Salesforce Commerce Cloud Reviews

Our clients use Salesforce Commerce Cloud to sell their goods retail online. This solution has been mostly used by American retailers.

The whole point is that SFCC concentrates on not re-inventing the wheel. For example, Wish-list functionality. These are the basic functionalities that should be in e-commerce, like Apple Pay or the social media authentication login. These kinds of functionalities were provided out of the box. So the customer's sign-in and sign-out and the whole check-out experiences are provided by Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which can be enhanced on the basis of need. The customization is done by the service providers on the basis of customers' needs. These kinds of basic solutions are there and the role of the SFCC service provider is to customize all of it. It is very extensive and the documentation is very strong. 

The community is not very large, around 4,000 - 5,000 good developers in the community who have actually been helping each other. This is not something available in other solutions because their solution is outsourced. People working in SFCC can only help other SFCC developers. This is a drawback in Salesforce which is not an open-source solution. Although it is closed source, at the same time it provides a high-quality service. The development is very easy, with continuous integration. Also, their continuous code development is easy.

Their methodology is such that all these can be easily implemented into Salesforce Commerce Cloud. So the software development life cycle becomes very practical in this way.

There are a lot of solutions in the Salesforce Commerce Cloud itself. For example, a company may offer to our clients their Order Management system, but sometimes clients don't want to buy all the services from one service provider. If I'm a developer of SFCC, then some of my clients would like to hire me for only the SFCC stuff. But my video order management system is in some other technology like AIX or you can see their backend system is in a botnet for the autonomy system, so sometimes they would like to involve me in those specs. I worked with one company that actually sold three services to one client. That is one SFCC spot where around 30 people were working in that specific team for the SFCC specific task, while around 20 people were working in a botnet to connect SFCC with AIX database and AIX was their order management system. Actually, SFCC doesn't have that database capacity so they recommend that the service providers and the clients use a third-party service as a database. Okay.

This how the SFCC works and how the services are being provided to the client.

There are some areas which should be improved. For example, the community is very closed source. What if Salesforce provided some depositories? Now a big percent of the hubs are only for people who actually paid a membership, and then they allow you to start working from the cloud. But there should be some sort of trial or learning opportunity for other people to learn what Salesforce Commerce Cloud is. Because if you don't buy it, you won't be able to learn it. That's a drawback. I'm not saying make it open source because this is a private company. I'm just saying that it should provide some opportunities for the public to learn it. To provide more opportunities with it because the e-commerce platform is expanding all over the world, even in third world countries. They should provide some way to learn it. Yes, they provide us the documentation, they provide us the community, but they don't provide us the coding environment. It should be there for some trial period because it is very costly. People want to work in SFCC, but it is not very affordable. For example, I am in Pakistan and I remember back 2-3 years ago, many clients or customers wanted to use Salesforce Commerce Cloud but they didn't offer any services in Pakistan.

That was their concern. And the billing was very, very high at that time. Because competitors were not there 2, 3, 4 years ago. But now the competitors are here and Salesforce Commerce Cloud is reducing its costs. But they are still not providing any free, development environment for the developers to explore SFCC.

I have been a Salesforce Commerce Cloud developer for last five years and my overall experience with it is around seven years. 

I am actively working in it.

The stability is very, very high. SFCC is a leader in the world. They have released multiple volumes in the last three years.

The mobile version is completed and now they are releasing their headless architecture, where the front-end and the back-end will be different. Two different teams can work in it. So that will be a giant step in the E-commerce market by Salesforce. So yes, the product is very stable. Nothing crashes. 

But from the development perspective there are some limitations like debugging. If there are things to debug, it should be done very slowly because this debugging is in the code and not on local machines. We are directly connected with the cloud and if there is any internet glitch then the instance or the cloud instance can be halted, which is a real migraine for a developer. So these kinds of limitations are there, but if the product is running on the production instance, it's live and does not crash.

But there are some steps that we have to do like old replication and the content replication, which are actually replicated from a lower to higher environment, meaning from staging to production. Production means a real website so the content and the code are actually set up by a developer or the deployment manager. These are the steps which actually take some time. It's not something that we can do in five or 10 minutes. It can take around two or three hours and our successful release can be done by the SFCC team. The deployment is handled by the service providers.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is very scalable. They provide built-in extra functionalities. They recently introduced a technique in which they provide us a basic website. From there, we have to extend an E-commerce site and we can add multiple functionalities based on customer needs, like Apple Pay or Magento integration. These kinds of things are very interesting to extend and add at runtime, or anytime. This makes the solution very scalable.

In terms of technical support, sometimes it takes time, at least six to 12 hours, which is not very good at the critical moment. But at least they come back to you, as opposed to WooCommerce which is an open source community. You post some question on an open source thread on any website and it's your luck if you get some answer. It might take months or it might take days, or it might take one minute. You're not sure. WooCommerce is not that helpful because it is an open source platform while the Salesforce will get back to you in at least five, six hours.

Salesforce gets back to you and solves the issues. This is the beauty of a closed source environment. If you're working with Microsoft Dynamics 365, their new solution, which is a very fine competitor of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, even they already are full, but they are evolving in the market and this is the beauty of closed source and private companies -they get back to you with answers.

Yes. I worked in WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a PSP. I also worked with WordPress E-commerce and Shopify. And obviously Salesforce as well.

WooCommerce is not a very customizable solution and not a good solution for the large clients who are trafficking pages with more than thousands of testimonies. If the sales are in the millions and the processes are very strong, then a WooCommerce site will not be able to bear the traffic load.

But Salesforce Commerce Cloud will never die because of traffic. At the same time there are a lot of options to import things into Salesforce Commerce Cloud. The customizations are there and any user can customize their website look and feel. The best thing about Salesforce is the role it plays for merchandisers allowing them to customize their sites at run time with the help of the first available data, and how it changes their website look and feel immediately by turning on/off some flags. The merchandising feature is very easy to use in Salesforce Commerce Cloud while in other platforms, like in WooCommerce, this is not always easy to use. The solution is not perfect for every market.

The initial setup process is very strong. Whenever we have to set up a website, which they provide and is known as SFRA or site genesis, there are multiple versions of Salesforce Commerce Cloud. There are around 4 multiple versions that are released by Salesforce on the SFCC. Each version has its data set. This process is easy. You can see the cloud instance in the business manager. It takes around a day, around eight to 10 hours are needed for setting up one version.

This is a very basic step. It's a baby step. It's the very first baby step to set up the PC version on any cloud instance. After that, the customization comes and the SFCC starts developing.

It all depends upon the customers' needs. It's not a hard and fast deadline or timeline. I have been in some situations that took us three to four months and others that took around nine to 10 months. So it's a bracket from three to 10 months. But if the team is cooperative and competent, on average a very big solution can be delivered in 6 or 7 months after the development is released. This includes everything - the documentation, as well as the code and the leads and everything

Planning time is very negligible, it gets changed client to client because there are a lot of ethical issues and I'm trying to decode it in front of you.

From a review perspective it also changes client to client. If a client is technical and he has some knowledge then they might have another plan and if they hire me as a freelancer, then they are the manager and I could be included in the technical discussions. From the solution perspective, I can give them suggestions but ultimately the direction will be decided by the client. This includes extra content and the images and how they should be processed to the production environment. The processes are different from client to client.

Price was a huge issue three to four years ago but now they're introducing their On-Demand Sandboxes concept. This is very practical as well. The thing is, whenever you use any cloud instance on the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, you are paying something to Salesforce Commerce Cloud even if you're not using it for each second, each minute. But now they have provided a new solution which is very helpful for the customers where if you buy their On-Demand Sandboxes plan, whenever you need some cloud instance for development, just create it, use it, delete it and that's it. You will pay whenever you're using it. That's the practical approach from Salesforce. But three to four years ago when before this concept existed there were a lot of charges by Salesforce but now they are reducing it because there are lot of competitors. Fees for developers are a little expensive compared to other developers because it's a very closed sourced community and not everyone is a domain expert in SFCC. Whoever invested time, whoever took the risk of working in this very closed source environment, should be paid a little higher.

My advice is that, yes, they should work with SFCC because it provides a lot of features to extend and link with third parties, API's are available from third parties, and they can easily be integrated into Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It has a customizable checkout experience, customizable homepage, everything can be customized. Their A/B testing is very, very strong. The New York traffic can see one thing on their homepage, while the Boston market can see another. So you can base the experience on different customer groups. Not everyone in America has to see the same thing on the site. The experience is very customizable for cloud and scalability is very easy. If you are a very small company and you can't afford a million dollar bill, then the Salesforce Commerce Cloud is not for you.

On a scale of one to ten I would love to give it a 10+.

The best things with Salesforce Commerce Cloud are that they encourage people to update from time to time, which is very positive coming from a private platform, that the certification path is very strong, and their certification is very reliable. If you are a certified developer they can easily deliver the value. The the first path is the developer path and then citizen architect. Multiple clouds are there. I'm a certified developer and heading toward the solution architect certification as well and I've been working with Salesforce Commerce Cloud for five years. This is the time to attempt SFCC architecture because I know the ins and outs of the whole solution. I have 10 people in my team who are managing it and we work together. Two Salesforce Commerce Cloud architects and eight certified developers. That is how we are working. Half of the team members are in America, but others are working from here and soon we will be there as well.

I like the product because it's pretty much like Elastic Path. I was also able to create an old infrastructure, storefronts, and all that kind of stuff also. In our case, the use case was for another Mexican company, and in that case, we decided to use Salesforce because it was, like, the technology that is a must.

Regarding how the product improved my company, I would say that, for example, in our case, one of the companies needed to create a couple of storefronts. In the case of Salesforce, it was easy to create more than one, and at the same time, they both were linked to the same infrastructure. That is why they decided to use Salesforce over other ones. I see that because of that flexibility, we were able to use Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

For me, the most valuable feature was the customer journey. It was a complete one from beginning to end. I liked that I was able to get all the components. Let's say that, for example, we needed a CMS which was available for free on the platform. For example, in Elastic Path, it's not like that. The CMS was free, and we liked that because at least the company didn't feel like they needed to pay for that technology separately.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is mature, so they have a lot of information about cost, documentation, and everything.

Salesforce's technical support is not as good as Elastic Path. Hence, support needs to be improved.

The marketing services in the solution need improvement. We needed it in some of our use cases to make some marketing-related things. In the end, the company decided to do marketing with another technology. So I don't know why, but I could say that marketing services or features are needed in the solution.

In the beginning, it was kind of difficult to understand the experience builder and B2B solutions. So probably, I would like to create the storefronts with an e-commerce builder. I am not sure about it, but it was like that. Like, difficult to understand the use and purpose of an experience builder. Then, we discovered that the B2B cloud solution was also for creating the storefronts, but we didn't understand at the beginning very well that part.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud should have a better pricing plan for smaller businesses.

I have been using Salesforce Commerce Cloud for probably less than a year, like six months. Also, I don't remember the version of the solution I am using.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

In the beginning, the setup was somewhat complex.

The price is pretty much like Elastic Path. I think price-wise, it's a little bit expensive. It can be made cheaper for smaller businesses. I understand that for larger businesses, it can be a payable amount. But for medium to smaller, it is kind of costly, and it might be difficult for them to pay.

It is important to see if the technology fits the company's needs.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

• The various cartridges like Customer Service (although be aware, this is a community based cartridge so a lot of SIs will recommend ZenDesk instead but that seems more for their own piece of mind in support rather than the customer requirements), PayPal and Amazon Pay: They aren't plug and go, but they take away the need to develop a lot, so they reduce costs.
• Its scalability. (You must prebook if you have a sale - see the Stability Issues section for more details).
• Reporting is very good.
• Up-sell ability is very good.
• Out of the box gave the basics and you build from there.

It's allowed us to merchandise FMCG in a speedier way.

We can easily report on daily customers, sales, conversions, etc.

Commerce Cloud is not cheap. You will not find a cost-effective solution with official systems integrators. They need a lot more smaller companies offering SI solutions. It can only help the marketplace

Out-of-the-box solutions should present a viable e-commerce site and they sort of do but also sort of don't.

Demandware claims to have an OOTB solution – and to some degree it does – but you can’t really run with it. You need a systems integrator to help manage the deployment. Demandware makes these guys pay a license fee to simply call themselves SIs so right off the bat you have prices that will include the off setting off that cost. The traditional Dermandware recommended SIs are large and so the market is sort of closed, in some respect, and this influences the prices offered for a developed solution. Demandware needs to encourage smaller SIs and development houses (and there are some coming through now) to allow competition.

I have used it for a year.

I did not overly encounter any deployment issues with the platform.

You must tell Commerce Cloud that you are having sales/holidays (even Xmas), so this is not a scalable solution without intervention. When you raise a ticket in their support and tell them, though, it's problem-free, so it's a point to mention, not a huge obstacle.

As mentioned in the Stability Issue section, scalability must be requested.

Actually, their ticket system and help area is very good. You can find everything you need there.

Technical support is very good. You have a team of people ready to help and fix issues.

It's a big solution. Make sure you go through discovery thoroughly as it can be costly to redo bespoke work after (same with anything, though).

A vendor team implemented it.

I'd recommend having skills in-house or getting a technical PM as a sounding board, so you can challenge system integrators.

Look into prices carefully. The percentage "fee" charged on each sale is negotiable and can range from around 2% to almost 3%.

We use this solution for general CRM use cases including capturing the regular customer lifecycle, opportunities, accounts and managing leads. It supports our entire sales cycle and forecasting.

Currently, we've got is a very small user base but we plan to increase usage in the future.We have a very small IT team who manage and maintain the system.

The conversion of opportunities and leads to accounts is one of the most valuable features.

The dashboards for this solution could be improved.

I have been using this solution for one year. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

We completed the implementation in-house. 

The pricing is fairly reasonable. 

I would recommend this solution to others. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I wouldn't say they have artificial intelligence, as it's not really AI, however, the data analysis that they provide to you is good.

The stability, from what I have heard, has been good.

What I don't like is the price.  The solution is expensive.

Once you get into the Salesforce universe, it's very difficult to get out. It's very difficult to connect with other platforms. I find that once you get into Salesforce, you are too trapped in their tech. The obvious technology is the CRM they offer to you, however, I don't like it. A software product should be good in and of itself, yet manageable enough to attach or to connect with other products. Integration with other products is impossible as they do have APIs, and functionality-wise is not the best. There are other platforms that offer more integration potential.

The initial setup is complicated, as is the initial integration.

Technical support could be better. I still don't have the full experience as a client, however, on the after-sales side, I feel a little abandoned after the signing of the contract. It was really pushy at the beginning. They were right on you. Then, after that, you feel a little abandoned as they just aren't there, in the same way, checking in and making sure you are okay. It's more on the after-sales of things that they should take care a little more about their clients already signed on to them.

This solution is quite new for us. We haven't used it for that long.

I don't have experience personally with stability, however, based on what I understand from clients as well as from other partners, the stability is good. If I was to rate the stability of I would say it's eight out of ten. I have not heard of bugs or glitches, and I have not heard of it crashing or freezing.

Technical support requires that you depend on their partner. Otherwise, while Salesforce is good at sales, the after-sales portion of the experience is lacking, mostly due to the fact that they're really lacking experience. It's not the greatest. 

We just switched from Magento to Commerce Cloud. I'd say this solution is a little bit better.

The initial setup is not straightforward. It's very difficult. The integration with other solutions also isn't easy.

The price is a little bit too high, however, you pay for what you get.

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. It depends on the appliance. For startups, it's really not good. For big companies like us, it is good, and for a medium company, it is probably not as good eighter. It's much more suited to something with size and infrastructure.

The product is easy to use.

There could be more product integration in the ERP space, similar to SAP and Aruba. They could develop this feature by taking advantage of their robust ecosystem.

We have been using Salesforce Commerce Cloud for 18 months.

It is a stable product.

The product is suitable for large companies.

The technical support services team offers training and skill development programs. There is enough documentation available to resolve the queries. It is easier to communicate when we call them for support as they refer to the same documents.

Positive

The product is easy to implement, particularly for non-technical users.

The product is expensive.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is the best option for enterprise customers. It has better CRM functionality and an ability to connect existing customer data with product catalogs than other products.

The product has entered the market at the right time. It helps us manage and procure customer data. I advise others to map out the differences between what the product offers and the requirements for their business use cases. They should train their resources in Salesforce to achieve the value of the solution offering.

I rate it an eight out of ten.

I use it for tracking purposes as a CRM to track accounts and customers.

The company as a whole, I really don't know. For me specifically, the daily reminders help me with my day-to-day tasks. Being able to put in quick notes and chatter for a specific account helps me to stay organized.

I have found the list creation and dashboard customization features valuable. 

Not just specific features, but being able to customize everything in general to our specific needs would be pretty awesome.

I have been using this solution for about two and a half years.

The stability is pretty good. It hasn't failed me once. 

There are about 200 users of this solution in my company. We have a dedicated team of about four people for maintenance. 

I don't know how much the solution costs per user, but I know it's our biggest cost in the company.

I would recommend this solution. 

I rate this solution as an eight out of ten. 

We use Salesforce for creating and documenting leads and opportunities as well as for forecasting and creating dashboards.

The features that are core to Salesforce including documentation and the variety of integrations available are most valuable.

This solution could be improved by providing additional artificial intelligence capabilities that are available out-of-the-box. It would be useful to have automatic forecasts using AI. 

I have used Salesforce for seven years. 

This is a stable solution. When maintenance is required, Salesforce notify you almost a week in advance and they usually take place over weekends. 

This is a scalable solution. I have used Salesforce with 700 users and it worked well. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. 

Salesforce is not a cheap solution.

Every company has a different use case for Salesforce and their customizations are unique. A good starting point is to understand why a company needs Salesforce in the first place and focus on utilization afterwards.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. This is because Salesforce is the best CRM solution on the market. The simplicity in which you can document and analyze the data you put in is really valuable. The integration they have with other providers helps optimize sales processes.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.