy technology, was very slow, and didn't support faceted search, rich descriptions, or product documentation, and couldn't really be modified to support new features. We wanted a hosted platform, that met these challenges and was a system that we could grow into.
Pros
- Very flexible with integration and workflow capabilities with other systems (ERP, CRM, PIM, etc)
- Very rich product detail pages and attributes
- Flexible role-based access for many different login types.
Cons
- Difficult to access internal database
- Not easy to maintain without development resources
- TCO is quite high compared to competitors
Likelihood to Recommend
With a skilled internal development staff, Optimizely is extremely flexible to do just about anything you want it to do. The look, site workflow, and external integration capabilities are stellar. Overall site performance is quite good as well. The hosting management team also does a great job with security and keeping underlying infrastructure (AWS) up to date and using best practices. Without internal development staff, expect a high cost for an outside development partner for implementation, integration, and routine maintenance and updates.
