IBM Websphere Commerce - Good Platform Or Not?

[rock22]

I have recently started working with a fairly large company that is rethinking their web paltform.  Currently they use IBM Websphere Commerce, but I'm finding a lot of limitations with it as far as SEO, content managment etc., it seems that the simplest things take a lot of resources and time.  On top of that, IT has had developed other modules that integrate with it to make it do what it needs to do, so we are using multiple systems.  The question we are evaluating is if Websphere is capable of providing what we need and just needs developed and implemented, or is in a platform that is not friendly for our needs?  It may be easy to say to scrap it and move on, but everyone knows how difficult it is to change platforms, especially for a multi million dollar company that is doing a lot of business.  So if the current system is capable, we want to make use of it, but we're not sure if it is even capable.

Has anyone had direct experience with this platform?

[retailgeek]

It depends on what you mean by "Good".

IBM is used by more of the Top 25 e-commerce Sites (sites doing more than about $1B/year in sales) and has scaled larger than any other e-commerce platform you can buy, so in that sense it's certainly "Good."

I say "you can buy" because amongst the Top 25 sites, the most popular solution is actually to build your own solution.   That should give you a good idea of how Top 25 sites operate, they have large teams of developers that build features on top of the "platform".  They think of their product as a "platform" they develop on, rather than a turn-key "solution" they use.

In the Top 25, you mostly see In-House, IBM, Oracle, and hybris.  hybris actually only has 1 site in this group, but that's largely because it takes these firms a LONG time to adopt a new platform, and hybris has so much momentum in the marketplace, that I include them in the top tier.

If you look at a broader group like the top 275 sites (sites above $50M/year in revenue), you still see a lot of in-house, IBM, Oracle, and hybris, but you also see GSI, Fry, and DemandWare.  Many of these sites will still do a lot of development, but you'll start to find some sites trying to use the product as an out of the box solution, or sites that outsource their development to third parties.

Another challenge with these top end systems, is that (because there are so many extensions and customizations) it's very difficult to upgrade to newer versions.  I tend to call them "Re-Implementations" rather than "Upgrades", so even when the vendor improves the features of the platform, it takes a long time before the clients get around to upgrading (if ever).

Specifically with your IBM site, if it's older than about 2 years (older than WCS V7 FeP 2), then you have almost no business user tooling for SEO.  All changes need to be made to the Java Server Page files by programers.  If you have V7 FeP2 or later, you have tools to set the default templates for URLs and Meta Data (Title Tag and Meta Description), and you have good business user tooling to over-ridding those defaults on a page by page basis.  But if you need to do any structured markup, site-map generation, canonicalization, etc... you'll still have to do it via developers not business users.  Also keep in mind that depending on what else is in your stack and how it's implemented, such as a third party search engine (very likely if your still on WCS 6) or a content management system, IBM may not even control all the SEO elements for all your pages.

So at the end of the day, IBM, Oracle, and hybris are all "good" systems for very large sites.  hybris is more modern/younger, so it is more user friendly.  DemandWare is a SaaS solution and can be pretty turn-key if you want.  But none of these platforms are as user friendly for business users as the solutions for small sites like Magento or Shopify.

If I were running a $1B site, I could do it with IBM, Oracle, or hybris and my SEO team would be handing specs to developers to implement   The deciding factor between those 3 platforms, would not be SEO features, it would be things like total cost of ownership, native mobile support, speed, search, content management, merchandising features, and the ability to hire subject mater experts.  Frankly, the implementation team would be more important than the platform.

But if I were running a $20M site, I wouldn't want to do it on any of those platforms.  Note: Most $20M/year sites, want to be $200M sites, so it's still very common to see IBM and Oracle used on small sites, but they often struggle.

I hope that gives you some food for thought.  If you're willing to share more details about your site and your challenges here, I'd be happy to give more specific advice.

Cheers,

-Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg