A Candid Look At hybris From a Developer's Standpoint
October 27, 2015

A Candid Look At hybris From a Developer's Standpoint

Carter Lathrop | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Hybris 4

Modules Used

  • Product Cockpit, Web Content Management

Overall Satisfaction with Hybris

As part of a project delivery practice, a team of engineers and myself implemented solutions with Hybris to develop a online web store for a major US clothing retailer. As an eCommerce platform, it met ours and our clients needs very well in terms of product management at a very large scale. Millions of products and related product data were organized and handled well using OOB Hybris while our custom modules and software supported and extended the code base to meet our clients needs. It also had out of the box support for promotions, gifts, and payment solutions (among others) which made our development time a more efficient.
  • Large scale product and user data management.
  • Out of the box support for common eCommerce functionality.
  • Robust platform that is supported well and consistently by the Hybris team who are available for direct support if needed.
  • Integrates well with other services if Hybris does not meet all business needs.
  • Localization for multi-national support was easy to implement.
  • Though there is an online community presence for support, it is not as strong as other platforms I have used.
  • The Content Management System though functional is a bit dated and can be difficult for non technical business owners to manage. Other industry leading CMS solutions are generally used in conjunction with Hybris in my experience.
  • Product indexing and search also is not up to industry leaders, used another product in conjunction with hybris to accomplish this business need.
  • Customer service management was actually a strong force in the platform. There was out of the box functionality to manage customer's orders as a customer service representative and it was easily customizable to add shipment tracking information updating.
  • Product management was an easy task for business owners, being able to manage and view details for a multitude of product variations was a strong point of hybris in my opinion.
  • Shopping cart functionality was easy to customize to business owners needs, customizations put in place to save a user's payment data and shipping preference allowed for faster lead conversions.
Hybris is a strong contender in the eCommerce platform race. It's closest competitor is probably ATG whereas Endeca, from the standpoint of our projects, is more of a supplementary tool to assist it. I and others have found hybris' strengths in that it's a light weight and very modular system which can rely on other tools where it's own abilities may fall short. ATG tries to do everything and be an all encompassing framework but in reality it is very hard to do all things at once and be great at all of them. Our philosophy was to use hybris' modularity and take what it does extremely well and leverage it along with supplementing tools such as Endeca to provide a solution that excels across the board. Being able to customize a solution to a business need is an important part delivering the right solution. The flexibility of hybris is the one thing that stood out to me and was most likely the reason for it's use in our project.
For a large scale, multi-national eCommerce application where a solution needs to be built with heavy customizations, I believe Hybris is the way to go. It provides a great starting point and scales well with proper development practices. Though be prepared to adopt supplementary solutions for things such as CMS and/or product search/indexing to achieve the most out of this product. Future releases of Hybris are improving on these two things though so it could be the case that these have been updated to leading industry standards, be sure to inquire appropriately.

SAP Commerce Cloud Feature Ratings

Product catalog & listings
8
Product management
10
Bulk product upload
8
Branding
6
Mobile storefront
4
Product variations
10
Website integration
5
Visual customization
3
CMS
3
Abandoned cart recovery
7
Checkout user experience
9
eCommerce security
8
Promotions & discounts
9
Personalized recommendations
9
Multi-site management
9
Order processing
8
Inventory management
8
Shipping
8
Custom functionality
9