15 ms·

Shopify Is Winning Salesforce Clients, Stoking E-Commerce Rivalry

136 points by mobilio 2y ago

mobilio 2y ago
And link: https://archive.is/diiM6 https://archive.is/diiM6
prng2021 2y ago
“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.
- bhouston 2y ago
  This is the classic disruption strategy though. Each time Salesforce may be like, yeah I can retreat from that territory, it wasn't that profitable anyhow compared to what I will keep. But in disruptive strategies, this repeats over and over again, until there is no territory left that is safe. <quote> Incumbent businesses innovate and develop their products or services in order to appeal to their most demanding and/or profitable customers, ignoring the needs of those downmarket. Entrants target this ignored market segment and gain traction by meeting their needs at a reduced cost compared to what is offered by the incumbent. Incumbents don’t respond to the new entrant, continuing to focus on their more profitable segments. Entrants eventually move upmarket by offering solutions that appeal to the incumbent’s “mainstream” customers. Once the new entrant has begun to attract the incumbent business’s mainstream customers en masse, disruption has occurred. </quote> https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/4-keys-to-understanding-clayton-christensens-theory-of-disruptive-innovation https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/4-keys-to-understanding-cla...
  - pwillia7 2y ago
    https://public-media.interaction-design.org/images/encyclopedia/disruptive_innovation/fig_1_the_disruptive_innovation_model.jpg https://public-media.interaction-design.org/images/encyclope...
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    On the other end, some of the largest customers might bring more of the tooling in-house.
rogerkirkness 2y ago
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
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  A few months back, I was doing some scraping for e-commerce and absolutely shocked at the number of Shopify properties (easy to tell from robots, sitemap, or DNS). I remember taking note of Shopify's stock price at the time and having a discussion with another member of the team. All I can say is I regret not investing.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    I still run uMatrix, and with paranoid settings, you become very aware of who hosts the web. Yes, Shopify is a biggie in the space.
    - a_wild_dandan 2y ago
      Are there any other companies which surprised you with their ubiquity?
      - dehrmann 2y ago
        Maybe not surprised, but Squarespace, Wix, Bigcommerce, AWS, Cloudflare.
  - iamacyborg 2y ago
    Another lens to look at Shopify is through the publicly traded email marketing company Klaviyo, which tends to be the default email platform for smb’s. They’ve basically built a $10bn business purely from serving shopify customers.
nusl 2y ago
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.
xyst 2y ago
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.
- leetharris 2y ago
  Yes I've seen it a couple of times and it is unbelievably expensive and always a mess. The amount of Salesforce consultants, Salesforce developers, plugins, tools, etc to keep it all stable is wild. Still, there's a reason people keep using it. Salesforce is basically a pseudo ERP at this point.
  - ghusto 2y ago
    > there's a reason people keep using it I believe that reason is that they've figured out quality matters not at all when you're pitching to C-levels.
  - billbrown 2y ago
    Sunk cost fallacy: they've spent so much money on it already, they have to keep using it or that was a waste. Salesforce's view of this: lock-in.
  - ForHackernews 2y ago
    > Salesforce is basically a pseudo ERP at this point. Wait, is that not what Salesforce is? I thought it was supposed to be a more modern SAP alternative with "cloudy" vibes.
  - rpncreator 2y ago
    > Salesforce is basically a pseudo ERP at this point. Not quite there just yet. Salesforce has commerce, OMS, CPQ, reporting (Tableau). Just missing the WMS (warehouse management system) and I think we should be there…
shmatt 2y ago
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
- scrapcode 2y ago
  My experience with Salesforce outside of sales orgs are it is used as an overly complex, bug-ridden phpMyAdmin
- tarentel 2y ago
  I had to implement a salesforce SDK a while back. It half worked, a bunch of things were broken, and it was an overall bad experience. We hopped on a call with someone from salesforce who was perplexed by all the bugs. Their sales rep was able to help though. Apparently, everything was fixed and working in the new SDK which the company hadn't paid for. Great company.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  I had the same experience migrating to their CRM. Half of what they promised was technically possible, but oh, we actually need the next tier of licensing which was like 10x more per month than the licensing we were told would work. The other half, like you said, was hacky and "in development". It was an a absolute nightmare and made me look incompetent because I had to explain to my superiors that I was essentially lied to.
- Spivak 2y ago
  Is there a name for "when leadership makes an objectively terrible decision but then everyone has to put in double time making it a success ensuring leadership learns nothing?"
  - FredPret 2y ago
    “Bankruptcy imminent”
theandrewbailey 2y ago
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.
- nicholasjarnold 2y ago
  When you say "SF is pushing a microservices architecture for e-commerce hard", I wonder if you mean they attempt to rope customers into buying into the Mulesoft ecosystem (most of which, btw, is old versions of Spring on old JVM under the hood). They now own Mulesoft, and there is an army of sales people whom are presumably really good at getting the execs excited for groundbreaking features like "API Governance", "API Gateway", "low-code" and my favorite "security". A company I worked with suffered some serious setbacks after a lot of promises, many months and many many millions burned on this stuff. I'll be a happy man if I never have to hear about SAPI/BAPI/CRAPPI from ProServices people that don't even understand their own products let alone sound engineering principles again. I must admit that I wasn't directly involved with SF/Mulesoft impls, but I did suffer through many regrettable touch points with it.
  - theandrewbailey 2y ago
    > When you say "SF is pushing a microservices architecture for e-commerce hard", I wonder if you mean they attempt to rope customers into buying into the Mulesoft ecosystem Yup, bingo! Before I got laid off, I was working on... monolithic (for the lack of a better term) SFCC systems, never headless. The vast majority of the few SFCC job postings I've come across have been asking for Mulesoft experience, and that summer job also featured it, though I never worked directly on it, only the SFCC instances that sat behind it. I've never worked with any Salesforce sales team prior to actually getting to work, and in fact, all of my work in the past 7-ish years (and most of it before) has been post-launch development and support. EDIT: And when I started looking at what Mulesoft was, why, and how to use it, all I found was hype about APIs; nothing about why you would point web browsers at it for HTML. The documentation might as well have said it was a genie that made all your wishes come true.
dboreham 2y ago
This thread might help me finally understand what exactly Salesforce does/sells.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  Haha. I kinda hoped that too but am still left wondering. I know back 20 years ago it was a CRM. I worked for at least one company who spent years and millions trying to replace their homegrown CRM with Salesforce. I know it can support customer help desk things too and even has a knowledge base feature. I’m sure somewhere somehow it can probably do a bunch of other “enterprise” things and somebody somewhere is probably using it for their general ledger or doing payroll through it somehow… but I have no idea if that is true.
  - theandrewbailey 2y ago
    Salesforce has been on a buying spree over the last 10 years.[0] Not only do they have have that CRM, they bought ExactTarget, an email marketing system, now Marketing Cloud. They bought Demandware and CloudCraze for their B2C and B2B storefront platforms. And don't forget Chat Cloud, I mean, Slack. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce#Acquisitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce#Acquisitions
    - rawgabbit 2y ago
      I wished they bought Informatica but the deal fell through. https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/salesforces-talks-buy-informatica-fizzle-wsj-reports-2024-04-21/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/salesforces-talks-buy-...
stonethrowaway 2y ago
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.)
- DowagerDave 2y ago
  I would describe Shopify, even with it's huge ecosystem, as laser-focused in this area, when compared to Salesforce. Thinking of using SF for your enterprise ecommerce solution? Why not go with the agile, startup competition, SAP? </s>
- inerte 2y ago
  You're right, but the article is mostly focusing on already big companies switching from Salesforce to Shopify. foonote: I used to work for Shopify 1.5 years ago
morpheuskafka 2y ago
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.
- jeromegv 2y ago
  > 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 Salesforce Commerce is an entirely different stack than Saleforce CRM. It's essentially DemandWare that was rebranded. It is the same parent company but think of it as a separate software entirely. > and I've been surprised to see it pop up in non-sales spaces (ex. the CFPB complaint system). Look at the billions Salesforce makes every year, they are in a lot of industries you might not have thought of.
- rpncreator 2y ago
  > I didn't even know it has an ecommerce function It has at least two (2) ecommerce functions (more if you count B2B Classic / CloudCraze) 1. Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2C - 2016 Demandware acquisition, somewhere in the spectrum of PaaS to SaaS, separate offering compared to the rest of the Salesforce platform. Customizations are done in ISML (JSP/JSTL/JSF-like) and an ECMAScript-like language in modern implementations (not going to cover SiteGenesis, Pipelines, and SiteGenesis Controllers for you old folks here). APIs are provided by the legacy OCAPI layer, and SCAPI layer, which has a thin Mulesoft API layer on top 2. Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2B/D2C - Salesforce-native platform (e.g. native Salesforce objects). Customizations done via Lightning (front-end) and Apex (Java-like language). More-or-less fully integrated into the Salesforce platform. More or less fully SaaS. Demandware (and subsequently, SFCC) was one of the first ecommerce platforms to pioneer licensing a commerce platform based on revenue sharing (given the SaaS-like model), as opposed to legacy self-hosted platforms (ATG, Hybris, IBM WebSphere) which initially focused on licensing per seats or CPU.
arwhatever 2y ago
Salesforce certainly doesn't compete by making themselves appear desirable to software engineers, with their circa 1997 Java-like dialect.
- theandrewbailey 2y ago
  When I just spent years and thousands of dollars for a software programming degree and their slogan is "No software", why would I bother wasting time applying to work for them?
  - bigfatkitten 2y ago
    Pretty good comp with (until the last year or so), unbeatable WLB.
- youngtaff 2y ago
  Software developers don’t really have money to buy services though… that’s why Salesforce sell to higher levels of an org
rubayeet 2y ago
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.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  Heh, everybody loves to be an army fighting against evil so like as it doesn't involve any actual army or fighting concepts like bullets and blood.
  - rubayeet 2y ago
    Yes, except Shopify is very intentional about us vs them narratives like this. The CEO is an avid consumer of Video games / SciFi / Nerd culture, and the leadership finds ways to inject these themes into the mission statements.
    - crowcroft 2y ago
      Curious if your experience of this is good or bad? Setting up a clear us vs. them mission at least makes it clear across the company what you should be focussing on. My experience at bigcos is that the mission is some hand wavey 'we exist to make life better for our customers' statement, and no one ever could agree on what that meant.
      - rubayeet 2y ago
        Neither good or bad to me. Mission is important some people, I have been in the industry long enough to realize companies will change their mission if the business is no longer viable / profitable, so I have taught myself to be indifferent to it. As long as I am working with smart and easy to work with people, on a business that is legal / ethical, I’m good.
awad 2y ago
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.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  > 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 From my experience, anything with a self-serve option tends to be a better product. It sets up all sorts of incentives (Have functioning support! Fix bugs! Have accurate documentation! Build understandable features!) that disappear when you remove "have to support self serve customers" from the equation. Then all those nice things disappear into a morass of professional services custom implementations and big customer feature chasing.
jesterson 2y ago
Given quality of shopify platform and quality fo their support, Salesforce has nothing to worry about.

136 points by mobilio 2y ago

And link: https://archive.is/diiM6 https://archive.is/diiM6

prng2021 2y ago

“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.

bhouston 2y ago
This is the classic disruption strategy though. Each time Salesforce may be like, yeah I can retreat from that territory, it wasn't that profitable anyhow compared to what I will keep. But in disruptive strategies, this repeats over and over again, until there is no territory left that is safe. <quote> Incumbent businesses innovate and develop their products or services in order to appeal to their most demanding and/or profitable customers, ignoring the needs of those downmarket. Entrants target this ignored market segment and gain traction by meeting their needs at a reduced cost compared to what is offered by the incumbent. Incumbents don’t respond to the new entrant, continuing to focus on their more profitable segments. Entrants eventually move upmarket by offering solutions that appeal to the incumbent’s “mainstream” customers. Once the new entrant has begun to attract the incumbent business’s mainstream customers en masse, disruption has occurred. </quote> https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/4-keys-to-understanding-clayton-christensens-theory-of-disruptive-innovation https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/4-keys-to-understanding-cla...
- pwillia7 2y ago
  https://public-media.interaction-design.org/images/encyclopedia/disruptive_innovation/fig_1_the_disruptive_innovation_model.jpg https://public-media.interaction-design.org/images/encyclope...
- dehrmann 2y ago
  On the other end, some of the largest customers might bring more of the tooling in-house.

rogerkirkness 2y ago

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

CharlieDigital 2y ago
A few months back, I was doing some scraping for e-commerce and absolutely shocked at the number of Shopify properties (easy to tell from robots, sitemap, or DNS). I remember taking note of Shopify's stock price at the time and having a discussion with another member of the team. All I can say is I regret not investing.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  I still run uMatrix, and with paranoid settings, you become very aware of who hosts the web. Yes, Shopify is a biggie in the space.
  - a_wild_dandan 2y ago
    Are there any other companies which surprised you with their ubiquity?
    - dehrmann 2y ago
      Maybe not surprised, but Squarespace, Wix, Bigcommerce, AWS, Cloudflare.
- iamacyborg 2y ago
  Another lens to look at Shopify is through the publicly traded email marketing company Klaviyo, which tends to be the default email platform for smb’s. They’ve basically built a $10bn business purely from serving shopify customers.

nusl 2y ago

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.

xyst 2y ago

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.

leetharris 2y ago
Yes I've seen it a couple of times and it is unbelievably expensive and always a mess. The amount of Salesforce consultants, Salesforce developers, plugins, tools, etc to keep it all stable is wild. Still, there's a reason people keep using it. Salesforce is basically a pseudo ERP at this point.
- ghusto 2y ago
  > there's a reason people keep using it I believe that reason is that they've figured out quality matters not at all when you're pitching to C-levels.
- billbrown 2y ago
  Sunk cost fallacy: they've spent so much money on it already, they have to keep using it or that was a waste. Salesforce's view of this: lock-in.
- ForHackernews 2y ago
  > Salesforce is basically a pseudo ERP at this point. Wait, is that not what Salesforce is? I thought it was supposed to be a more modern SAP alternative with "cloudy" vibes.
- rpncreator 2y ago
  > Salesforce is basically a pseudo ERP at this point. Not quite there just yet. Salesforce has commerce, OMS, CPQ, reporting (Tableau). Just missing the WMS (warehouse management system) and I think we should be there…

shmatt 2y ago

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

scrapcode 2y ago
My experience with Salesforce outside of sales orgs are it is used as an overly complex, bug-ridden phpMyAdmin
tarentel 2y ago
I had to implement a salesforce SDK a while back. It half worked, a bunch of things were broken, and it was an overall bad experience. We hopped on a call with someone from salesforce who was perplexed by all the bugs. Their sales rep was able to help though. Apparently, everything was fixed and working in the new SDK which the company hadn't paid for. Great company.
bongodongobob 2y ago
I had the same experience migrating to their CRM. Half of what they promised was technically possible, but oh, we actually need the next tier of licensing which was like 10x more per month than the licensing we were told would work. The other half, like you said, was hacky and "in development". It was an a absolute nightmare and made me look incompetent because I had to explain to my superiors that I was essentially lied to.
Spivak 2y ago
Is there a name for "when leadership makes an objectively terrible decision but then everyone has to put in double time making it a success ensuring leadership learns nothing?"
- FredPret 2y ago
  “Bankruptcy imminent”

theandrewbailey 2y ago

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.

nicholasjarnold 2y ago
When you say "SF is pushing a microservices architecture for e-commerce hard", I wonder if you mean they attempt to rope customers into buying into the Mulesoft ecosystem (most of which, btw, is old versions of Spring on old JVM under the hood). They now own Mulesoft, and there is an army of sales people whom are presumably really good at getting the execs excited for groundbreaking features like "API Governance", "API Gateway", "low-code" and my favorite "security". A company I worked with suffered some serious setbacks after a lot of promises, many months and many many millions burned on this stuff. I'll be a happy man if I never have to hear about SAPI/BAPI/CRAPPI from ProServices people that don't even understand their own products let alone sound engineering principles again. I must admit that I wasn't directly involved with SF/Mulesoft impls, but I did suffer through many regrettable touch points with it.
- theandrewbailey 2y ago
  > When you say "SF is pushing a microservices architecture for e-commerce hard", I wonder if you mean they attempt to rope customers into buying into the Mulesoft ecosystem Yup, bingo! Before I got laid off, I was working on... monolithic (for the lack of a better term) SFCC systems, never headless. The vast majority of the few SFCC job postings I've come across have been asking for Mulesoft experience, and that summer job also featured it, though I never worked directly on it, only the SFCC instances that sat behind it. I've never worked with any Salesforce sales team prior to actually getting to work, and in fact, all of my work in the past 7-ish years (and most of it before) has been post-launch development and support. EDIT: And when I started looking at what Mulesoft was, why, and how to use it, all I found was hype about APIs; nothing about why you would point web browsers at it for HTML. The documentation might as well have said it was a genie that made all your wishes come true.

dboreham 2y ago

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

cruffle_duffle 2y ago
Haha. I kinda hoped that too but am still left wondering. I know back 20 years ago it was a CRM. I worked for at least one company who spent years and millions trying to replace their homegrown CRM with Salesforce. I know it can support customer help desk things too and even has a knowledge base feature. I’m sure somewhere somehow it can probably do a bunch of other “enterprise” things and somebody somewhere is probably using it for their general ledger or doing payroll through it somehow… but I have no idea if that is true.
- theandrewbailey 2y ago
  Salesforce has been on a buying spree over the last 10 years.[0] Not only do they have have that CRM, they bought ExactTarget, an email marketing system, now Marketing Cloud. They bought Demandware and CloudCraze for their B2C and B2B storefront platforms. And don't forget Chat Cloud, I mean, Slack. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce#Acquisitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce#Acquisitions
  - rawgabbit 2y ago
    I wished they bought Informatica but the deal fell through. https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/salesforces-talks-buy-informatica-fizzle-wsj-reports-2024-04-21/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/salesforces-talks-buy-...

stonethrowaway 2y ago

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.)

DowagerDave 2y ago
I would describe Shopify, even with it's huge ecosystem, as laser-focused in this area, when compared to Salesforce. Thinking of using SF for your enterprise ecommerce solution? Why not go with the agile, startup competition, SAP? </s>
inerte 2y ago
You're right, but the article is mostly focusing on already big companies switching from Salesforce to Shopify. foonote: I used to work for Shopify 1.5 years ago

morpheuskafka 2y ago

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.

jeromegv 2y ago
> 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 Salesforce Commerce is an entirely different stack than Saleforce CRM. It's essentially DemandWare that was rebranded. It is the same parent company but think of it as a separate software entirely. > and I've been surprised to see it pop up in non-sales spaces (ex. the CFPB complaint system). Look at the billions Salesforce makes every year, they are in a lot of industries you might not have thought of.
rpncreator 2y ago
> I didn't even know it has an ecommerce function It has at least two (2) ecommerce functions (more if you count B2B Classic / CloudCraze) 1. Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2C - 2016 Demandware acquisition, somewhere in the spectrum of PaaS to SaaS, separate offering compared to the rest of the Salesforce platform. Customizations are done in ISML (JSP/JSTL/JSF-like) and an ECMAScript-like language in modern implementations (not going to cover SiteGenesis, Pipelines, and SiteGenesis Controllers for you old folks here). APIs are provided by the legacy OCAPI layer, and SCAPI layer, which has a thin Mulesoft API layer on top 2. Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2B/D2C - Salesforce-native platform (e.g. native Salesforce objects). Customizations done via Lightning (front-end) and Apex (Java-like language). More-or-less fully integrated into the Salesforce platform. More or less fully SaaS. Demandware (and subsequently, SFCC) was one of the first ecommerce platforms to pioneer licensing a commerce platform based on revenue sharing (given the SaaS-like model), as opposed to legacy self-hosted platforms (ATG, Hybris, IBM WebSphere) which initially focused on licensing per seats or CPU.

arwhatever 2y ago

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

theandrewbailey 2y ago
When I just spent years and thousands of dollars for a software programming degree and their slogan is "No software", why would I bother wasting time applying to work for them?
- bigfatkitten 2y ago
  Pretty good comp with (until the last year or so), unbeatable WLB.
youngtaff 2y ago
Software developers don’t really have money to buy services though… that’s why Salesforce sell to higher levels of an org

rubayeet 2y ago

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.

lesuorac 2y ago
Heh, everybody loves to be an army fighting against evil so like as it doesn't involve any actual army or fighting concepts like bullets and blood.
- rubayeet 2y ago
  Yes, except Shopify is very intentional about us vs them narratives like this. The CEO is an avid consumer of Video games / SciFi / Nerd culture, and the leadership finds ways to inject these themes into the mission statements.
  - crowcroft 2y ago
    Curious if your experience of this is good or bad? Setting up a clear us vs. them mission at least makes it clear across the company what you should be focussing on. My experience at bigcos is that the mission is some hand wavey 'we exist to make life better for our customers' statement, and no one ever could agree on what that meant.
    - rubayeet 2y ago
      Neither good or bad to me. Mission is important some people, I have been in the industry long enough to realize companies will change their mission if the business is no longer viable / profitable, so I have taught myself to be indifferent to it. As long as I am working with smart and easy to work with people, on a business that is legal / ethical, I’m good.

awad 2y ago

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.

ethbr1 2y ago
> 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 From my experience, anything with a self-serve option tends to be a better product. It sets up all sorts of incentives (Have functioning support! Fix bugs! Have accurate documentation! Build understandable features!) that disappear when you remove "have to support self serve customers" from the equation. Then all those nice things disappear into a morass of professional services custom implementations and big customer feature chasing.

jesterson 2y ago

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