Are you an undecided Magento 1 customer feeling the pressure to upgrade to Magento 2 or find another website platform? Choosing the right e-commerce platform to support and grow your business is critical, but if you've been procrastinating, you're racing against a ticking clock.

Magento 1 loses all service and support to the platform in June 2020, leaving thousands of businesses with the choice to either rebuild on a new platform, or risk security breaches.

If you're considering a platform switch, first compare the complete suite offering against your near- and long-term goals. Does the platform offer features and flexibility to scale alongside your company and withstand the test of time?

For example, if your goal is website personalization, does the platform offer a user-friendly CMS, visitor groups, or product and content recommendation engines? If your goal is a robust marketing strategy, does the platform integrate with your marketing automation tool or make it easy to leverage APIs to collect data?

If your website feature set is incomplete, you'll need to integrate third-party solutions to reach your goals. This is a common challenge for Magento customers that rely on costly and time-intensive extensions. When issues arise, you're left at the mercy of third-party developers or customer support reps (who may not be familiar with the intricacies of your website).

To help you make an educated decision, we're throwing another website contender into the ring: our long-standing website partner Optimizely (formerly Episerver), which also happens to be highly rated by both Gartner and Forrester.

Optimizely's Digital Experience Platform offers a variety of flexible digital solutions to enable modern marketers to build hyper relevant and powerful online customer experiences, while giving developers a flexible framework and single code base to develop from the ground up.

Optimizely is a complete solution, offering easy content creation, commerce and merchandising, personalization, AI-driven recommendations, experimentation, optimization-as-a-service, and consistent support from one trusted source. Read on to see the top three reasons we recommend Optimizely.

1. Optimizely Marries Content + Commerce

Optimizely is a powerful platform for delivering robust commerce experiences, marketing campaigns, and digital journeys. Some of the many capabilities include intuitive CMS functionality, visitor groups, recommendation engines, and features to manage orders, catalogs, carts, and payments.

The simple drag-and-drop editor enables marketers to create personalized, content-driven webpages and promotions easily, without development intervention. According to Forrester, content management is considerably easier on the Optimizely platform, reducing updates by 50%.

Magento offers strong commerce functionality, but lacks the ease of creating a world-class experience, with commerce and content working in tandem. These outcomes too often require third-party extensions, resulting in higher price tags and increased risk.

2. Online Personalization Made Easy

Marketers can easily publish unique content in minutes using Optimizely Digital Experience Platform, Optimizely Personalization, Web Experimentation, and optimization tools, and share with targeted audiences via visitor groups.

Visitor groups enable marketers to create audience segments based on commonalities, like customer-type, order history, geographic location, number of visits, or frequently visited categories. This allows sharing dynamic content between targeted segments. For example, two groups will see completely different messaging within the same dynamic content block.

Clients like Yamaha WaterCraft Group use visitor groups to display personalized content based on the product type and watercraft model they've shown interest in, or previously purchased. Yamaha takes it a step further by sending customized emails showing appropriate apparel and maintenance recommendations, based on watercraft model, location, or season. These personalized touches enable Yamaha to uniquely nurture prospects and customers and deepen their brand loyalty over time.

3. Data-driven Recommendations

Within Optimizely Digital Experience Platform, marketers leverage intelligent algorithms to deliver personalized product and search recommendations.  

Built on the flexible Microsoft Azure cloud platform, Optimizely Digital Experience Platform ensures that you get faster time-to-value along with continuous innovation.

• Always scalable: As a cloud solution, Optimizely automatically handles sudden traffic spikes or seasonal variations, so your customers receive great service anywhere, anytime.
• Always fast: Optimizely's platform is highly optimized out-of-the-box, delivering content to screens in no time. You get global computing power and always-on support.
• Always secure: With a proven security process, such as enforcement of duty separation, extraordinarily strong DDoS mitigation features, and ISO 27001 certification, Optimizely Digital Experience Platform cloud solution provides best-in-class security.

Optimizely Product Recommendations

Optimizely Product Recommendations enhances product discovery and increases cart value with smart product suggestions. With powerful machine learning algorithms, Optimizely Product Recommendations captures behavioral and action-based data to learn and predict which product offerings are most valuable to achieve a unique, highly-individualized shopping experience.

With the complete Optimizely package, companies like Creative Co-Op are able to create personalized customer experiences, ultimately, increasing revenue 13%.

For more on how Optimizely Web Product Recommendations helps you achieve a 24/7 personalized buying experience across all channels, click here.

Optimizely Search & Navigation

Similarly, Optimizely Search & Navigation help visitors easily find products or information using smart search.

Optimizely Search & Navigation helps marketers combat visitors' increasingly short attention spans by delivering content quickly, reducing frustration and increasing the likelihood they'll convert.

Optimizely Intelligence Cloud

Optimizely Intelligence Cloud gives you a complete overview of visitor behavior and helps you discover new segments.

• Track your visitors: Collect data from all visitors, from anonymous leads to repeat customers, so you can track their paths to conversion.
• Advanced segmentation: match the right visitor segments with the right digital experience
• Better content: know exactly what content to create or how to merchandise

Not an Upgrade, but a Re-Platform

Trusting the wrong platform or digital partner with your website can lead to serious consequences.

The move from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is not an upgrade, but actually a re-platform of your e-commerce solution. If you're going through the process of re-platforming, why not see what other options are available, and make the most informed decision you can?

At Whereoware, we've helped clients like Primitives by Kathy re-platform from Magento to Optimizely (formerly Episerver) successfully redesigning and relaunching their website in just six months. Let us help you along the way or give you a free demo of Optimizely.