Commerce Layer is a headless commerce platform and order management system that enables users to add global shopping capabilities to any website, mobile app, chatbot, or IoT device. It is a CMS that can be used to create shoppable content through its API on a global scale.
$649
per month (annual commitment)
Optimizely Commerce Connect
Score 6.1 out of 10
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Optimizely Commerce Connect is a PaaS e-commerce backend solution coupled with Optimizely's PaaS CMS to help e-commerce organizations, of any type, create highly customized websites and buying experiences with a two-in-one content and commerce solution.
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Pricing
Commerce Layer
Optimizely Commerce Connect
Editions & Modules
Growth
$649
per month (annual commitment)
Enterprise
Custom
Startup
Free
100 orders/month included, then $0.90 for any extra order
Real headless solution, fully SaaS. In comparison to all other solutions, Commerce Layer has an integrated order management which is lean, but very flexible. With all other solutions, we would have needed a separate OMS which would have increased both the complexity and the cost …
Alderich Web Solutions worked great for us however when it came to diagnosing and fixing issues with the website we had to rely on the support with little ability for us to "get under the hood" and look at the issue for ourselves. After switching to Optimizely, having this …
Stibo STEP MDM was a powerhouse. It seems we could do anything we could dream up, but we also had an in-house IT dev team to support it. The cost was the reason we went with Optimizely Commerce Connect. We did not explore HubSpot for this project.
Optimizely Commerce Connect offers a very wide range of features for admin users. There is less a need for an IT specialist or programmer to be involved when changes need to be made.
Optimizely is more flexible and more customizable, but also more efficient from a development standpoint. Salesforce Commerce Cloud has more capabilities but is more prone to become complex, and also generally more expensive. Magento is a comparable alternative but with less …
Just depends on the use case. Some clients are more heavily weighted towards a marketing CMS and don't need a ton of complex technical functions of their eCommerce platform. For these we recommend Episerver.
Episerver did not have a headless CMS offering when we implemented. They may offer one now, but they are very late to the game in offering an API-based CMS experience. If you use an Angular or React front end, and you want to communicate with this incredibly expensive product …
Episerver's plug and play architecture is the winning factor comparing to AspDotNetStorefront. We did not choose Magento because it was not built on .Net.
Coming from a Software Engineering background, Episerver was the preferred system as it was an attractive platform from a developer's point of view. Today, I consult solely on Episerver solutions and still prefer the platform for multiple reasons (some already covered earlier …
Episerver was by far the most user friendly content platform allowing our business to easily manage the content with ease resulting in an overall productivity increase and time for the team to spend less time doing content management and more time managing the personalization …
During the evaluation, Episerver was by far the most flexible as far as features and implementation go. Some of the more SaaS-based products don't allow for the level of customization needed for our clients, clientele. While the other platform boasted similar features, they …
Overall, Episerver seemed easier to use from a user perspective and easier setup. There was also preexisting resources with Episerver experience. Factoring in costs it became an easy solution.
I did evaluate other products in addition to Episerver. The other finalist was Magento, which has a very robust cart and a large market share. I have used that platform in the past and overall had been happy with it's performance. I ultimately selected Episerver because it was …
Commerce Layer is a great choice, if you want to build a tailored system. The flexible API allows to build all kinds of applications around commerce, but you also need to deep dive a bit into the structure. If you want to set up a simple store and sell a few SKUs, you're probably rather a Shopify customer, but if you want to build great customer experiences and tailer the software to your business, Commerce Layer is a very good choice.
Very strong fit for mid-sized organizations that need more flexibility and customization as compared to canned or template-based offerings, but also want the efficiency and externalization that comes with a pre-existing, cloud-hosted platform (as compared to a full custom offering). Works well with a PIM and more mature catalog data in order to fully leverage the dynamic data capabilities.
Web content management -- the interface is drag and drop and makes it very easy for business users to create product pages.
In site search with Episerver Find -- it is easy to promote attributes and make quick tweaks to fine-tune results.
Integrate with other systems -- we have integrated with our ERP, our product information management system, our digital asset management system and our marketing automation system to take advantage of investments we have already made in content and customer data.
Support. Episerver used to have direct support and access to the tech team to discuss and resolve issues. The new support portal is not enough for developer needs.
Quality Assurance. We find issues in the Episerver code that should have been resolved in QA before release.
Sales. Episervers sells the framework as a solution while showing Alloy. While it helps Episerver sell more, it puts the implementation partner into trouble as the client thinks they bought the solution. Episerver does not provide a solution. It provides a framework that you can build a solution on.
Really want to be able to spend more time and resources on rolling out new things with Episerver but at the moment we seem to be fixing alot of issues and pain points with the way our system was setup.
The new apps are great, but in our case, we built so specific functionalities around it that we built our own admin tool. Based on the complexity (especially for after sales processes), no off the shelf tool would have been able to do this.
The job functionality is one of the strongest benefits Optimizely offers. It allows a savvy user to quickly go in to a given job, see the job history to find errors and then even take the steps of a job, copy the code and paste it back into your source to diagnose a potential issue.
We had an incredible team at Episerver Supporting us with the go live, reviewing our integration, and pushing our integration partner to deliver a quality product
The Commerce Layer data model is very flexible, which also creates a certain complexity. It's important to understand how the data model works and how relationships between them are built.
Fully understand what is OOTB feature of the platform before proceeding to develop. Then implement a customization of key features once you can prove they are working as OOTB to make them more user friendly and productive for the business. Eg pre order and e gift card
Real headless solution, fully SaaS. In comparison to all other solutions, Commerce Layer has an integrated order management which is lean, but very flexible. With all other solutions, we would have needed a separate OMS which would have increased both the complexity and the cost of the solution.
Stibo STEP MDM was a powerhouse. It seems we could do anything we could dream up, but we also had an in-house IT dev team to support it. The cost was the reason we went with Optimizely Commerce Connect. We did not explore HubSpot for this project.
