Corporate gifting platform Sendoso recently announced its acquisition of Alyce, combining two of the more well-known companies in the promotional marketing space. However, the two platforms continue to operate independently. A growing industry means an ever-changing landscape of platforms available to streamline your business’s gifting goals. Let’s take a closer look at Alyce vs Sendoso, as well as a third competitor, Imprint Engine.
Table of Contents
- Alyce vs. Sendoso vs. Imprint Engine: Key Takeaways
- Plan Structure
- Customer Service
- Global Operations
- Build Your Brand With Imprint Engine
Alyce vs. Sendoso vs. Imprint Engine: Key Takeaways
Alyce, Sendoso, and Imprint Engine offer streamlined solutions to your offline marketing efforts. These solutions include CRM platforms that host your end-to-end campaign journey. Each company focuses on gifting, so their features and capabilities are similar.
Imprint Engine | Alyce | Sendoso | |
Global Capabilities | Worldwide shipping and support | Worldwide fulfillment Global inventory management | |
Customer Support | Global customer support Creative designers Brand managers | Gift research Meeting Scheduler | Creative Curators Virtual Sendoso experiences |
Personalization Features | Unlimited gift marketplace featuring exclusive brands Unlimited customization possibilities for branded merchandise In-house decoration Handwritten notes and personalized messaging Custom packaging | Personalized gift invitations Branded swag on demand Curated gift marketplace Personalized messages | Meeting scheduler Gifts from Amazon eGift bundles Handwritten notes |
Analytics | CRM integrations Analytics dashboards Real-time inventory streaming Product reports to help analyze trends and prompt reorders | CRM integrations Campaign insights | Inventory updates and alerts Packing and shipping Analytics dashboards Send tracker Salesforce dashboards |
Platform Offerings | Custom online stores UX/UI designed to work with your brand and scale with you Advanced user-permissions Internal or public-facing ecommerce experiences through Shopify Plus All stores built, maintained and updated by our in-house teams | Post-gift CTA Curated gift marketplace Swag Store | Team sending Team budgets Team permissions |
Plan Structure
Each of the three platforms has its own pricing model. Plan structures vary when you look at Alyce vs Sendoso vs Imprint Engine. However, they all share a tiered system that allows customers to only pay for the level of service they need.
Imprint Engine
Imprint Engine offers four plans for our IEX platform: Free, Express, Pro and Enterprise with Basic or Advanced company stores as an add-on option. This gives customers the ability to build a plan that best fits their needs and is tailored to the size of their organization. As plans grow more advanced, customers gain access to more seats and full portal access so that greater collaboration is possible.
Our IEX platform is available for free for one-off projects in which customers still have access to our product design team, ideation concierge, global customer support teams, global shipment tracking and management, and global customs support. Unlike our competitors, we offer a 2% product rebate to customers signed up for the Pro and Enterprise plans.
“I’ve worked with Imprint Engine for nearly 10 years at 3 different companies. Most recently they helped us build an online store with hundreds of SKUs in a matter of weeks. Their quality, speed, and reliable customer service is top-notch and keeps me coming back!”
Diedre Nicolopoulos, Metropolis
Read more about our IEX platform plans.
Alyce
With Alyce, customers pay for the annual platform fee, cost of gift invitations, and cost of gifts. Customers can choose from its four plans: Essentials, Growth, Enterprise, and Pro. Essentials is designed for customers who are just getting started with personal gifting while Growth is better for customers looking to use gifting as a tool to accelerate their growth strategies. The Pro plan includes everything included in Essentials and Growth as well as access to its Swag Select and Alyce Activate™ tools. Enterprise programs are tailored based on customers’ goals and needs. Like Imprint Engine, discounts increase with the more advanced plans.
Learn more about Alyce’s plans.
Sendoso
Like Imprint Engine and Alyce, Sendoso offers several options for small teams, large companies, and global enterprises. Customers can choose from its Essential, Plus, Pro, Enterprise, and Express plans. Plans tailored for multiple or larger teams offer more features and customization while the Express plan is free and available for pay-as-you-go one-off projects. Learn more about Sendoso’s plans.
Check out our related post if you’re looking for Sendoso alternatives.
Customer Service
Customer service is paramount to consider when comparing brand experience platforms. Each company connects with brands and customers with a different approach, some lead with the human element, others with the convenience factor. Each play a role in your overall customer experience.
Imprint Engine
The core of what we do is help elevate community and culture within our customers’ organizations. Every member of Imprint Engine acts as an extension of our customers’ teams. Ultimately, our clients are more than just our clients. They’re our business partners. And we want them to utilize us that way. We’ve established teams of experts in every sector of our business so that we hardly ever have to outsource (but if we must outsource, we have a strong network of exclusive vendors for that, too).
With Imprint Engine, customer service starts on day one instead of only when something goes wrong. Our team onboards, executes, and follows up on projects closely and transparently so that customers are in the loop and enabled to pivot or make requests every step of the way.
We follow four simple steps of service:
- We discover how we can help by learning everything we can about your brand, your needs, and your long-term goals. We strive to know your brand as well as we know our own so that we can recommend the right experiences to elevate your culture and community.
- We put systems in place to design and deliver. Our creative team takes all of the information we’ve learned to design the best approach and program and create a fully custom product experience. Customers have unlimited access to our creative team so they can opt to collaborate or hand us the reigns to create something amazing.
- We build exactly what you’re looking for. Once you’ve given us the go-ahead, our in-house production, decoration, and web development teams work together to guarantee quality. Whether you’re printing shirts for an event or building out a complex company ecommerce site, our in-house talent makes it happen.
- We deploy anywhere in the world. Our warehouse and inventory teams make sure your goods are picked and packed correctly, then shipped wherever it needs to go across the globe. Our global fulfillment and logistics teams manage our warehouse centers around the world to ensure products arrive without issues and our dedicated customer support team stands by to troubleshoot anything that may come up. Finally, we provide reporting and analytics to track the project’s overall performance.
“Imprint Engine’s team stands out for their exceptional professionalism, dedication, and willingness to go the extra mile, placing them in a league of their own. Their super quick response times, ability to pivot, and creative ideation have been instrumental in elevating our swag experience. Working closely with them has truly transformed swag at Miro, setting a new standard for excellence in our branding endeavors.”
Eva Bauerrichter, Miro
Alyce
Alyce’s objective is to make their customers look good. Like Imprint Engine, Alyce believes in proactive customer service rather than waiting until disaster strikes.
Sendoso
Sendoso aims to help clients build a broader, stronger customer base through its gifting solutions. Its gift ideation, curation, and customer support helps clients save money and increase their ROI. And if global clients need services, Sendoso’s global logistics team and network manage inventory from its global distribution centers.
Sendoso believes in building authentic relationships through intelligent corporate gifting and does so through its “advanced, all-in-one solution.” Like Imprint Engine, it offers global customer support teams that are dedicated to ensuring project success.
Read more about how Sendoso works.
Global Operations
In today’s remote work climate, it’s likely you have clients and employees located all around the world. That’s why having a brand experience partner with global operations is key to a successful brand experience campaign. Some partners have to outsource to international suppliers to fulfill your global needs while others have fulfillment centers set up in multiple countries. But for Imprint Engine, global operations means not only global warehousing, but boots on the ground around the world so that no matter where the end consumer lives, you have a local presence.
Imprint Engine
With teams in North America, Europe and APAC, we are positioned to produce, store and fulfill brand experiences throughout the entire world. We have established Imprint Engine warehouses in the United States, Ireland, India, the UK and the Netherlands so that storing and fulfilling orders abroad is as easy as it is stateside. Along with warehousing, we have leadership teams, brand managers and customer success teams dispersed around the world as well.
Navigating global logistics is hard. There’s a huge learning curve with maintaining quality control internationally and understanding cultural sensitivities and regional trends. Luckily we’ve got it down. With dedicated teams established globally, we’ve managed to forge strong partnerships with regional vendors so that we’re in the loop on quality control and can cut down on shipping costs and taxes that often accompany centralized distribution.
Unlike our competitors, we ship to more than 180 of the 195 countries in the world. Our IEX platform allows even the biggest enterprises in the world to reach people and make an impact from anywhere.
Read more about Imprint Engine’s global capabilities.
“Imprint Engine has been instrumental in helping maintain brand integrity as we’ve scaled. Their ability to integrate with our procurement system, turn projects around quickly, and coordinate between multiple stakeholders is unmatched.”
Janel Higgs, Uber
Alyce
Like Imprint Engine, Alyce is able to help customers distribute gifts to people all over the world. It recognizes the importance of breaking through the digital noise with physical gifts and the challenges that accompany global gifting like customs, currency exchange, and tracking.
Unlike Imprint Engine, Alyce does not warehouse items around the globe but instead outsources to its network of suppliers. It doesn’t list how many companies it can reach, but customers are able to view their options within their dashboard.
Take a look at Alyce’s Global Gift Guide.
Sendoso
Sendoso offers worldwide fulfillment and inventory management and ships to over 165 countries with preferred shipping rates. It employs both US- and EU-based buyers to curate egift and physical selections that are unique to each market. Sendoso has also established fulfillment centers in the US, Canada, UK, EU, and APAC. Like Imprint Engine, customers have visibility into their inventory around the world and are enabled to restock any location within the platform.
Read more about Sendoso’s global capabilities.
Build Your Brand With Imprint Engine
Each platform offers excellent features and services. While customers find Alyce cheaper and easier to use, Sendoso is described as more robust with greater integration capabilities and flexibility. Imprint Engine provides a brand concierge approach, giving customers full access to our specialized teams as extensions of your own. We believe great products come and go, but great experiences live on. That’s why we keep the element of human-to-human connection at the forefront of everything we do.