Magento alternatives and competitors

Let me tell you about one of my clients: the basic premise of the solution is to enable the organization to do what it typically does best. It helps to create the platform, as much as possible, without having to focus on some of the associated challenges surrounding e-commerce platforms, like stability, scalability, and managing the technical agency theme or roadmap.

People always choose the solution that best serves their business goals. You can say that Salesforce is the best e-commerce cloud platform on the market, which serves the business purpose.

There is no "one size fits all" approach when it comes to e-commerce. It's a part of Salesforce's family, so Salesforce is very trustworthy and if we talk about Health Cloud, it's HIPAA compliant. If we talk about other industries, it offers all of the security policies which are needed. It is highly trusted, and the data is completely secure and it can easily integrate with the solution set. 

Salesforce offers the best features and functionality which are developed and refined over many years to provide a highly customized e-commerce experience. It is mostly for clients who are more into e-commerce, so they go for the Salesforce Commerce Cloud because, the best part is, you don't have to develop everything from scratch.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud has seamless upgrades. Since the platform is SaaS, Salesforce continuously rolls out many new features in the background. These are available through an administration panel and often with minimal or no technical intervention needed on the client-side.

The revenue share model is very attractive to organizations — strong product profit margins, from which to fund the license fee. This commerce model is not as appealing to high volume, low margin retailers, or B2B organizations as their margins are traditionally much tighter. I think that's a limitation they should improve. If your organization has a nonstandard or niche business model or audience, the fast nature of the solution may not be a good fit.

I think the E-commerce cloud should be improved for the low margin retailers and B2B organizations.

I have seven years of experience with Salesforce, but technically only two to three years if we're talking specifically about Commerce Cloud.

Speaking about scalability as a cloud-based product, Salesforce Commerce Cloud can cope with huge demands and traffic spikes without the customer having to plan for it in advance. If there is a sudden spike in the demand, the platform scales silently in the background with no intervention required.

I have reached out to technical support many times but usually, it was for help enabling any features which were not activated, or if there were any technical issues, for example, while publishing something. So in that case, I have reached out to technical support. You can't expect them to do any customizations in your org.

They will only help you with enforced technical glitches if there are any, or any activation features if needed.

Their support is good from my past experience; they definitely offer good support compared to other CRM platforms. Salesforce support is quite better than all of them.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

They offer a full system integration service, starting with the discovery that uncovered the highest revenue commercially focused activity roadmap of the business. Everything goes very well in Commerce Cloud. 

What I would suggest, initially it's a straightforward setup, but then later, if you need some customizations or high-level technical things added to your e-commerce platform, then obviously you need a solution partner or implementation partner to design that.

Setup time varies from customer to customer. Speaking about Salesforce in general, or any cloud of Salesforce, we can't give an accurate estimate of how much time it's going to take, because it depends on many factors: is it a big company or a small company? What kind of requirements they have? What kind of platform do they want to build? Do they need it to provide live agent support? Do they want to add social extensions, like Facebook, etc?

Everything adds more time to the total sites, so it depends from requirement to requirement, what kind of implementation they need. Sometimes it takes 10 days and sometimes it takes 10 months to settle things completely.

Whether we follow an implementation plan depends on the client's requirements; however, the initial setup is the same.

If they want to launch their campaigns, personalize their merchandise, help shoppers find what they want and if they want to boost organic traffic, again, it depends on person to person and from client to client.

My clients see a return on their investment with SalesForce. For example, some of my clients' data and e-commerce sites were not properly organized earlier. When they started using Salesforce Commerce Cloud, it took some time, but their direct revenue increased.

It really depends on many factors. You can easily see the sales growth, you can analyze that and you can add many features to make it user-friendly. You can add the chat option, you can easily send campaigns. If you are sending personalized campaigns, then obviously you will get some clients which are not coming back to you from the last few months so that is a long process to get more revenue.

If I talk about the cost of using the platform as realized as a revenue share, meaning that the client effectively funds the platform from OPEX rather than CAPEX, then there are no significant upfront license costs. As an approach, it's quite compelling that Salesforce has seen their financial success due to the growth of client revenue in what's described as a shared success model. 

I have worked with Shopify, some of my customers were using Shopify and Salesforce Sales Cloud, not the Commerce Cloud in that case. They were managing everything on the Shopify website and they mentioned it is easy to use, but still, I feel with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, we have tons of features, which are not available in Shopify.

Sometimes people don't need the features which are provided by Salesforce. They just need a simple e-commerce platform. Shopify is cheaper than Salesforce so that is the reason that people often choose it, but if a company is big and they want to achieve something good, they obviously go for Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

There is built-in marketing functionality in Salesforce Commerce Cloud. If you want to do very personalized marketing campaigns, those are available in Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

If you only want people who have purchased RED products to see sales on other RED products, you can do that with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. If you want to send campaigns to only those people who are living in city X, and who have purchase items worth more than five dollars, within the last 30 days or any duration; you can easily do that with Commerce Cloud. No other solution can hold a candle to this.

A secondary advantage that Salesforce Commerce Cloud has over Shopify is that while the plugin market is much smaller, all plugins must be certified. A constant complaint of everyone using Shopify is that the plugins make the site slower and slower — who knows what crazy code they are including. That doesn't happen with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, since each plugin must be fully certified, which includes speed requirements.

You could say, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is like a cloud-based software as a service, e-commerce solution. 

If you find Salesforce Commerce Cloud a compelling proposition, chances are, you will continue with adopting the Commerce Cloud roadmap provided by Salesforce. It's another thing that you won't have to concern yourself with. Clients can focus on using the solution's features and functions to drive sales for their sites. They don't have to always be focused on the CRM part of Commerce Cloud, it allows them to focus on their sales growth.

There are some huge brands that use Salesforce Commerce Cloud, including Puma and Adidas.

These are not my direct clients, but I have worked for some of these companies, doing some outsourcing work with some third parties involved. 

If you are interested in using Salesforce, be sure to check which additional Salesforce Commerce Cloud you want to go for — B2B, or B2C Commerce. There are different additions: a starter pack, a growth pack, etc. It depends on the business.

Also, if you wish to use Salesforce, you should hire an implementation partner, not just for the customization part, but for the best advice, because implementation partners know the best practice and the best things which are useful for the client and for the company. I have seen people who have completely messed up because they didn't have an implementation partner.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Salesforce a rating of eight.

SAP Hybris Commerce is basically an eCommerce solution. We are Bosch-Siemens Home appliances. We sell household appliance products, like refrigerators, washing machines, etc... We have our own eCommerce website. Something similar to Flipkart or Amazon. We sell all these products with our websites.

For all the products there will be a product list. As a customer, you will log into this website and then select the particular product, for example, either Bosch or Siemens refrigerators, then check out and pay the bill. Then key in the delivery address, something similar to how you're going to buy any particular product on Amazon or Flipkart.

We have around 300 plus websites across multiple countries. We host and manage all these web applications, basically eCommerce applications. Apart from that, we do have other web applications, which are built on PHP and Node.js. Most of them are hosted on AWS, some of them are hosted on premises. And apart from that, there are solutions like SAP SD module, SAP MM, FICO, CRM.

Generally, as a customer, you will visit the store, purchase the product and the store may deliver on the same day or on the next day or whenever. It is a physical visit and then you're going to get the delivery. You visit the store, you pay and then you come back and the particular product will be delivered to your home. In our case, the customer can be anywhere. He or she visits the particular website and selects the product online. They can see all the features, and then pay online. The website itself will suggest on so and so date it'll be delivered. Based on the date provided, that particular product will be delivered. Post delivery, you can call the customer care. They will come and install. It is all online. You need not go to a physical store. With the click of few buttons with your mobile device or with your notebook or laptop you can purchase the products at your home. Whatever household appliances, it can be refrigerators, microwave ovens, washing machines. We really have lot of products.

We have found the B2B, B2C and D2C very valuable.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say the product search. There will be multiple criteria to search products and there will be a number of products in different categories. The question is how soon can I find the product which I'm looking for. The search can be improved.

There will be security involved in your payment gateway while you are paying. Creating a purchase order. There are many areas that can be improved in the front end - the look and feel performance wise. The entire life cycle right from logging into the particular eCommerce website until you check out, how soon I can complete this entire process? Those are the three areas. There are many areas one can improve.

I think we have the latest Hybris version from 2000, Hybris nine, something like that. Whatever features SAP is releasing, we are evaluating how they will be beneficial to the customer. If it is beneficial, then we are implementing. Apart from that I don't see anything extra.

We have been using SAP Hybris Commerce for close to eight years.

SAP Hybris Commerce is stable.

In terms of scalability, we had certain issues. For example, let's say we have Big Billion Day or Christmas Eve - there were some scalability issues. Now I think, with the help of AWS auto scaling, scaling out or scaling in is pretty much covered.

It is a worldwide solution. We have some 70 countries using it. 

In India itself, we have three teams developing and maintaining it. Two development teams and one support team. Deployment is also happening in Germany. There is a dedicated team there. I think, maybe three to four consultants. But all deployment will happen in Germany. Development and support teams will be in Bangalore. Each development team comprises somewhere around nine to 10 members. Support is also around nine to 10 members.

We have our own in-house solution. So, based on the customer feedback, our business team will analyze the requirements and accordingly, the development team and the IT team will implement the solution.

It's all BSH related development. So, whatever the customer needs, there is a business team that will understand and analyze them. If there are any developments that are required, that will be informed via technical specification documents or business specification documents through the development team. The IT team will materialize the requirements. We follow Agile methodology.

In our case, we started with the older version of Hybris, so at that time, there were not too many improvements. To meet the business requirements, it has been customized heavily. Complex customizations and complex developments have been developed. Those features are now available with the latest versions. Changing that into the latest version will be a tricky task now.

It was a long journey. The implementation started somewhere in the year 2013 or 2014. Currently we are working on whatever enhancement, minor changes or modifications which the customer is looking for. That will take probably two weeks or one month time to develop. To deploy, as it is a cloud deployment, hardly takes two or three hours down time.

We implemented all on our own. We used AWS and there are some deployment tools, like CHOF, all those things.

Obviously we evaluated other solutions. Such as Magento, Demandware and three or four other vendors. Since Bosch is implementing heavily on SAP, Hybris being a SAP product, after a careful analysis, the team arrived at SAP Hybris.

The end user can use any device for this - mobile device, desktop, laptop, anything. I would say it its very convenient

On a scale of one to ten, I would give SAP Hybris Commerce a nine.

The instance that has been live for two and a half years is a B2B e-commerce system. Our customers can view the product online. They can place orders online, and then we'll process them on the backend. They can view their order history as well as invoices.

It's on-prem, but we are in the middle of a project to move that instance to the cloud and add a new one to the cloud. Sana will host them.

The site saves us the time we used to spend on emails and phone calls with customers. It has helped reduce manual work because we're not entering in phone orders or email orders. Once the orders are in, everything else flows the way it normally did, so that part hasn't been reduced.

We've also seen a slight increase in customer engagement online. New customers are up about 10 to 15 percent, and we have a lot of our existing customers using it, which is nice. Increasing online customer engagement is pretty important because it brings new customers so that our salespeople can give them a call and get a relationship going.

Among the best features are the ease of updating the site and the ease of maintaining it. The admin is also pretty easy to use.

We use Sana Commerce with Microsoft Dynamics on the back end and the native ERP integration works well. The fact that no third-party integrations are needed between our Sana Commerce web store and Microsoft Dynamics is important. It's one less thing to worry about when it comes to troubleshooting.

Our business is unique in the sense that we don't authorize or charge the credit card upfront. We only authorize the card when the order has been packed and is ready to ship. And we charge the credit card when an order is actually shipped out and we've invoiced it. Also, not all our customers are credit card customers; some are on terms. We had to do some customization so that the system would understand that if a customer is on terms, we don't need to worry about the credit card. And if someone is a credit card customer, we don't authorize the charge until later, after we've invoiced.

It would help if there were a way to configure the solution to change whether or not the system processes credit card information immediately, based on the customer's terms. It would also help if we could configure at what stage the credit card is authorized and charged.

We've been using Sana Commerce for two and a half years.

It's pretty stable.

It's easily scalable. For example, if we were to buy a complementary new product line, adding those items to the website, as well as creating additional pages for the new product line, would be pretty easy. It's pretty scalable in that regard.

We do see ourselves increasing our use of Sana because we have a total of four sister companies and only one of them is using it currently. Now that we're switching to the cloud, a second company will also be using it. And once both of those companies are on the cloud, we have a third company teed up to be using it.

Fortunately, we haven't had to reach out to technical support much because the solution is stable. Overall, they're very professional, responsive, and collaborative.

I'd rate their customer service a nine out of 10. I think they're in demand and a little overloaded on work. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time for them to get to our work.

Positive

We didn't have a previous solution. We chose Sana because of the seamless integration with Microsoft Dynamics, as well as the ease of the admin.

Setting things up was pretty straightforward. Regarding the amount of time it took, we were being very meticulous about it, as it was our first time going into e-commerce. It took about three or four months.

As far as the setup and getting everything looking the way it needed to, that was all on us. Every now and then we'd have some questions for Sana. And we needed Sana people to take it to go-live.

As for maintenance of the solution at our end, it's just me.

Our Sana site has probably only helped increase sales a little bit, but it has reduced the cost of selling for us. It has also helped reduce the risk of order errors. And we have seen cost savings with respect to head count, for sure. 

Overall, Sana Commerce has helped lower our TCO.

When we got version 9.2, it was a good price. Everything is moving to the subscription-based cloud model, and that's probably a little high when you look at the lifetime cost.

We looked at Magento and Pebblestone but they were too complex, a little bit harder to maintain, and more expensive.

My advice would be to understand what you want to get out of it, and that only one person should maintain it. Weigh the cost against the benefits of having it.

I have my own group of Shopify developers and we create Shopify stores for our clients. We also handle maintenance, fix bugs, and do whatever it is that they need.

I have a partner account, which enables me to create the stores for my clients.

The most valuable features are the core structure and backend structure. Our clients are easily able to manage their sites at the backend. Shopify provides an easy to use service at the backend that includes product upload, customer service, team settings, and team customization. It is all very easy to handle.

I would like to see a new feature that supports the sale of wholesale goods. I have many clients that want to sell their products to the wholesale market, and Shopify currently does not have that kind of feature. In order to support this, we have to do custom coding.

The response time by technical support is sometimes delayed and is an area that can be improved. Sometimes we get a full response in a day or two, whereas, at other times, it takes five days.

I have been working with Shopify for three years.

Shopify is always available. I'm using a premium package that they provide and there are no bugs. If we do any customization then there won't be any major problem.

Scalability is very good.

There have been times where we contacted technical support because something was not working as we wanted, so we needed to know what was happening. The support is very good. They will take time to give a response, but eventually, they will give proper answers and, overall, I am satisfied with the support.

I only know Shopify and have not worked with other solutions such as WordPress or Magento.

The initial setup is really straightforward.

When I create a store from my partner account, there is a button press that begins the process. From there, I need to enter a few details that include the physical address of the client, their name, and the business name. Then, the store is ready and you can upload anything you want.

It is very simple and it can all be done within about ten minutes.

After the initial setup, the length of time required for customization depends on how many pages they want, what the design is like, and what the requirements are. If the design is complex then it may take a month, whereas if the design is simple then it will be ready in two or three weeks.

I do not follow a specific design strategy. I'll ask my client what they need and they will give me a specific document or design if they have it, and a feature function list. I'll read the documents and then provide a timeline and a quote. It comes down to them telling me what they need and I'll give them what they want.

This is a product that will give you your money's worth. If a client takes their store seriously and does their marketing then Shopify will give them a high rate of return.

If you create a store directly from Shopify then you will receive a 14-day trial period. After that, you will need to purchase a plan. However, if I create it from my partner account then you will get an unlimited trial period. Then, once the store is complete, you need to purchase a plan.

They have various plans including ones that are priced at $29 per month, $79 per month, and can go up to $300 per month.

My advice for anybody who is considering Shopify is not to hesitate. It is the best solution and I suggest implementing it. The biggest lesson that I have learned from using it is that it is simple to use and there is no complexity.

I think that Shopify is the number one e-commerce platform. In my opinion, it is the best choice for e-commerce sites. That said, no service is perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.