A great platform, but work to do on the commerce and catalog engine
September 11, 2017

A great platform, but work to do on the commerce and catalog engine

Nadia Lotter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Episerver Digital Commerce

Episerver is our e-commerce platform used by the e-commerce team. It's essentially in delivery for our B2C business and integration with our CORE ERP system. Having previously been on Magento, we were looking for a more intuitive e-commerce platform. One with a robust personalisation engine that focuses on content and was easier to use and integrate with. Episerver addresses all those needs, as well as being a stable platform hosted with Azure. We really struggled with Magento performance in the past.
  • 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 was by far the most user friendly content platform allowing our business to easily manage the content with ease resulting in an overall productivity increase and time for the team to spend less time doing content management and more time managing the personalization benefits the platform represents.
It's well suited for all personalisation and front end requirements. The commerce engine, however, is clunky and difficult to use and a lot of what we would expect to be best of breed user experience for a commerce catalog management is not out of the box with EPI. We have had multiple customisations to the platform and for a retailer, there should not be so much customization required as it's extremely costly to manage. The VM/merch tool is non-existent and we really need this.

Optimizely Customized Commerce Feature Ratings

Product catalog & listings
1
Product management
1
Bulk product upload
1
Branding
1
Mobile storefront
5
Product variations
1
Website integration
5
Visual customization
5
CMS
8
Abandoned cart recovery
1
Checkout user experience
8
eCommerce security
5
Promotions & discounts
4
Personalized recommendations
4
SEO
4
Multi-site management
2
Order processing
2
Inventory management
2
Shipping
2
Custom functionality
2

Using Episerver Digital Commerce

3 - Ecommerce Manager
Product Manager
Ecommerce Co Ordinator
Development - We have alot of issues pop up from time to time that need to be fixed by developers which becomes costly.
  • Content Management
  • Product Management
  • Promotion Mamagement
  • Personilisalition
  • Loyalty
  • too early to tell
  • Loyaly
  • Epi Triggers with Perform/Reach
Really want to be able to spend more time and resources on rolling out new things with Episerver but at the moment we seem to be fixing alot of issues and pain points with the way our system was setup.
  • Too soon to tell

Evaluating Episerver Digital Commerce and Competitors

Yes - Magento 1.7 - Not a content engine with personsalisation
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
Content and Personalisation engine
Go through the commerce and catalog manage in more detail.

Episerver Digital Commerce Implementation

Fully understand what is OOTB feature of the platform before proceeding to develop. Then implement a customization of key features once you can prove they are working as OOTB to make them more user friendly and productive for the business. Eg pre order and e gift card.
Change management was minimal - We embrace change as a digital business. We had more issues with the vendor, not our internal change.
  • Vendor pitched a product and features that were included, but upon delivery said they were not out of the box features and significant custimisation would need to occur
  • Project was 3 months late
  • Team was change over mid project and we had to communicate all out requirements from start, even after contrct and SLAs were signed

Episerver Digital Commerce Support

We had an incredible team at Episerver Supporting us with the go live, reviewing our integration, and pushing our integration partner to deliver a quality product.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
Not kept informed
No - Did not know this was available, but might be too costly for us as we are still only a SMB.
Yes - Still has not been resolved, its a bug within visitor groups.
We were really struggling to get our 3rd part agency to deliver our project. They changed teams multiple times during the development stage, we were needing to constantly re communicate issues and requirements to the 3rd party agency. Episerver speed in and provided a project director to manage and guide to project and integration. We ran into issues when setting up our hosting on web apps for azure and Episerver team escalated this and worked overtime to assist us with the issue. Even though we are a small brand, we have big dreams. The Episerver team, NAtalia, Marcu and Kim, don't care how small our business is, they care that they make the difference they can to really help us grow. They empower us to be successful and this is why we continue to work with the episerver business. We know we are in safe hands, and have chosen the right partner to help us as we grow our b2c offering.

Using Episerver Digital Commerce

The CMS has clearly had time to evolve as a tool but the digital commerce aspect is outdated and needs to be reviewed as it is not intuitive to the admins using it.
ProsCons
Consistent
Do not like to use
Unnecessarily complex
Slow to learn
Cumbersome
Feel nervous using
Lots to learn
  • Mostly content management, front end content
  • The catalog management of product etc.
  • Promotiontional setup
  • The logic behind where everything is kept