We had to do a lot of customization, so I wouldn't say the integration worked out-of-the-box. Also, if you want to have anything done, you have to go back to their development team, which is offshore. You can't customize it yourself. And that customization took a long time.

Sana is a decent company, although they have had their challenges. When we originally signed up with Sana, they lost a lot of their leadership team. Part of the problem with them is that their entire support team is offshore in Sri Lanka. When you want to interface with the development team, you have to wait a day or two for each response. 

We also didn't realize this going into it, but there is an RQS (requirements gathering) phase, which takes about a month. After that, there is a development phase that takes another month. There are also testing and go-live. If you want to introduce any new features or functionality, it's at least a three to four-month process, possibly more, because of the way their structure works. Everything has to be customized. They are resource-challenged as well. Sana is a very small company. That means that when you want to start up a development enhancement, there's a wait time of at least a month. So in addition to requirements, development, and testing, you have to add a month of waiting for a resource to be assigned to even look at the requirements. 

They have some growing pains. We've told them this a few times and it seems to be getting better, but they definitely have challenges. 

Another challenge is that their global capabilities are quite limited. We're a global company. We operate in 23 countries. We've asked them, "What can we do in China? What can we do in Europe?" I don't think they have any customers in China. We'd be their first. Europe is more solidified than Asia, but still growing for them and not as established.

We've had to restructure some of our backend processes to accommodate order errors that come through the site. We've had to address and do some enhancements for that.

It's quite expensive. We have probably spent a couple hundred thousand dollars in development expenses to get up and running. That's not what we expected, but we've gone through it. 

Their support should have more in-depth knowledge about different ERP solutions that they connect to. 

There could also be more support about everything that is related to website management, which is not strictly related to the B2B tool. These are the things like knowing about GDPR regulations, knowing about digital consents, and in general, all the laws that go with having a website. Sometimes, we would have liked more support in that area. 

There could also be more features coming out on the platform, but I know they are already working on that. I know they're changing the way they manage that.

Our business is unique in the sense that we don't authorize or charge the credit card upfront. We only authorize the card when the order has been packed and is ready to ship. And we charge the credit card when an order is actually shipped out and we've invoiced it. Also, not all our customers are credit card customers; some are on terms. We had to do some customization so that the system would understand that if a customer is on terms, we don't need to worry about the credit card. And if someone is a credit card customer, we don't authorize the charge until later, after we've invoiced.

It would help if there were a way to configure the solution to change whether or not the system processes credit card information immediately, based on the customer's terms. It would also help if we could configure at what stage the credit card is authorized and charged.

One problem that we encounter is that it's difficult to upgrade as a result of making a large number of customer-specific adaptations. This is a problem that would affect other solutions, as well, and is not specific to Sana.

In our version, the graphics flexibility that you see as an admin is something that can be improved. The feature allows you to modify what the shop looks like, such as being able to choose whether you want to show three or four images on the row. In the newer version, they have improved it quite a bit, but in our version, it needs improvement.

The performance can be improved. Sometimes, the system is really slow because of the ERP integration. I'm not sure whether this is a problem with Sana Commerce or the ERP system but overall, it could be faster. When it comes to usability, if it takes too much time to load, then it's not the best.