Optimizely Configured Commerce

Score7 out of 10

26 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Optimizely Configured Commerce are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Visual Editing Capability: Users have appreciated the visual editor in Edit Pages for its customization options, enabling quick website editing and enhancing overall user experience. The feature allows users to easily create and update content without extensive technical knowledge, resulting in efficient content management processes.

User Management Ease: Several users found managing users to be straightforward, especially in the back end editing interface which streamlines administrative tasks and ensures efficient user access management. This contributes to a seamless workflow and improved user interaction within the system.

Integration Flexibility: Many reviewers highlighted the system's integration capabilities with various systems like ERP, CRM, and PIM as highly flexible, offering seamless connectivity that enhances workflow efficiency and data accessibility across different platforms. This provides users with a comprehensive solution that can adapt to diverse business needs seamlessly.

Reviews

12 Reviews

Highly capable and customizable, but with a similarly high TCO.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

June 29, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently use Optimizely as our B2B product ordering website for our customers. We deployed it to help ease the ordering and reordering process for our customers. Our old site used legacy technology, was very slow, and didn't support faceted search, rich descriptions, or product documentation, and couldn't really be modified to support new features. We wanted a hosted platform, that met these challenges and was a system that we could grow into.

Pros

Very flexible with integration and workflow capabilities with other systems (ERP, CRM, PIM, etc)
Very rich product detail pages and attributes
Flexible role-based access for many different login types.

Cons

Difficult to access internal database
Not easy to maintain without development resources
TCO is quite high compared to competitors

Likelihood to Recommend

With a skilled internal development staff, Optimizely is extremely flexible to do just about anything you want it to do. The look, site workflow, and external integration capabilities are stellar. Overall site performance is quite good as well. The hosting management team also does a great job with security and keeping underlying infrastructure (AWS) up to date and using best practices. Without internal development staff, expect a high cost for an outside development partner for implementation, integration, and routine maintenance and updates.

James Cass

Director of Information Technology in Information Technology at Morrisette (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

EDCO Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud review

Rating: 1 out of 10

Incentivized

June 24, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are an exterior building product manufacturer and distributor. We use Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud as a sales tool for our diverse customer base to place orders. Our customers also use it to check on the status of their order file. they also use it as a price source. This tool has helped with order entry errors.

Pros

up to date price
up to date inventory
Product updates

Cons

Service after the sale. We have extreme difficulties getting quality service when we have issues

Likelihood to Recommend

we have been trying to get our sandbox updated for several months. There is a problem with the inventory and pricing API connection.

Verified User

Manager in Customer Service (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

B2B Commerce - Five Gold Stars for Everything!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 6, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am the E-commerce manager for an industrial distribution company. I am responsible for being the SME on the Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud admin console and website platform. The product allows us to offer 24/7 access to our catalog for thousands of our customers who used to not have any digital access to our catalog. Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud has saved both our customer's time and effort as well as our branch employees who no longer have to answer the phones or emails [requesting the catalog].

Pros

Ease of account creation for our customers
good integration with our ERP
robust marketing tools

Cons

Need the ability to look at more of our user data
Need the ability to refresh our sandbox environment with production data in quicker, more efficient ways
Classic CMS is very limited in ways end users like myself can edit widget content

Likelihood to Recommend

I think Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud is very robust and user-friendly for the vast majority of users. For companies like us, who like to get in and sift through our user data, search behavior [and] account activations, getting at that data in an efficient manner has been a bit of a struggle. We're having to spend a lot of extra development dollars with our partner to get what should be readily available. But, again, for most users, the platform is an excellent and [a] very stable place to host a e-commerce site for industrial distributors.

JEFF GIBBS

eCommerce Manager in Information Technology at IBT Industrial Solutions (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Opti B2B Commerce Cloud - At First Blush

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

January 6, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The product is meant to replace our current eCommerce system (StoreFront). Its main purpose is to allow our customers to purchase our products online. The product also allows our in-house staff to manage product descriptions, images, search terms, and user access. It was supposed to also allow our Marketing team to manage web content, but we have foregone that feature.

Pros

Integration with our ERP system
Management of products
Integration with payment gateways

Cons

CMS content management is rudimentary - at best
CMS needs to integrate with other UI frameworks besides just react
Integration with Insite is a hindrance compared to what Episerver has been able to do

Likelihood to Recommend

It is difficult to say specifically as we came to Epi via the purchase of Insite. Episerver has historically been really flexible and developer-friendly. However, the specific implementation that we have received utilizing Insite has all but crippled our internal team. As such, we will not be using Opti for our main, public web functionality.

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Optimizely is highly capable but needs better operational support.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

January 6, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

A platform for the customer-facing website. Contains ~300,000 products for current customers and open internet. Interfaces with external PIM for a majority of product content.

Pros

Flexible configuration
Easy to use interface
Technical support is available

Cons

Speed and consistency of technical support
Speed and reliability of deployment for frequent (monthly) software updates
Integration with external PIM

Likelihood to Recommend

The website is generally functional and reliable, but changes and enhancements are difficult and time-consuming to develop and deploy. Overall support response is very slow for both simple and complex issues.

Verified User

Professional in Marketing (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

A great system with excellent potential

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

December 21, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The New CMS ties into a suite of tools that we use. PIM, Analytics, and Product Recommendations. It is an easy and fast way to edit and publish our content while using the PIM to push products to the site. The ability to also tie in an off-the-shelf app integrated into the CMS for easy editing is a bonus. We now have multiple users in the company able to log in, edit, publish and market easily.

Pros

Edit Pages - A visual editor with custom widgets allows a quick way to edit the website
Manage users - in the back end editing and managing users is very easy
Data - the whole system allows us to track users and collect data fairly easily

Cons

Uploading customer data in bulk needs to be improved to make it easier to accept multiple addresses. Currently, its too time consuming
Setting up of additional services should be done by Optimizely without the need for customer engagement (unless needed)
When rolling out new features or functions follow-up meetings should be set up with Customer Service and client to see how this will affect the system if at all, and what are the options.

Likelihood to Recommend

The system is set up to really take advantage of data and customers to upsell and make your decisions easier when presenting products to customers. It would be great if more of this was automated and less reliant on user changes.

Darko Milivojevic

Director E-Commerce at Gerrie Electric (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

A great feature set allowing adaptability in your business model

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

December 21, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

One of the biggest boons of Optimizely B2B is the easy job editor and builder which allows fine-tuning of the jobs that import data over from a PIM or ERP without having to use backend coding. This allows us to keep our website flexible and functional and even allows us to quickly pivot when problems occur such as outages by changing the lookback times on our biggest jobs.

Pros

User Management
Order Management
Job Management

Cons

Product List Module
UI Performance in large data sets
Allowing users access to the database in realtime

Likelihood to Recommend

Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud works best for those building a website that will have under 2 Million Skus. Back-end console performance will start to lag at higher SKU counts requiring workarounds (by using filters instead of the search), though this is only on the backend, the customer-facing side of the web isn't affected.

Verified User

Administrator (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Optimize User Experience with Optimizely

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

September 22, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Optimizely for content management of our eCommerce B2B website. Currently, it is only being used by our Marketing/Web Department. It helps us to maintain products' info, landing pages, and marketing initiatives.

Pros

Maintain product data
User-friendly
Customizable
Manageable

Cons

Little options and flexibility with creating visitor groups
Does not organize product categories very well
Difficulties with A/B testing
Too many separate Optimizely products that aren't included in the Cloud

Likelihood to Recommend

Great for eCommerce to manage a lot of SKUs and can accommodate multi-site/multi-languages.

Verified User

Employee in Marketing (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Solid e-Commerce Solution, But CMS Side is Not As Robust.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

September 15, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We purchased this when it was Insite Commerce and are using it for both the eCommerce catalog and our marketing website. We chose to use the CMS as well for the ability to use the eCommerce database to update feed pages on the CMS side while making one change in the catalog side. We did not have eCommerce prior and were also going through a rebranding of our company and a redesigned website overhaul.

Pros

The e-commerce catalog can be relatively turnkey.
The turnkey hosting and site uptime are very good.
There are robust features and functionalities to build a modern turnkey e-commerce site.

Cons

The CMS side of the system is not as intuitive as it could be, but not quite as simple as WordPress, for example, to customize and deploy a unique look. It has required a heavy level of customization by our third-party integration provider that made code-level changes to support the site.
We have run into the need to customize our templates more than we would like, which has been costly and keeps us reliant on our certified development partner. We would like more control over the ability to customize our templates and functionality.
The native form building has not been turnkey or easy for us to set up without reliance on our development partner to make the changes. We have moved on to using an external form solution as a result and one where our internal design team and our digital marketing agency can both maintain and customize with ease.
We have had a number of bugs that broke our site when upgrades happened and were customer-facing issues that took days to fix.
There is not the concept of a staging server that automatically can then push the functionality to the live site. We are required to copy over the functionality into the production site, which makes it extra time-consuming to maintain and keep in sync the sandbox site with the production. In the past, I have used CMS [platforms] that were much more elegantly designed in terms of previewing functionality first and then launching it into production with a series of checkboxes and validations. This would be a huge upgrade to add that functionality.

Likelihood to Recommend

The eCommerce catalog side has a lot of benefits to it and has been much easier to work with and customize than the CMS side. It is this integration and using both for a branded marketing website that has the user journey from browsing and leading into the eCommerce side that has been the bigger challenge, outside of the overall stability of the releases with the bugs we have encountered. I think the solution is well suited if you are mainly a catalog site. We, however, sell machinery and solutions that are not sold via the eCommerce site and we need to showcase them on the website. However, we have a core industrial catalog of consumable products that support the machine and solutions purchases which are very well suited for the eCommerce catalog. It is the CMS/Catalog integration that has caused a need for more customizations to the platform and as a result increased costs to maintain, lowering our overall ROI from the solution. We are also a bit hamstrung by having to rely on our development partner to make changes that our digital agency is better suited to do for us in the CMS. It is requiring extra cost and resources as a result. If more functionality could be surfaced, it would be much better.

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Marketing (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Great Product, Very Happy with our Results so far!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

August 31, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using it to support our eCommerce platform that our customers use to find and purchase products.

Pros

Search
Product recommendation
Order management

Cons

Analytics reporting
Connecting data to outside platforms
Exporting data

Likelihood to Recommend

I think overall it is a good tool for large companies looking for a way to improve their customer's eCommerce experience. It does well with our complex business model and allows us to create a unique experience for each user.

Adam Wuesthoff

Ecommerce Analyst in Marketing at Dot Foods (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Loading Reviews List....

Solid e-Commerce Solution, But CMS Side is Not As Robust.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

September 15, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

The e-commerce catalog can be relatively turnkey.
The turnkey hosting and site uptime are very good.
There are robust features and functionalities to build a modern turnkey e-commerce site.

Cons

The CMS side of the system is not as intuitive as it could be, but not quite as simple as WordPress, for example, to customize and deploy a unique look. It has required a heavy level of customization by our third-party integration provider that made code-level changes to support the site.
We have run into the need to customize our templates more than we would like, which has been costly and keeps us reliant on our certified development partner. We would like more control over the ability to customize our templates and functionality.
The native form building has not been turnkey or easy for us to set up without reliance on our development partner to make the changes. We have moved on to using an external form solution as a result and one where our internal design team and our digital marketing agency can both maintain and customize with ease.
We have had a number of bugs that broke our site when upgrades happened and were customer-facing issues that took days to fix.
There is not the concept of a staging server that automatically can then push the functionality to the live site. We are required to copy over the functionality into the production site, which makes it extra time-consuming to maintain and keep in sync the sandbox site with the production. In the past, I have used CMS [platforms] that were much more elegantly designed in terms of previewing functionality first and then launching it into production with a series of checkboxes and validations. This would be a huge upgrade to add that functionality.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Marketing (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience