Salesforce Agentforce Commerce vs. Springbot

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is well suited for medium to large sized eCommerce platforms (mainly B2C but B2B could work as well) who are looking to streamline their web processes and website functionalities while incorporating multiple departments. If you are a small business and have tighter margins, this may not be the best choice for you as there may not be as many opportunities to utilize all of the CRM's features and you may be at a financial loss because of it. Otherwise, this platform is great for organization and providing a helping hand in your eCommerce roadmap!

Incentivized

If you have a small marketing team with a small budget and you use Mailchimp & Adroll, Springbot might work for you. Otherwise, there are other more robust tools out there to accomplish the same goals. They need to work on more integrations with other ESPs and retargeting providers. And they need to work on making sure the data being sent to their customers is accurate.

Incentivized

• Demandware business manager features a very robust set of options to accomplish many merchandising and content tasks out of the box. For typical retailers, there are usually very simple ways to accomplish common tasks.
• The ability to schedule content and tie unique content to session data is particularly useful and fully featured.
• Many features that would typically be missing from a home-grown CMS and would require development are included in business manager and easily controlled by marketers.

Incentivized

• One of the things that impressed me the most early on was their dedication to email deliverability and growing my "engaged" list of customers. Through this, they taught me the value of quality subscribers vs. quantity of subscribers, while still sharing new ways to grow my email list in a healthy and sustainable manner. For so long, my main focus was always having the biggest email list - and while that's good to have a lot of subscribers, the most important thing is to make sure they are ENGAGED with your brand. So together we've come up with fun ways to do that, and we've seen that reflected in our list growth and open rate.
• One of the other things I was looking to do when I partnered with Springbot was to increase my site traffic. The original sales rep had a few recommendations on how we could do this, and our team was most excited about their Facebook Services offering. We were paired with a Facebook expert who did a discovery call with us, and then presented a strategic plan for us to follow for the first 90 days, until we could fully optimize. Their Facebook team narrowed down my target audience and has helped strategically grow my site traffic.
• Finally, and maybe the part that I value the most, is the partnership that I've developed with Springbot. Out of the gate, there is absolutely work to do to get things set up and they don't sugar coat that. While much of the onboarding was smooth - we had a few obstacles to work through, and I'm thankful my Success Manager kept me up to date as we resolved anything that came up, and was proactive with her outreach and recommendations to get the most out of the platform. I find myself learning something new each time I chat with her, whether it be optimizations to my automations, new marketing ideas, or ways to increase engagement as I go into the holidays.
• After being with them for a year, I feel this is more than a vendor + customer relationship, and think of it as a strategic and valuable partnership.

• The #1 pain with Demandware as a developer has been Pipelines. Originally development on this platform was designed as a visual drag, drop, and configure model. You would create these logic flows (pipelines) in the visual editor, made up of nodes (pipelets) and connectors. These quickly got out of hand and turned into a spiderweb. Worse they were not like anything that most developers are used to. Pipelines save to XML but the markup was not clean and difficult to merge or diff, to say the least. I guess they were aiming for a more simple model but quickly realized that was not sufficient for real-world applications. To their credit, Demandware recognized this and has been steadily moving toward a clean, pure-code model.
• The benefits of SaaS and the quick release cycle can be a mixed blessing. Features and API's can and do change from time to time. When you're using a platform like this you cannot build it and forget about it. It's not obvious to everyone but you're signing up for some amount of maintenance over time to keep things up to date.
• The platform has a flaw that still hasn't been resolved. Each Demandware customer "realm" has many instances for development, staging, production, etc. All of the instances have their own user accounts and passwords, and you have to log in to each instance separately. It's very frustrating as an admin or developer, though less so to business users who will only need to access one instance. Demandware could really use a Single Sign On!
• Demandware has a marketplace for third-party extensions to add pre-build integrations with other systems. While there is a reasonably broad selection of third-party vendors, I have to point out that the quality of many of these components has been sub-par. There are a few gems but many are clunky and quickly cobbled together, and surely require further investment of time. Demandware needs to do a better job of quality assurance with third-party vendors.

Incentivized

• They don't keep any of their promises
• They don't listen

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.

The overall ease of using the system. Consolidation in location for our team members. Mobile application for on the go research, as many of our team members are constantly traveling to job sites or to meet clients. No more duplicate calls to current customers, since we have 12 different divisions that span the company. Mostly the ability to look at the database when our team members begin cultivating a new
lead/prospect with a potential customer to see if anyone within the team has a
relationship with that person or the company they work for.

Incentivized

I think Springbot is pretty user-friendly overall. The only down-side is that the website is often updated, leaving the customer to hunt certain features down that are now in a different spot. So I think it would be helpful if every so often they sent an email that let customers know what changes were made and where to access everything

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

They only cared about referencing the user agreement to get out of any common sense discussion I tried to have. They have one goal take your money and don't care if the system is working for you or not.

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

Implementation went fairly smoothly.

All relative to your organizational size. Shopify works for small to mid, Magento for small to large, commerce tools would be a large-scale plus. Hire a skilled consultant to help you make a decision of this caliber!

Incentivized

We were choosing between a few different options when considering a new email marketing program. Previously we were using Constant Contact, but wanted a program that offered more. We looked into Klaviyo as well, but after comparing the two we decided to go with Springbot as they offered a wide variety of insights and had wonderful customer service.

• Salesforce Commerce Cloud ends up paying for itself in the long run so long as customers are taking advantage of its full capabilities.
• I would highly recommend trying it or consulting a partner like us about it if you have an interest and think you could benefit. A thorough business analysis will tell you if this segment of Salesforce is right for your objectives.

Incentivized

• Money spent with zero return. We got nothing from this investment.