Please, Be Cautious of Orderhive
April 22, 2019
Please, Be Cautious of Orderhive
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Orderhive
We planned for Orderhive to be implemented in the e-commerce department of one of the businesses that I consult with. The department at that business was, at the time, using an archaic, industry-specific ERP system, that was holding the business back from growing. After comparing a range of vendors, we selected Orderhive due to the ability for it to be customized to suit our business.
- Around 18 months ago I started conversations with Orderhive as a potential vendor to run a large portion of our ecommerce business. It seemed promising, and the idea that the Plus (now called Enterprise) solution was customisable was the reason I decided to select Orderhive.
- There was a significant amount of due-diligence from my end. It took me around 6 months to get my head around what features the software currently had, and what we would need to have Orderhive complete as a customisation.
- This in itself was also quite a bit of work - there were a number of revisions to the contract documents, created by a non-technical sales representative. My concerns started around this point when I was unable to speak with a technical representative to discuss, in more detail, how each feature would work.
- The google doc that I created to try to capture the detail of each feature was simply copy and pasted in to the contract document - meaning that if I missed something then it was going to be developed incorrectly. It seemed that there was no attempt whatsoever from Orderhive to truly understand what it was that we required on a deep level.
- Nonetheless, once we signed the contract, and we paid the deposit, things were underway - and I will admit it did seem promising. Within around 8 weeks Orderhive had set up the staging and production server environments and had completed some very basic functionalities such as adding an additional column to the Kanban order view.
- However, once the very basic customisations were completed, things completely stopped. It was tough work from my part to get the Orderhive team together to discuss where the project was at, and why it had stopped. We had a couple discussions about how to get things back on track, but it was at this point that I wondered if Orderhive had just realised some of the complexities that would be involved in our customisations.
- It took around 3 more months of exchanges between us for me to formulate a plan in how finish this project - I compromised significantly on the features we originally requested. I actually removed the largest customisation from the project in the hopes it would kick it back in to gear. But it seemed the damage was done - the Orderhive team no longer wanted to work on this project - and instead place their focus on an easier (more profitable) area of their business.
- 2 weeks ago, I sent an email to our original sales representative, stating that I wished to cancel the project. I had a reply from the CEO of the company, and in that email it confirmed what I had suspected for some time… He stated that “In the last two months, we have upgraded architecture of Orderhive to achieve customisation in the SaaS version. So we can deliver better and much faster than earlier. I am working on your requirement to figure out how we can achieve it in SaaS customisation.”
- Orderhive has essentially used the money we have paid them to develop our custom solution to upgrade their own SaaS solution - we have funded some part of the development of their SaaS product that they will ultimately use to sell to other customers.
- There has been a negative ROI in this case. Not only have we paid a deposit toward the customisation of our orderhive implementation, there has also been a massive sunk cost of approximately 18 months of my time and effort.
Orderhive attempts to do too many features, and each of those features is totally underdeveloped. The reason for choosing the Orderhive plus/enterprise solution in the first place, was so that we would be able to strengthen these features in our custom implementation, as well as additional custom business processes. Unfortunately, since Orderhive has been unable to deliver on this, the entire effort has been a loss.