Salesforce Commerce Cloud or Shopify Plus: Which Platform Suits Your Business' Needs?

Salesforce Commerce Cloud or Shopify Plus: Which Platform Suits Your Business' Needs?

When it comes to eCommerce platforms, Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC - aka Demandware) and Shopify Plus are two of the most popular choices for businesses looking to create or expand their online presence. Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses, and the best choice depends on a business's unique needs, resources, and goals. Below, we explore the pros and cons of both SFCC and Shopify Plus to help you make an informed decision.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC - Demandware)

Pros:

Customization and Scalability: SFCC is renowned for its high level of customization, making it ideal for large enterprises with complex needs. It can handle intricate product catalogs, multiple sites, and large-scale operations seamlessly.

Enterprise Features: SFCC comes packed with robust features such as multi-site internationalization with a shared code base, multi-language and multi-currency support, and very advanced caching logic.

Staging Environment: SFCC has multiple built-in test environments that can simulate caching, integrate with external systems, test jobs, house product and content data and hierarchy, and view how it will look at any date in the future.

Production Updates: SFCC has a very sophisticated production replication system that can replicate any or all data from staging to its development (test) and production environments at any time, as well as any version of code. This can also be programmed to happen automatically, at any date or occurrence in the future.

Development Environment: SFCC has an individual development environment for every developer that allows multiple developers to code against different versions of product and content data in their own environment. These can be spun up or spun down as developers are added or removed.

Products: SFCC has advantages in the number of products, number of product variants, and the speed at which products can be imported into the system. It also has no limits on the number of images and is best-in-class for image upload speeds.

Promotions and Campaigns: SFCC has much more flexibility and capability in the way it handles promotions and campaigns. Campaigns can be built tying products to discounts, content, dates, and times in the future using SitePreview. These campaigns can be fully tested long before they go live. The built-in Order and Product-level promotions are the best in class and cover nearly everything you could ever want to do.

Search: SFCC is best-in-class for out-of-the-box search customization. The sheer number of search features is significant.

Integration Capabilities: Salesforce Commerce Cloud excels at integrating with other enterprise systems including ERPs, CRMs, and third-party tools, ensuring a cohesive ecosystem.

Jobs: Processes can be built to run at any time or date and do nearly anything in SFCC, all safely inside the SFCC environment. Extremely robust jobs can be built that allow for easy integration with nearly every other platform around.

Performance and Reliability: Built to handle high traffic and sales volumes, SFCC ensures stable and reliable performance, even during peak periods.

URL Structure: SFCC allows you to customize the URL naming structure. This can be beneficial if you don't want the standard "collections" and "products" keywords in the URL.

Checkout Customization: The checkout is fully customizable in SFCC. Any functionality or logic can be built directly into the site's checkout process.

Security: The security capabilities built into SFCC are extremely granular, giving an admin the ability to limit very specific functionality to certain users or groups of users. These changes can be made at the granular level across all applications and functionality or at a higher level by assigning users to groups and groups to access rules. It also has very specialized "behind-the-scenes" tracking that tracks nearly every Business Manager screen that an employee uses and every change they make. This data is not readily accessible but can be retrieved by Salesforce under certain conditions.

Cons:

Cost: Historically, Salesforce has charged more for its Commerce Cloud SFCC platform as compared to its competitors. However, recently, Salesforce has been lowering its SFCC pricing to be extremely competitive, giving those brands renewing on the platform a nice drop in price. Development and maintenance costs are higher in many cases because it takes more time to implement similar functionality due to the open-source extended capabilities of SFCC.

Complexity: Implementing and maintaining SFCC requires a team of skilled SFCC developers with a good deal of tribal knowledge about the platform. The extreme customizability and flexibility make it more complex to learn and maintain. DEMAND SFCC developers average over 11 years working on the SFCC platform, eliminating guesswork and allowing you to make best-in-class decisions on implementing and using the platform optimally.

Time to Launch: Due to its extensive customization options and setup requirements, getting an SFCC site up and running can take longer compared to other platforms.

Steep Learning Curve: Both the platform and its administrative tools can be challenging for non-technical users to navigate and utilize effectively. The learning curve takes time, and much of the learning just comes with experience.

Content and Design Implementation: Although SFCC has robust content capabilities, its user interface, Business Manager, is not as easy to use or understand as the Shopify admin portal. SFCC has Page Designer, which allows end users to quickly create pages based on templates, but Shopify's admin portal is more advanced and allows users to quickly add images, move sections around, and is generally easier to use.

Shopify Plus

Pros:

Ease of Use: Shopify is designed with simplicity in mind, offering an intuitive interface that allows businesses to get online quickly and manage their stores without needing extensive technical expertise.

Shopify Payments: All payment options are built-in and configurable via the admin portal. No more spending hours implementing a new payment gateway. You can turn it on and immediately accept VISA, MasterCard, AMEX, Discover, and digital wallets like PayPal, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.

ShopPay: Shopify also features the top-rated checkout for conversion, called ShopPay. This modal payment option allows customers to quickly purchase from your store with their address and credit card information already completed.

Affordability: With a variety of pricing tiers, Shopify is accessible to businesses of all sizes, including startups and small businesses. It allows businesses to scale with the platform scaling alongside them.

Extensive App Ecosystem: The Shopify App Store offers a wide range of plugins and extensions, making it easy to add new functionalities as needed. This can result in significant savings of both development time and vendor subscription fees. Apps for purchase on Shopify can often be cheaper than purchasing the same vendor product on another eCommerce platform. However, some apps can also be very expensive, and those costs should be considered when pricing the overall package.

Front-End Design: Thanks to its user-friendly interface and pre-designed themes, Shopify enables businesses to build their website front-end quickly. This can sometimes result in a very rapid implementation if the theme parameters align with the design concept.

Friendly Admin Portal: Shopify comes with an admin portal that allows end users to quickly and easily edit images, content, and products, as well as move sections and blocks around on the page without needing development support. This allows new content to be released much faster and doesn’t require content editors to know CSS or HTML.

Reliable Hosting and Security: Shopify provides built-in hosting, PCI compliance, and security features, so businesses don’t have to worry about managing these aspects themselves.

Cons:

Limited Customization for Complex Needs: While Shopify is highly customizable for simple to moderate use cases, it can struggle to meet the requirements of large enterprises or businesses with highly specialized needs.

No Staging Environment: Users in the Shopify Admin Portal can "accidentally" change products and content on production very easily. There is currently no way to test the future state of products and content or replicate that state to production.

No Encapsulated Dev Environments: In Shopify, all developers work using the same product and content that's also available to production. There is no way for a Shopify developer to build out and work off their "own" product and content. This makes it difficult to manage large development efforts where the content/product data differs from that currently on production.

International Multi-Site Challenges: There is currently no way to share a master product catalog or code across multiple sites in Shopify. Localization is not built into the platform. Shopify has expansion stores, but the overhead to maintain multiple international sites is greater with Shopify.

Product Limitations: Brands with a large number of products (over 50,000), over 2,000 product variants per master product, or a large number of product images may encounter challenges such as storage limits when importing that data. Salesforce SFCC product imports are built-in and free. Many Shopify brands use Matrixify to import data, which can be costly and is slower compared to SFCC.

Promotion Limitations: Shopify does not come out of the box with all the order and product-level promotions that exist with SFCC. Third-party tools offer additional promotional capabilities and can be added for a fee. Shopify also does not have built-in campaign capabilities that allow users to tie a promotion with specific content at a particular date and time.

No Site Preview: SFCC allows users to preview what the site will look like on a future date when a campaign or promotion hits. This feature does not exist in Shopify.

Search: Search is not as robust as that which comes out of the box with SFCC. There are two main apps for search, SearchSpring and Algolia, that work well, but they come with additional costs.

Black Box: Shopify is not as open-source as SFCC. This limits customization for end users who may want to adjust specific functionalities.

Checkout: Checkout customization is limited to checkout extensions. Some may argue it’s best to leave checkout as Shopify intended, as it has the best conversion rates out there. The downside is that some customizations to checkout may be impossible.

Security: Shopify allows you to assign users a general set of generic permissions. These are fairly broad and cannot be locked down at a functional level. Additional challenges arise when a brand provides collaborator access to another company. The access permissions assigned to the external company are shared with all external users from that company, potentially exposing sensitive information to untrained individuals.

No Built-In Jobs: Shopify has Shopify Flow available in the app store, but it is not as robust as SFCC Jobs.

App Dependency: Many features that come natively with platforms like SFCC require third-party apps in Shopify, which can add costs and complexity.

Transaction Fees: Unless you use Shopify Payments, additional transaction fees are applied, which can add up for businesses with high sales volumes.

Scalability Challenges: While Shopify Plus offers enterprise-level features, businesses with very large or complex operations may still find its capabilities limiting compared to SFCC.

Choosing the Right Platform

When deciding between SFCC and Shopify, it’s important to consider your business size, budget, technical expertise, and long-term goals.

Go with SFCC if: You are an established enterprise with complex needs, a large product catalog, and the budget to support a robust, scalable, and customizable platform.

Opt for Shopify if: You are a small to medium-sized business looking for an affordable, user-friendly platform that enables rapid deployment and easy management.

Both platforms have proven track records of success, and the choice ultimately depends on aligning the platform’s strengths with your business' requirements. At DEMAND, we have the expertise to help you succeed on either platform, ensuring you make the most of its capabilities to achieve your goals.

VIEW ALL