1ShoppingCart vs. Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Right now it isn't well suited for anything [in my opinion]. It is not being maintained and many of the important functions one got it for in the first place simply do not work and no one is doing anything about it. A number of my colleagues use it too and we are all looking for an alternative. I'd never recommended it to anyone and have steered clients and colleagues away from it.

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

• Email Marketing - Easy to use templates but you can also use your custom html template.
• Managing your list - It is easy to set up separate lists and create opt in forms for each one. It allows multiple opt in forms with customized messages for all steps of the opt in process.
• Ecommerce - Setup of your product or service is easy. You can use buy now type buttons on the 1ShoppingCart store. Integration with your merchant account or Paypal is offered.
• Includes an affiliate management option. This module allows you to manage an affiliate with custom links and an area to post materials for affiliates to use - such as banners.

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

• The UI needs improvement. There are other systems out there that are more intuitive.
• Customizing/branding a shopping cart page can be a little tricky - when it should be very simple.

Incentivized

• 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

If I were in charge of the renewal decision I would really take a look at 1SC vs. Infusionsoft. There are many ways each are great and many ways they are different. I would look at what was best for my company and make the choice accordingly. I find that Infusionsoft has many more ways to intuitively market, segment and cultivate new leads and grow the business as a whole than 1SC currently has.

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.

Why can't I give it a MINUS 1 million??? There is effectively no support.

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.

For this group, cost was a big indictor and reason why we decided to go with 1ShoppingCart. We wanted a solution that would lower our Dev costs (it somewhat did), but did not require the up front costs that a Shopify would need to transport our entire website experience to a new platform. 1ShoppingCart did what we needed it to do and made our checkout process that much cleaner!

Incentivized

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

• Better customer service would be helpful, as previously stated if needed to have the customer service calls not be a fee based call and instead included in the price and not an "add on" cost.
• Just having the ability to connect 1shoppingCart with other systems, such as Wordpress and LeadPages helps to connect all the dots to my sales pages.

• 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