k-ecommerce

We reviewed several systems before selecting k-ecommerce. Key factors in our decision included: seamless integration with our ERP (MS Dynamics GP), ability to customize the customer experience (we did not want the typical web store layout), 100% solid performance and reliability, proven encryption and cyber protection capabilities, all for a reasonable cost.
The most valuable benefits are the significant time saved by both our customers and our employees from non-value added work in which orders seamlessly flow into our orders queue.
In discussing the platform with customers, we get comments like “I wouldn’t change a thing about it.” We actually do have plans to further enhance and develop it, but do not intend to detract from its core ease and simplicity.
We are extremely satisfied with the end result. We had a Year 1 goal for 60 customers to adopt our system and we hit 70. This is both a significant time savings from order keying/increased accuracy for both our customers and our employees, but it also sets us apart as an innovative, forward-thinking company

The only frustrating part of the development was the transition between stages (from the discovery phase to the dev to implementation); we did not feel there were good hand-offs in that process. As we have experienced with other IT implementations, this one took longer than expected.

The k-eCommerce platform and Dynamics GP integration work very well. When we add customer data or items or pricing info to the ERP it’s available on the site really quickly where our customers can find it. No bugs or glitches, and they had the integration service up and running within a day.

The product catalog is extremely helpful, it lets us separate items by brand and availability type (Standard or Made to Order). We have thousands of SKUs for hundreds of different products. Before k-eCommerce we had to give that information to customers over the phone or by email. But now all the information our customers are looking for is right there on the site.

The Excel import/export feature is probably our favorite. It makes it easy and fast to upload or modify product and brand info and get all the important information in the right place where everyone can see it. We also use the import feature to add product specs. Dynamics GP doesn’t use product specs, which means about 80% of the info we need on our product pages isn’t even in GP. The Excel import saves us weeks of manual entry and lets us upload everything extremely fast.

The k-eCommerce support team is fantastic. At first we had some difficulty figuring out how to use the system and we even accidentally deleted our site at one point. The support team had us back online as quickly as possible and answered all our questions. The ticketing system they use works well. We’ve had hundreds of tickets and they always nail it.

The platform is easy to integrate if you’re running a basic business and are flexible with your requirements. But the solution becomes more complex the more complex your business gets. The software overall is complicated and customizable to the point that k-eCommerce would really need to take a more hands-on approach with training and onboarding and just generally explaining all the solution’s deeper capabilities. In our case we basically had to figure a lot of that out for ourselves and then decide the best way to integrate our specific requirements and systems. This probably took us a good 6 months just to get knowledgeable enough about the platform that we could explain to k-eCommerce how we wanted to customize. And even with all that, there are probably configurations and features in the platform that we aren’t even aware of and that might have been a better option.

For instance, we sell a lot of paper products. Since paper basically always looks the same, we wanted to use images for whole categories rather than individual products. But Dynamics GP thinks by item numbers instead of products, and it took us a long time to figure out how to modify the k-eCommerce category tree to group the items in the tree and then have a picture to represent the category.

We’re happy with the end result, it just took us too long to get there.

If it was a stand alone e-commerce system it might be ok

The company's support, follow thru, and the integrations. All three are less than desirable

We turned to k-eCommerce for a system that integrated directly to SAP. We’ve invested a lot in SAP over the past years to increase our production and business efficiencies and so it was important for us to develop a network that could communicate without “band aids.”
The design, functionality and navigation of k-eCommerce are a huge improvement over our previous site and many of our competitors. It’s easy to find products by part number or description, which helps our retail customers research and buy and helps our dealers and distributors navigate easily and find answers for their clients.
It’s really helpful being able to create multiple tabs on a product page for additional content, images, video, graphs, etc. Technical data is important for certain products in our business, so being able to provide this data to our customers in an organized and easy-to-access way is critical.
Our project manager was a great resource. He had patience while we built up the product content stage over the course of a few months and then had a huge impact getting us set up and ready to go live. The training materials were very helpful and worked nicely as a guide to build the site.
The support team is quick to respond, both on issues with customer orders and site issues like loading content or adding a function. No question is too big or too small for them to help with.

One area where we have struggled a little bit is with shipping method integration and getting the shipping calculations down. The boxes we use to ship products range in size from 5x5x5 up to 46x24x12 for non-freight shipments so trying to determine the appropriate estimated box size for proper calculation is difficult. k-eCommerce integrates to FedEx and UPS as different set ups so finding a happy medium that doesn’t overcharge the customer can be a challenge.

k-eCommerce is very easy to use. We can upload all our products in a single operation by defining them in Excel. Both the training and the implementation process were very clear for us, and the k-eCommerce team has always been open to our feedback and our requests as far as design, modifications to the site, and so on, with a reasonable turnaround time.

The design team in particular has a very good understanding of what our business requires in order to stand out. We’ve received many compliments on how visually engaging and user-friendly our site is.

The support team has improved a lot over the years. In the past, sometimes I felt like I knew a bit more than the person I would be talking to, but these days the technicians are always able to answer my questions well. It’s very important for us to be able to get an actual person on the line to talk about technical problems and get them resolved quickly. It’s rare to find this kind of service these days. With other companies you just get voicemail.

The only problems we experienced were in transitioning to a responsive site. We ended up losing some site data (such as photos) and configurations, category settings, etc. We still haven’t completely replaced everything, as we opted to take care of the most important fixes first. But in general it’s not easy to make changes. We usually have to call to double check how to do it the right way.