commercetools vs. Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Commercetools is generally a very flexible, smart platform for eCommerce business. It's an API enabled, cloud solution that makes integration seamless and quick to deploy. It's also a modern platform that utilizes API query languages like GraphQl. It lacks some functionalities in pricing and geographic variations of product portfolio but the platform is constantly improving and new functionalities are added.

Incentivized

Global Sites; larger commerce organizations but not too large where the % rev-share would affect its feasibility in a feature comparison. Salesforce is rock solid in infrastructure and rarely has outages or issues; it scaled appropriately for holiday peak and was able to accomplish anything we put our minds to as long as we staffed development appropriately. The latter, however, is not to be overlooked. Developers are necessary and expensive.

Incentivized

• Very good documentation
• Stabile and scalable Microservice-Architecture
• Cloud Native Platform

• Traffic - When we have sales, our traffic will increase exponentially and their cloud can handle the huge uptick in traffic we receive without overloading our servers.
• Site updates - it continually monitors in the background for any upgrades or updates needed so we don't have to go in and do it ourselves. A real time saver!
• Integration - outside plugins and add-ons are easy to install with Salesforce commerce cloud as it allows a seamless integration of extra plug ins onto our site.

Incentivized

• Pricing - Commercetools has pricing limitations with respect to customer/SKU combination. If an organization provides lots of custom/contract pricing for customers, Commercetools has difficulty mapping it in. They are working on this to make it more flexible.
• Geographic variations in product portfolio - Commercetools has central product master that doesn't provide product activation/enabling based on different geographies/elevation/sales office structures. Some creative mapping skills are needed to overcome this limitation.
• Data mapping limitations - Commercetools lacks in out of the box data mapping limitations to full fledged ERP platforms. Extensive data mapping workshops are necessary to fit the functionalities of an ERP platform from order, to delivery , to warehouse operations and billing.

Incentivized

• The UX within the Business Manager portion of Demandware, the primary interface for marketers, is generally a confusing, inconsistent mess. Particularly infuriating are the lack of consistency for search and sort behavior within the tool.
• A number of useful features, such as the ability to set schedules or tie features to unique customer segments, have seemingly arbitrary limitations imposed.
• Demandware's idea of leveraging the community to be a learning resource and a sounding board for new ideas and features is a nice theory, but in practice it doesn't work for businesses with a lot of customization. I'm left with the impression that individual support is not a priority.

Incentivized

A huge factor influencing our decision to remain on the Demandware platform is that our new parent company is standardizing all its luxury brands in the US on it. We are fortunate. However, even if we had remained an independent company, I believe we would continue on the Demandware platform for all the reasons outlined in this review. I appreciate the stability the platform has provided to our eCommerce site in the last three years as well as the continuous improvements and technological advances being rolled out that will allow us to keep the site fresh, engaging, modern and stable. I've heard many horror stories from colleagues on other platforms who struggle with the expense and complexity involved with making what should be minor and simple changes and updates to their sites.

Overall it's going great. Hoping it can reach very good heights soon.

Incentivized

We have only had one instance where the platform went down in the time we have been using it.

They are very responsive and a support technician will be assigned quickly. Even if there is further clarification needed for the ticket, or a solution is not immediately available, you feel that someone is there and staying on top of the issue. Most common issues are resolved quickly and satisfactorily.

Incentivized

The in-person training was thorough. Trainer was pretty dry, but covered everything really well.

Implementation went fairly smoothly.

When I think of Salesforce products, I sometimes think of them interchangeably as one big lump. It's hard not to be incredibly immersed in the ecosystem day in and day out and taking advantage of resources like Trailhead. While Microsoft Dynamics compares in quality and offerings, it doesn't offer the same engagement and resources as Salesforce in its communications, social, and marketing, which makes a difference in terms of relevance and help. Commerce Cloud comes with the support you need to succeed and the tools you need to grow. In a high demand consumer world, we need products like this to keep up and get ahead. The minute we catch up, we're behind. Salesforce helps you stay on pace and create the unique and personalized experiences customers everywhere expect.

Incentivized

• We were able to successfully launch the ecommerce platform in under 4 months of starting development work.
• Integrate the same APIs to different client facing solutions.
• The total cost of platform recovered in 8 months of deployment.

Incentivized

• It created an impact on our processes greatly where we're now able to assist our users with lesser wait times and higher efficiency
• Content creation is very easy on the tool
• It also stores the versions of the processes making it easy to roll back a version if needed

Incentivized