Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Shopify: Comparison of Features, Pricing, Ease of Use, Integrations & More

Finding the best ecommerce software to bring your products or services in front of your target customers can be daunting. Among the leading ecommerce platforms to consider would be Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Shopify. Each has distinct selling points that could easily sway your decision. The key, however, in choosing the best platform is to dig deep into which one addresses your needs best at the price most acceptable to you.

To help you weigh the difference between Salesforce and Shopify, this guide sets side-by-side the features, pricing, use, integration, and more of Salesforce Commerce vs Shopify. The goal is to help you choose wisely what fits your business best.

Despite the dual fourth-quarter headwinds of inflation and supply chain issues, total retail sales in the United States increased 19.3% in 2021, according to The State of Retail and E-Commerce. Consumers are returning to service-sector spending as they become more comfortable with in-store shopping. The report offered four takeaways:

• Investment in digital tools to meet consumers where they were was not in vain, and in-store and online shopping will increasingly merge.
• Online shopping’s continued growth necessitates digital product discovery, and online retailers’ next big challenge will be to replicate in-store shopping’s tactile experience.
• The race for ultra-fast grocery delivery is on, and consumer expectations may shift, but for now, people are happy with delivery times.
• Off-price expansion and high-end experiences are the future of physical stores, with little value in the middle.

Shopify was used by 20% of ecommerce sites worldwide in 2021 and was the most popular ecommerce software in the US then, with around 29% of websites using it. It is therefore ideal for retailers. However, as your business grows, you will need more features, particularly a CRM. While Shopify integrates well with CRMs, it has no CRM of its own. As such, the CRM product suite of Salesforce vs Shopify tips the scale in favor of the former in this arena.

Salesforce is the leading vendor in the CRM applications market worldwide with a market share of 19.5% in 2020, reported Statista. To boot, GlobeNewsWire reported Salesforce as among the key players in the ever-growing commerce cloud market, placing it a few notches higher than Shopify. Indeed, Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Shopify is a close battle. This guide, therefore, helps you choose the best platform for your business.

Overview of Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Shopify

Shopify and Salesforce Commerce Cloud are among the best ecommerce software systems. Salesforce controls a sizable portion of the CRM market, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud has emerged as a major player in the commerce cloud. In the meantime, Shopify is the most popular ecommerce site on the planet. To understand how these two heavyweights can help your company, it’s best to first get a sense of what they have to offer.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Salesforce Commerce Cloud capabilities include ecommerce, order management, mobile-first POS, and predictive intelligence. Its three primary features are experience, operations, and intelligence.

Its experience-management features aid in the management of products, pricing, promotions, and content. In terms of operations, you’ll be able to connect your back office to order fulfillment through a variety of channels. Personal consumer interactions and business decisions are guided by intelligence elements. These abilities power cross-channel commerce, from online shopping to order fulfillment and customer service.

Commerce Cloud provides a unified view of prices, items, orders, and customers, thanks to a personalized and shared promotion engine. The multi-tenant architecture of this app ensures security and dependability.

Salesforce has shifted its focus from MNCs and tech behemoths to SMBs and online enterprises. The change was necessary because the market is changing, and in order to remain at the top of the CRM market, Salesforce must meet the expectations of its customers.

As a result, Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides the following values:

• Unceasing innovation. Salesforce Commerce Cloud quickly demolishes out-of-date commerce solutions. With this level of adaptability, your company can respond to changing customer expectations. The software is also updated up to eight times a year, and these updates have no negative impact on your online business. Because of its open architecture, you can easily add new features without disrupting your cloud upgrade path.
• Fast execution. Salesforce Commerce Cloud accelerates the execution of ideas, ensuring that your company’s infrastructure is always capable of supporting its development and operations. You can also easily manage site functionality and brand experience. The most intriguing aspect is the cloud’s self-scaling. Instead of focusing on infrastructure upgrades and maintenance, IT can concentrate on strategic goals and innovation.
• Full control and ease of use. The simple and easy-to-use platform saves you time spent analyzing the need constraints. Salesforce Commerce Cloud also allows you to fully control the functionality of your site even if you have no IT background.
• Community Support. You gain access to a large community brimming with new ideas. Users can easily share ideas and innovations because the tool is built on a multi-tenant cloud architecture. Your company can also benefit from cloud-based intelligence.

Shopify

Shopify allows you to create and manage online stores as well as sell products in person. Shopify is best suited to small businesses or retailers. It is a feature-rich platform, so you can do almost all of your retail activities on a single app without feeling overwhelmed. Shopify, on the other hand, is moving up the market with Shopify Plus, which is aimed at high-volume merchants.

Shopify’s multi-tenant platform handles billions of dollars each year. This platform eliminates the need for transaction fees, rack space, and bandwidth. Meanwhile, Shopify Plus enables you to sell on all major marketplaces and social media platforms. Customers’ engagement, sales, and brand awareness improve as a result of its multichannel capabilities.

Shopify adds value by offering the following features:

• Identity and reputation. Shopify is a leading provider of ecommerce solutions and is one of the industry’s most recognizable brands, particularly in North America.
• Accessibility and usability. The easy-to-use online platform allows you to set up and manage online stores on your own, even if you lack technical expertise.
• Innovation and technology. Shopify invests heavily in the development of new and innovative technologies.
• Functionality range. You can use a wide range of tools and functionality to set up and operate various online stores, including Facebook stores, as well as use international payment gateways and search engine optimization tools.

Comparison of Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs. Shopify

A superficial look at Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Shopify gives you a hint that these two platforms have different selling points but quite similar features. Free yourself from unique ecommerce challenges by taking a deeper dive into the core features of these two platforms vis-a-vis your business requirements.

Core Features

The core features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Shopify are similar. Both provide robust storefront, shopping cart, order management, product management, marketing, and analytics capabilities. However, there are some significant differences.

Shopify has a plethora of templates. You can spend a few dollars on a design template that you think is stylish enough for your product. Customization, however, is what Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers best.

Staging environments are required in Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Meanwhile, any change you make on Shopify is immediately reflected in the system. This means, however, that your minor error would be published immediately. Salesforce Commerce Cloud imposes checks, double checks, and triple checks.

Personalized marketing campaigns are more feasible on Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Shopify and are part of a complex built-in marketing functionality. You can create campaigns that only target people in a specific location or who have spent a certain amount of money during a specific time period. In the arena of personalized marketing, Salesforce Commerce Cloud leads the top ecommerce software platforms.

Furthermore, Salesforce Commerce Cloud allows for the creation of complex user experiences, which means you can create unique user experiences for different users. You can also create a variety of flows and test them using A/B tests, and its multi-store functionality lets you use a single backend to power multiple brands and stores. Salesforce Commerce Cloud makes it simple to share a backend database, such as a product catalog. This could be challenging with Shopify.

Integrations

Shopify’s plugin market is larger than Salesforce Commerce Cloud. The plugins, on the other hand, tend to slow down the site. Despite this, it integrates with a wide range of business systems and applications, including MailChimp, QuickBooks, Fulfillrite, itDuzzit, Zapier, KISSmetrics, and Chargify.

Meanwhile, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a component of Salesforce Digital 360, allowing you to perform a multitude of tasks apart from selling: You can engage with your customers across multiple digital channels for example, and improve the security of the checkout process by simplifying the payment process.

Because of Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s partnership with Stripe, you can use Commerce Cloud Payments to add payment functionality to your website without writing any code. With MuleSoft Accelerator for Commerce Cloud, you can also integrate external systems such as Jira, ServiceNow, and SAP into Service and Commerce Clouds more quickly. Finally, plugins hardly slow down system performance because each plugin must be fully certified, and would have passed speed requirements.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is part of Customer 360, an integrated platform that helps you grow relationships with your customers and employees by connecting your marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams.

Pricing

On a “medium” or “large” scale, Shopify is generally less expensive than Salesforce Commerce Cloud. You can run a Shopify store for as little as a few dollars per month and as much as a few hundred dollars per month. The following are the pricing plans:

• Basic Plan – This plan is ideal for new ecommerce businesses with occasional in-person sales; it includes two staff accounts, up to four inventory locations, and charges a 2% transaction fee.
• Shopify Plan – This plan is ideal for growing businesses that sell online or in-store; it includes 5 staff accounts, standard reports, up to 5 inventory locations, and a 1% transaction fee.
• Advanced Plan – This plan is ideal for scaling businesses that require advanced reporting; it includes 15 staff accounts, advanced reports, up to 8 inventory locations, and a 0.5% transaction fee.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud pricing includes no upfront licensing fees, whereas Shopify Plus does. Its pricing tiers are scaled, and the amount merchants pay indicates whether or not their business is performing well. Salesforce Commerce Cloud charges a small commission, usually between 1% and 3%. This means that if your store is small, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is less expensive than Shopify: if you don’t make any sales, Salesforce Commerce Cloud does not make money either.

Salesforce has recently changed to accommodate SMEs and to keep up with ecommerce trends. The available tiers are listed below.

• Starter tier – This tier is ideal for single-store owners with one website/store, 7,500 products, and two price books. GMV is taxed at 1%.
• Growth tier – This tier is ideal for mid-sized businesses with up to 5 websites/stores, 75,000 customers, and 10 price books. GMV is charged at a rate of 2%.
• Plus tier – This tier is ideal for large businesses with up to 10 stores, unlimited websites, 750,000 products, and unlimited price books. Charges 3% of the GMV.

Ease of Use

Shopify is simple to use. There are many templates, from which you can choose, and the design is quite straightforward. You can easily add products to the platform. All these with no coding skills required. However, you would not be able to customize on this platform. That means, for example, if you use the templates, you may end up with a design that is very similar to that of other stores.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is far more flexible than Shopify in terms of heavy customization, and it is also far superior in terms of product attribution and catalog management. However, you may require the services of a Salesforce developer to customize the platform and make the most of its features. However, once the platform is built, salespeople will be able to use it with ease. Omnichannel is also a possibility with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. As a result, you can provide a consistent customer experience to customers who shop online, on a mobile device, on a laptop, or in a physical store.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud gives you insights into user behaviors that will help in your strategies.

Getting Started

Implementing Salesforce Commerce Cloud in a way sets a business up for success by requiring specific knowledge and skill. To get the most out of the program and reach your full potential with your business, you need Salesforce-certified developers who understand SFCC’s architecture and programming language. They can implement and customize the platform with the proper functionality for your unique needs. They can also provide ongoing site maintenance and support.

Shopify, meanwhile, is much easier. You simply need a domain name, and you can open an account in Shopify. Building the website does not require much tech knowledge since there are templates available. However, there is not much room for customization.

Use Cases

As mentioned earlier, Shopify provides a wide range of templates from which to choose, has a straightforward design, and with a reasonable number of SKUs, you have a relatively simple product catalog. You do not even need any technical knowledge to get it up and running. Take note, however, that if you want international growth, you will have to use workarounds like ERP or PIM to manage your products. If your company does not require a lot of customization, personalization, or AI, or you do not do B2B, Shopify might be a good fit.

Meanwhile, Salesforce Commerce Cloud lacks templates but is extremely customizable. As such, you can have distinct designs across channels. Furthermore, you can have complete control over the back end of your website, allowing you to build as needed. You can also create incredibly personalized selling experiences, in addition to implementing personalized campaigns with custom-tailored advertising, marketing, and brand experience. It also provides platforms for omnichannel marketing. International expansion is also a breeze.

Since Salesforce Commerce Cloud is part of Salesforce Digital 360, its services go beyond ecommerce and marketing. It also extends to human resources, making it easy for you to manage your teams.

Customize your store on Salesforce Commerce Cloud and add products easily.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Shopify Comparison Table

Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Shopify–Which Is Better?

What will work best for you would depend on what your long-term budget and plans are, not your short-term budget. The better platform should also be up to date with the latest ecommerce developments.

If you are looking for an ecommerce platform with powerful marketing functionalities and customizable features, and one that will offer you more robust functionalities as your business grows, then Salesforce Commerce Cloud could give you your money’s worth. Otherwise, you can try Shopify for an easy-to-use platform.

By Jenny Chang

Jenny Chang is a senior writer specializing in SaaS and B2B software solutions. Her decision to focus on these two industries was spurred by their explosive growth in the last decade, much of it she attributes to the emergence of disruptive technologies and the quick adoption by businesses that were quick to recognize their values to their organizations. She has covered all the major developments in SaaS and B2B software solutions, from the introduction of massive ERPs to small business platforms to help startups on their way to success.