Updated March 10, 2015

User Review: "KalioCommerce - A True Partner"

Libu Chacko

Director Of E-Commerce

Positive PromotionsInternet, 201-500 employees

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Software Version
Enterprise

Modules Used
Kalio Mail, Kalio Enterprise

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently using KalioCommerce (KC) as our online storefront. All web operations are using this as a form of not only presenting the products online but to also facilitate ordering. It serves not only as a platform for customers to buy items, but also as a tool for our customer service agents to assist our phone customers. Our strategic sales department also uses it to drive sales toward their book of business.

Pros and Cons

Great customer service. While working with them, I never felt like they were trying to sell me the next upgrade or service. They were always ready to trouble shoot a problem with me and figure out what the best way to solve it.
Expert knowledge of E-Commerce. By virtue of having so many clients, they are able to see what works and what doesn't work and help you apply it to your business.
The platform itself allows you to do practically anything you want to do within reason. We were able to achieve most of our requests by simply working with Kalio's support engineers coupled with our own marketing and technical team. I found their support engineers to be strong on the technical side but still able to communicate effectively with those that might not be technically inclined.

Because Kalio has a growing client base, I find them a bit understaffed. The speed at which our company was growing, we needed to lean on them more, but they weren't always able to deliver because of the sheer volume of requests compared to their staff.
It's difficult to physically write code within the space they have provided. I find that I have to copy and paste the code into a different text editor to read it better.

Return on Investment

Not needing to worry about all the headaches of running a website that needs to be up. If you were to run that in-house, you would easily get a return within the first year alone.
Allows you to focus on your business and what you're good at. The place that I worked at was not an IT firm by any stretch. Outsourcing key IT infrastructure to Kalio freed up resources and allowed focus.

Likelihood to Recommend

I can only speak in terms of Enterprise clients as I haven't had any experience with their smaller platforms. That being said, I think your firm would benefit the most if you fall in the following:

Little to no web technology staff
$20M+ in sales online
Little to no idea of how to run an ecommerce website
Sales/revenue or growth in general has plateaued

After working with Kalio, I believe the following will work best:

Invest in your technical knowledge and development team so you don't have to rely on Kalio for all changes. While you can't get away with utilizing Kalio completely, you can do about 95% of what you want done if you have a knowledgeable web team.
If you cannot afford to hire or cannot find an ecommerce guru, lean on Kalio for their industry knowledge and ecommerce experience.
Sign up for their Optimizely A/B testing package. If you have experience running A/B testing and have the bandwidth to actually execute tests on a monthly basis, then sign up for the lowest package. Otherwise, let them drive and execute the testing. The individual running it now (Matt B. as of March 2014) is very knowledgeable and does nothing else except testing for clients.

Likelihood to Renew

By re-platforming, we could potentially lose over 2 years. The first 6-12 months in physically moving the website over to another service, and then another 6-12 months in learning the new service and all of its intricacies. We found we wouldn't gain much by being stagnant for possibly 2 years.