General purpose e-commerce solution
February 01, 2018

General purpose e-commerce solution

Sean Scott | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Oracle ATG Web Commerce (legacy ATG Platform)

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Commerce Cloud

We use Oracle ATG Web Commerce in our organization to support our e-commerce site. It provides the basic engine for our online commerce web site as well as functionality for managing our product catalog, our sales and promotional offerings, and our in-house customer service agent portal. We are currently using an older version, version 10.2. This is due mainly to the effort that would be required to migrate customizations to a newer version and intend to sunset most of the features of ATG in favor of in-house code.
  • Product and SKU management
  • Product page display
  • The schema design within ATG is poor. It does not follow accepted standards. For example, column naming is inconsistent and generalized, with multiple (unrelated) tables using column names like "ID" as primary/foreign keys. This is a barrier to an intuitive understanding of the schema. Out of the box, the schema is missing many important foreign key relationships. In fact, the publishing schema explicitly prohibits FK relationships, causing data inconsistencies when ATG's black-box algorithms fail. We've built an impressive arsenal of custom scripts specifically for handling the many exceptions and orphan conditions that arise from this design practice.
  • The job scheduler is poorly designed. It uses a database table to manage message queueing. The processes flows as follows: Messages are inserted into a table. Then, a scheduled process selects messages, applies them, updates the message row on success/failure, then goes back and looks for messages that are "complete" in order to delete them. It performs this in a serialized loop that is inefficient and heavy on database resources. There are far better ways for processing message queues than trying to leverage a database.
  • We've been on ATG for several years so it's difficult to quantify its impact on AOV and conversion compared to other products.
  • Mobile in ATG is not the greatest. We chose to abandon ATG's native mobile offering in favor of a more flexible and fluid mobile engine built in house at less expense and requiring lower maintenance.
We're married to Oracle ATG Web Commerce for the time being, and have been users for about six years now. We are slowly moving auxiliary features out of ATG and into custom in house solutions that give us purpose built, more responsive, and more appropriate functionality. Eventually, ATG will serve only core features like catalog management and order processing. All other activities will be handled externally as microservices that we control, rather than relying on the black box of ATG.
Oracle ATG Web Commerce has its roots in older technologies and design from years ago. Over time it's been updated but shortcomings in the original design linger in the product's foundation. It is probably a good, general commerce solution for shops that don't require extensive customization of their web presence but if you find yourself needing to categorize products or offerings in "unusual" ways, or include properties that fall out of the mainstream, the burden of customization will be high.

Oracle Commerce Feature Ratings

Product catalog & listings
8
Product management
8
Bulk product upload
4
Branding
6
Mobile storefront
4
Product variations
8
Website integration
5
Visual customization
6
CMS
3
Abandoned cart recovery
2
Checkout user experience
3
eCommerce security
4
Promotions & discounts
8
Personalized recommendations
1
SEO
2
Multi-site management
Not Rated
Order processing
5
Inventory management
2
Shipping
2
Custom functionality
3

Oracle Commerce Cloud Implementation