Digital River vs. IBM Digital Commerce

It is well suited for large organizations with many SKUs, promotions, and large teams, where flexibility and speed to market are not necessarily as important as repeatability and stability. It is also well suited for digital products, especially if they sell internationally. They have the ability to integrate with an existing system for user management and website in a rather straightforward way as well.

Incentivized

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

• Regional settings like local payment methods, ability to apply or not apply local VAT etc.
• Reporting and any kind of business analysis.
• Easy usage of the platform.
• Marketing is definitely strong side of Digital River Global Commerce. Apart from the features it has, there is a strong team behind it who can make all your fantasies come true using all their expertise and possibility of the platform.

Incentivized

• 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

• Integrating with any 3rd party is challenging. The more you can do to clearly define your requirements, the easier it will be to integrate.
• It can be difficult to differentiate and customize your product with an outsourced solution.
• Your internal timeline might not match with their timeline and delivery schedule.

• 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

Inertia and cost. To switch platforms would require a significant undertaking to migrate product catalogs, websites and retool marketing efforts. It would require a significant cost differential or game changing technology that would bring a decent ROI on the change

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

This was in place when I migrated to the role. We were greatly satisfied with the server and products that we did not pursue other products.

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

• More sales and broader reach to consumers. With the web presence of the eCommerce site, Korn/Ferry products were accessible 24 hours/ 7 days a week. Prior to that change, consumers had to call to order products and had to wait on office hours of when a Customer Service Rep was available.
• Access to data and analytical information for sales. This also allowed for making a more efficient inventory process.
• Transformed the Customer Service role to Commercial Operations which was a major plus. The position became more a support position (which is what was needed) than what was previously a Data Entry position. This also allowed opportunities for marketing a lot of the eProducts to consumers that the organization had.

• 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