from Hacker News

Shopify Is Winning Salesforce Clients, Stoking E-Commerce Rivalry

by mobilio on 10/29/24, 1:23 PM with 92 comments

  • by theandrewbailey on 10/29/24, 3:20 PM

    As a certified Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud Architect who has been out of a job for months, this alarmingly impacts me. Looks like I'm gonna need to replatform my skills to be relevant.

    I've been working on the platform since it was called Demandware, and I've been on numerous implementations and sites while working for a partner/consulting firm. I was laid off in January. It seems that Salesforce is pushing a mircoservices architecture for e-commerce (headless SFCC) hard. Separate systems are used to support features that Commerce Cloud can do on its own, but isn't setup that way for reasons I've yet to fully comprehend. Perhaps its more scalable, but Commerce Cloud already allowed you to scale up and down the number of backend servers with load. Perhaps they sell the idea that deployments can happen separately, so that you can update your homepage without bringing along any partially complete backend features, but in my years of doing releases, that's never once been an issue. Page redesigns aren't as big of a headache anymore thanks to a page designer feature. My cynical side says Big Cloud wants to sell more so it can charge more.

    I got a job during the summer that used such a microservices system (first time I've ever worked on one), but that job ultimately didn't work out for reasons that weren't entirely technical.

    AMA, I guess.

  • by shmatt on 10/29/24, 2:45 PM

    I had the pleasure of leading a project of migration from an old commerce stack to Salesforce Open Commerce. Terrible experience filled with empty promises, non-existant features, and suggestions to write complex hacks to create features that were promised as already built into their product.

    They are great at signing CIO/CTOs up, but come migration and operations time they were an empty box of promises

  • by morpheuskafka on 10/29/24, 4:20 PM

    I hardly even understand what Salesforce does. I thought it was a sales lead/CRM software. I didn't even know it has an ecommerce function, and I've been surprised to see it pop up in non-sales spaces (ex. the CFPB complaint system).

    Shopify is like the easiest software in the world to set up, looks really good and professional right out of the box, and has tons of integrations. It's rapidly taking over other product areas (ex the Shop Pay wallet across different Shopify tenants) but super easy to understand. It can be set up and used by a one-person non-technical business, but you also see it in larger stores with considerable revenue.

    I don't see how anyone would ever wind up doing Salesforce unless they are large enough to do the whole RFP/bids thing that needs some kind of specialist to write and compete for.

  • by rogerkirkness on 10/29/24, 2:01 PM

    Most of the top 1000 e-commerce sites are built on Salesforce, but most of the rest are built on Shopify and it's a very long tail. Salesforce acquired Demandware which was strong at very custom requirements. As time goes on, the number of companies who need that level of customization is closer to 100 than 1000, so customers number 100-1000 is really what this is about.

    Disclosure: worked at Shopify

  • by nusl on 10/29/24, 2:11 PM

    My very brief time working with the Salesforce tool, both as a user and integrating with its API, were honestly quite negative. It's massively complex and fiddly. I'd not be surprised if folks might want something relatively simpler for things that Salesforce is overkill. I think Salesforce is overkill for much of what it's used for simply because it's "the tool" to use.

    Having also worked with Shopify quite a bit in my day job, it has its warts but is largely easier to grok.

  • by xyst on 10/29/24, 2:20 PM

    Has anybody actually seen a fully integrated salesforce at big or small companies?

    SF pitches their platform as essential tools for businesses and facilitating cross team collaboration/communication.

    But in reality, I have only seen maybe 1-2 teams using a subset of their platform then using legacy equipment to manage other parts of their business and customer relationships.

    SF seems more like a flex than an actual essential tool.

  • by prng2021 on 10/29/24, 1:58 PM

    “Salesforce will still appeal to big businesses with annual sales of $300 million or more since it has more sophisticated tools”

    I question how much Salesforce cares about these smaller businesses. They might have let Shopify take this segment of the market to focus on bigger companies.

  • by rubayeet on 10/29/24, 5:59 PM

    Former Shopify employee here. The company loves narratives like this where there is an enemy and there is a cause to unite the team behind it to battle with the said enemy. In my time there, the enemy was Amazon, and the cause was “we are arming the rebels against the Empire”. The had ambitions plans to fight Amazon at their terrain (shipping and logistics), made significant acquisitions (Deliverr, 6 River Systems). But at the end they had to shut down those divisions. In my last year at that company, I noticed the mission moving away from “mom and pop businesses” and towards enterprise. To me this fills like yet another narrative engineering by the execs to sustain the significant growth they have seen in the stock valuation.

  • by mobilio on 10/29/24, 1:47 PM

  • by dboreham on 10/29/24, 3:48 PM

    This thread might help me finally understand what exactly Salesforce does/sells.

  • by awad on 10/29/24, 6:26 PM

    As a former vendor working with customers across the e-commerce spectrum, Shopify were certainly the best to work with from both a technology integration and ease of use standpoint. They're a rare example of a company that started very self service and remained that way while growing to significantly more complex client bases so has a wide appeal. Working with them was generally a treat.

    Demandware weren't strictly speaking the worst to work with, but it was certainly better days when they were an independent organization vs part of the Salesforce behemoth. There's just a lot more red tape slowing everything down, which I think carries over to the customer experience....things take days/weeks/months in SFCC land that can be done in minutes/hours/days in Shopify land.

    All that is to say I'm not at all surprised by the headline, that I'd be long Shopify as an investor, and I'd seriously look at them first as a developer if I were building in the e-commerce space.

  • by arwhatever on 10/29/24, 4:31 PM

    Salesforce certainly doesn't compete by making themselves appear desirable to software engineers, with their circa 1997 Java-like dialect.

  • by jesterson on 10/30/24, 7:32 AM

    Given quality of shopify platform and quality fo their support, Salesforce has nothing to worry about.

  • by stonethrowaway on 10/29/24, 3:49 PM

    In case it isn’t obvious:

    You pay a salesforce architect (like the ones in this thread) thousands of dollars per day and not get jack shit in return for years.

    Or you can DIY one of these small shopify sites, grow from a small business to a large business, and be one of these success stories that Shopify is attracting.

    (nb. Shopify already covered some of this in various podcasts awhile ago, so Bloomberg as usual is asleep at the wheel.)