Salesforce Agentforce Commerce vs. Stripe Billing

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

If you have a small to medium sized business Stripe is most likely the perfect solution for you. It will automate almost all of your billing, freeing up your time to be used elsewhere. If you have a large business I would recommend getting in touch with the Stripe customer support team first to ensure it will be a good fit for you.

Incentivized

• 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

• Stripe attempts to bill clients multiple times, so if the initial attempt to collect payment fails, they keep trying. Often payment is collected on the 2nd or 3rd try. This ability to re-try billing attempts with the same user on a monthly basis increases the overall amount we collect in payments.
• It is easy to search for customers using Stripe- type in the first few letters of the subscriber's name and they immediately appear. It's a simple feature, but very useful when fielding customer service calls.
• Stripe does make it easy to create new coupon codes or issue partial or total refunds.

• 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

• Dashboard gives too much info for dept. use, may vary for others.
• Be able to export multiple invoices as a PDF at once.
• Getting to the invoices can be tricky if you have to click on multiple links.

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.

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

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

I have had no problems with Stripe support, they are prompt and it does not crash like other platforms or software. They are also great about notifying if maintenance is needed. Since the interface is so easy to use, I haven’t had to contact support that much, versus other platforms, it can be hard to be aware of certain features.

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

Our previous product was Cloudnet360, which provides an integrated shopping cart and CRM. With Cloudnet, our customers had to leave our site and go to an outside checkout page in order to purchase. In addition, Stripe provides a robust API which allows us to automate more of the work of maintaining a subscription service.

Incentivized

• In my experience I see most of the retailers see better sales after moving to Demandware.
• Site performance is really good if the application built with best practices suggested by Demandware.
• Service integrations have some limitations in terms of quota etc but still all are inside manageable grounds.

Incentivized

• By managing our e-commerce, Stripe makes it easy to have a subscription business, so it automates the whole thing.
• ROI would be much higher with better analytics -- having to create reports and segment customers manually is a pain and definitely eats into the ROI of the product
• I would also like to see more AI applied to the reporting and data for better insights

Incentivized