Adobe Commerce vs. Salesforce Commerce Cloud

We need to do a lot of quotes, and sometimes customers call and want to pay. Adobe Commerce (Magento) did not let you keep saved quotes, so you had to put people on hold whilst you started making the order from scratch rather than just taking payment, which was very annoying.

Incentivized

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

• Magento Commerce Cloud allows us to develop our own custom solutions for problems that we need solved.
• Magento Commerce Cloud can also be integrated with many of the third part vendors that we use. This has made many implementations go very smoothly and tends to be much quicker than developing our own custom solution.
• There are many features available right out of the box. Many of them we have not implemented yet, but it is great to have them available to us when we are ready.

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 Magento admin is not as user-friendly has other e-commerce platforms, and this is why I never recommend it for smaller ecommerce stores.
• You absolutely need a skilled developer to customize and extend Magento. A skilled developer can make Magento amazing, but if you're looking for a DIY website option, Magento will frustrate you.
• Magento takes a lot of server resources, so you will not be able to run on it a shared hosting account. You will need a dedicated server for it.

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

Magento is well-supported by a big development team at eBay, which not only addresses bug reports very quickly, but also is constantly working on improvements to the platform. The wealth of Magento third party modules ensures that the platform will be up to date with future changes to
Payment or ERP systems.
Security is always a concern and with the Zend framework as a foundation, Magento has had very few security-related patches since I have started to work with it

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.

As an experienced user of Adobe Commerce platform, i found the platform complex for beginners yet very flexible to customize as per the client requirements be it a integration with third party system, implementing any payment gateway, managing multiple stores or customising the Adobe Commerce default functionalities, we did not experience issue with it.

Incentivized

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.

The technical service was impeccable. They were on point and were very knowledgeable.

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.

Great value for an flexible, open source platform.

Implementation went fairly smoothly.

Open source nature of Magento was a key consideration, particularly when launching in new markets. Cost is another key factor here and the GMV model is an important enabler for us as we continue to grow. Adobe Commerce is highly extensible and advanced customization and flexibility built in meaning that we can shape the product into exactly what we require.

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

• When we first went LIVE with Adobe Commerce our SEO / Organic traffic plummeted and so did our conversion so our initial take of Adobe Commerce wasn't great. This was partly to do with business decisions but also to do with out of box functionality not being as expected.
• Fast forward and we basically did a redesign on the platform and partnered with a fantastic SEO partner and improved results and now are doing extremely well on the Magento platform. Much improved!

Incentivized

• 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