Demandware: Held Back by an Inconsistent and Inconvenient User Experience
March 25, 2016
Demandware: Held Back by an Inconsistent and Inconvenient User Experience
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Demandware
We are using Demandware as our commerce platform for our core website. The tool is administered by IT and by the Digital Commerce portion of the Marketing Department. Features and functionality are managed by IT, while content, pricing, promotions, and other Business Manager functions are handled by marketers. Demandware was adopted to replace or unify internally developed commerce tools and to provide a cohesive content management solution for the core website.
- Demandware business manager features a very robust set of options to accomplish many merchandising and content tasks out of the box. For typical retailers, there are usually very simple ways to accomplish common tasks.
- The ability to schedule content and tie unique content to session data is particularly useful and fully featured.
- Many features that would typically be missing from a home-grown CMS and would require development are included in business manager and easily controlled by marketers.
- The UX within the Business Manager portion of Demandware, the primary interface for marketers, is generally a confusing, inconsistent mess. Particularly infuriating are the lack of consistency for search and sort behavior within the tool.
- A number of useful features, such as the ability to set schedules or tie features to unique customer segments, have seemingly arbitrary limitations imposed.
- Demandware's idea of leveraging the community to be a learning resource and a sounding board for new ideas and features is a nice theory, but in practice it doesn't work for businesses with a lot of customization. I'm left with the impression that individual support is not a priority.
- Despite it's shortcomings in UX and occasional arbitrary limitations, Demandware is still a pretty efficient CMS. It has expanded many of the capabilities and options for our marketing organization, which has led to speedier and more effective deployment.
- For a platform of its size, Demandware experiences far more performance issues, including downtime, than I would have expected. In those scenarios, support has been spotty and transparency on the Demandware side has been consistently lacking.
- There seem to a significant number of problems integrating Demandware into legacy systems. We're still experiencing issues that were probably introduced during our implementation. We've had some success with Demandware, but it's certainly been held back by many of the problems I've called out.
Major selling points of Demandware were that it appeared to require far fewer dedicated IT resources after implementation, and that the content management seemed more robust out of the box than the competition. The fact that all of Demandware's resources were dedicated to continuously updating and improving the platform, and that we would have access to those improvements without requiring a new implementation, were also major selling points.