Episerver - A good platform

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.