ChannelOnline vs. IBM Digital Commerce

It would be ideal for a small solution provider looking for an entry level option to handle many of the company's functions at the same time. If customer relationship management, sales reporting, having a indexed eCommerce site, or having the ability to connect to 3rd party solutions is important to you; I would not go with ChannelOnline

Websphere commerce is well suited if multiple sites are required based on geography, for branding, large customers. It is well suited for B2B model to handle different pricing and catalog filters for each business. It is not well suited if there are multiple external systems that drives the pricing an d promotions. WCS should be the master for pricing and promotion

Incentivized

• Detailed product information
• Product reviews
• Supplier Relationships

• Scalability. Since WebSphere Commerce is based on WebSphere Application Server, it's fully scalable just like WAS.
• Support. Their support team is a pleasure to work with. They get back to you quickly and are knowledgeable of their product, so I learn a lot from them about things that are not covered in detail in their documentation.
• Robust. The software is robust once it's up and running since it depends on WAS.
• Sample store & sample data. It's really fast to get a store up and running based on the sample store & data they provided.

Incentivized

• Sales Reporting Features
• Product Documentation and Training
• Customer Relationship Management
• Account Management
• Supplier Integration
• New Release Information
• Search Engine Indexing
• Custom Solutions

• It still uses EJBs, need to move to latest technologies for persistance
• Promotion module customizations needs to more easy
• Grouping of products based on the shipping methods/shipping dates etc functionality needs to be added

Incentivized

Updates aren't valuable and don't see us ever being ahead of the competition with this solution. Feature enhancements that are released are just attempts to stay relevant with other ERPs in the industry. If you're trying to take your company to the next level this isn't going to be your solution unless you're a very small company

The scalability and various configurations of the product allows for a wide range of e-commerce site features. It provides a storefront to begin with so it helps with speeding up development.

Incentivized

The interface is pretty easy to use and get used to. It's the lack of account, product and customer management usability that hinders ChannelOnline

We are down for 5-20 minutes once or twice a month

Support Staff is very nice and friendly. Most are knowledgeable but other than phone support they're lacking in every category

Compared to some other software that our clients have considered, a lot of them choose WebSphere Commerce because of the ability to scale easily. Some of our customers are coming from a PHP based ecommerce platform that doesn't allow them to scale up and they're hitting the limit of their ecommerce system

Incentivized

New features are released twice a year. Often these releases are fixing bugs and will rarely be an enhancement that will take your company to another level of effectiveness

• It handles most business functions so the value is definitely there.
• Account Management is really inconvenient and will cost you hours of pay if you're in a business with a relatively medium-high employee turnover.
• It won't easily integrate at all with your website.
• Lead Management is pretty much non existent.
• Quotes and orders are fairly easy to manage so employee efficiency could rise.
• Training and readily available documentation on ChannelOnline is weak. This is especially true for new features.

• We were able to roll out Commerce in record time thanks to a good understanding of the tool and our required processes.
• We were able to roll it out on several websites in quick secessions due to the platform's features.
• We were able to plan a solid road map given repeatable projects.

Incentivized