HCL Commerce Reviews & Product Details - Page 19

There are several key advantages to leveraging WebSphere Commerce as the platform for your eCommerce solution. The product provides significant advantages in both the B2C and B2B markets, giving it a leg up on some of the competition in the space. Provisioning up a storefront is relatively quick and painless. IBM provides "starter stores", which can be installed, re-configured and extended upon. Their Extended Sites offering is a game changer, allowing for sharing of resources and reduction of costs for implementers supporting disparate sites. In the most recent release, IBM has added support for mobile on-boarding. which was at the forefront of the current mobile revolution. The introduction of the rich-internet application Management Center significantly improves support for day to day operations, such as cataloging, promotions and pricing. IBM supports payment services via plug-ins that are relatively fast to implement for any payment service provider. From an architecture perspective, IBM has committed to open-source technologies, including Java and Struts, which reduces the learning curve when hiring technologists to extend and support the product. The recent addition of Sterling to the IBM portfolio has great potential through integrations with the WebSphere Commerce product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The majority of disadvantages to leveraging WebSphere Commerce come with customizing and extending the platform. Extending the product has become increasingly complex with version 7. IBM is moving away from EJBs and towards a web services-based approach to business data processing. The Data Services Layer (DSL) is difficult to understand and even harder to extend and maintain. Management Center relies on the DSL for processing, so understanding it is a requirement. The growth in the product over the past few releases has resulted in a significant learning curve for developers to understand the features that have been introduced (Dojo, OpenLaszlo). IBM did not do a good job with fix packs in release 7. Several times, Management Center has taken days to weeks to correct after a fix pack deployment. The cost of running WebSphere Commerce has grown significantly in the latest release. Management Center consumes high amounts of memory on operation workstations, requiring catalogers, marketing folks and customer service to have very powerful workstations. The footprint has continued to get larger both on the front end and back end. Luckily, the benefits of the platform still outweigh some of the cost impacts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.