Salesforce vs. Shopware Comparison with a View to Budget Pruning
Success in e-commerce is conditioned by many factors. As a business owner in this trade, you must pay close attention to such bonanza summands as finding your niche, having high-quality merchandise to offer, maintaining rapport with customers, training your personnel, etc. But the big-time cornerstone is the correct choice of an e-commerce platform.
There are at least a dozen of the most popular platforms today so choosing the one that will fit you to a tee is a no-nonsense venture. Having accumulated a wealth of experience in developing e-commerce sites, IDAP can offer a comprehensive Salesforce vs. Shopware comparison since these two e-commerce platforms are considered to be among the top ones in the current marketplace.
In this part, let’s consider why we should compare the platforms in the first place and make a brief overview of each.
Reasons to Compare Salesforce vs. Shopware
The COVID-19 global pandemic that is still wreaking havoc in the world has caused tectonic shifts in many industries and e-commerce is no exception. Companies that work in this field try to live up to the motto epitomized by the title of the Bee Gees’ song Stayin’ alive and reduce expenditures as much as possible. The peculiar nature of the trade doesn’t allow massive cut-downs on salary or the number of employees so e-commerce CEOs try to find viable ways of getting lean without becoming mean. One such recipe is reconsidering software solution policies.
What are the requirements for an ideal platform? It should cover basic functionalities, provide numerous integrations and admin workflows, allow third-party solutions, and have positive references from users. Salesforce ticks all the boxes, however the staggering repercussions that the coronavirus pestilence produced in the realm of e-commerce seem to have put an end to its unquestionable domination. What makes many online shops think of migrating to other platforms?
Being speedy and powerful, Salesforce is quite cumbersome and expensive, on the flipside. In current conditions of precarious survival, small e-commerce agents with under 20 daily transactions feel that they pay through the nose for the immense infrastructure they hardly exploit. Moreover, if they have been using Salesforce for quite a longish span the redesigning may be imminent sooner or later and new infrastructure development with Salesforce will cost a pretty penny as well, to say nothing of outsourcing.
Such or similar train of thought is symptomatic of quite a few e-commerce enterprises in the times of frugality so they start looking for an alternative platform to migrate to on condition that it will live up to their functional expectations without making a hole in their pocket. If you are one of the gang, the juxtaposition of Salesforce vs. Shopware will be instrumental in further decision-making.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Shopware Comparison: A Brief Overview
Having being founded in 2004 as Demandware and launched a year later, this platform was acquired by Salesforce in 2016 and is known as Salesforce Commerce Cloud ever since. As its very name suggests, this Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform is hosted in the cloud which is one of its greatest assets and one of the reasons that account for its top position among similar products.
The AI utilized in it is geared for personalized e-commerce which makes the participation of a data specialist and usage of responsive design tools redundant. The designer solution implemented in it grants the merchant greater control over both content and templates. Among other fortes experts of IDAP mark its high scalability, automatic software updates, regular and reliable upgrades, consistent support, and superb multi-channel functionality (all that allows conveniently creating custom solutions and off-the-shelf software solutions).
In view of the boons mentioned, it is no wonder that the platform is employed by Marks and Spencer, Adidas, Lacoste, Puma, and other business giants which allowed the developer company to manifest a steady growing pattern ever since its foundation.
| Year | Revenue US$ millions | Net income US$ millions | Total Assets US$ millions | Price per Share US$ | Employees |
| 2005 | 176 | 7 | 280 | 5.19 | |
| 2006 | 310 | 28 | 435 | 8.62 | |
| 2007 | 497 | 0 | 665 | 11.69 | |
| 2008 | 749 | 18 | 1,090 | 13.43 | |
| 2009 | 1,077 | 43 | 1,480 | 11.37 | |
| 2010 | 1,306 | 81 | 2,460 | 24.21 | |
| 2011 | 1,657 | 64 | 3,091 | 32.93 | |
| 2012 | 2,267 | −12 | 4,164 | 35.73 | |
| 2013 | 3,050 | −270 | 5,529 | 45.94 | 9,800 |
| 2014 | 4,071 | −232 | 9,153 | 57.26 | 13,300 |
| 2015 | 5,374 | −263 | 10,665 | 70.66 | 16,000 |
| 2016 | 6,667 | −47 | 12,763 | 74.55 | 19,000 |
| 2017 | 8,392 | 180 | 17,585 | 90.26 | 25,000 |
| 2018 | 10,480 | 127 | 21,010 | 131.91 | 29,000 |
Among the downsides are the high ownership cost, the absence of some integration types, and inadequate intuitivity of usage.
Launched in the same year, Shopware can’t boast of the same achievements being popular predominantly among German-speaking nations. However, it has displayed an over 23% growth of market share within the last six months starting to gain a secure foothold in the US, the UK, and some European countries. This open-source platform provides excellent catalog management with a native feature-set which, coupled with solid scalability opportunities and wide range of integrations, has attracted a fair number of blue-chip businesses including L’Oreal, Euronics, Segway, and Discovery Channel not to mention some Bundesliga clubs.
When specialists compare Shopware vs Salesforce Commerce Cloud they point to the advanced content management offered by the former, which allows the creation of extremely flexible page content by users who don’t need any technical support in it. This benefit attracts quite a lot of small and mid-size e-commerce companies that started to migrate to Shopware abandoning other platforms.
The two main obstacles that still prevent the migration process from becoming landslide are the absence of cloud facilities and a predominantly German-speaking community which makes it harder for English-language clients to get user support if necessary.
