Salesforce Commerce Cloud Reviews

Salesforce Commerce Cloud's main use case is D2C and B2C, focusing on direct-to-customers. Salesforce Commerce Cloud's architecture is very effective for our channel partners, providing them a good platform. However, we are not using the native commerce mobile app but the generic web-based one.

One of the most valuable features in Salesforce Commerce Cloud is that it helps me avoid storing credit card information, with a vault function taken care of. Salesforce provides this vault feature, enabling me to bill my D2C customers directly and also feeding data into my Marketing Cloud and Services Cloud.

For visibility features in Salesforce Commerce Cloud, I might need to schedule a separate meeting as I can only share certain levels of information. Experience-wise, it is very good; the platform helps identify promotional opportunities and integrates well with Salesforce's Trade Promotion Management.

The main benefits Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides are significant process improvements. If we did not have it, I would need to establish a separate D2C portal such as Magento Commerce and integrate with Salesforce for some data. Having Salesforce Commerce Cloud is essential as it integrates very quickly and is part of the entire ecosystem.

If Salesforce Commerce Cloud could incorporate features such as Product Data Management and Customer Data Platform internally, it would benefit large customers such as us, reducing reliance on multiple third-party products.

I started working with Salesforce Commerce Cloud in 2019.

I rate the stability of Salesforce Commerce Cloud between nine and ten, as it tends to be stable despite occasional issues typical of SaaS products.

I would rate the scalability of Salesforce Commerce Cloud as a nine because it offers plug-and-play solutions, enabling faster rollouts in different countries.

My experience with technical support from Salesforce is mixed; they are available but sometimes not as responsive when issues arise, leading to longer wait times unless I subscribe to higher-level support.

Integration with Salesforce environment is achieved using MuleSoft, which is a Salesforce product.

We are not using Salesforce's content management tool; instead, we use a different product called Aprimo for managing our content. Aprimo integrates with Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud's initial setup is very easy and simple; if your sales process is clear, implementation can be done in less than thirty days.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud faces competition from ServiceNow with its latest features, and products such as Zoho CRM and Zoho Marketplace also present strong competition, though Salesforce still leads. Commercially, they also offer very competitive pricing.

Integration with Salesforce environment is achieved using MuleSoft, which is a Salesforce product.

We are not using Salesforce's content management tool; instead, we use a different product called Aprimo for managing our content.

Zscaler is our VPN, providing extended network capabilities instead of using the Cisco VPN client we relied on earlier.

I tried Salesforce's Einstein AI-driven personalization feature, but we did not find it very effective, so we created our own platform for GenAI and a conversational bot. We use our product to extract data from Salesforce into our Data Cloud.

I would rate this review an eight overall.

My use case is to register opportunities to store proposals and to support the sales life cycle.

One of the most valuable features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud is that we are in a transition, aiming to improve our KPIs from our sales team. This is one of my current challenges to register the leads in an easy way. Until now, I had an Excel file, and only when the lead is converted into a real opportunity, which means when the client asks me for a proposal, I jump from Excel to Salesforce Commerce Cloud. We wanted to be more professional in this point and to register the leads in Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

I need to understand how to do it in an easy way. Four years ago, we linked Salesforce Commerce Cloud with Outlook, and this was a nightmare because a contact in 20 opportunities is a common scenario. We have some services that are recurrent services, and the client asks us for a proposal for each quarter. We are renewing quarter by quarter, and after three years, you have 12 proposals only for that team. We have several teams because we work with big clients.

What happened in my Outlook and mobile phone was that the same contact appeared 12 times. This issue might be resolved now, but we switched off due to problems when I tried to send emails to personal accounts. They mixed with so many records, creating big confusion between the names and emails, putting emails for person B in the record of person A. This was truly problematic. Nevertheless, we now have a mobile app from Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and I will try to find an easy way to input that part.

I need to learn what the main advantages and improvements from Salesforce Commerce Cloud are. I would like to see some additional functions which can make my life easier with that product.

The main problem is that I have some colleagues complaining about phone call registration. If I make a phone call to a client, it is not easy to register that I did the phone call at that specific time. I know this functionality exists, but it would be more effective with call center system integration. We are senior sales representatives, and we use our mobile phones to make calls and follow-ups.

I believe that to take advantage of this, I need to have discipline, a daily booked slot in my calendar that states during this period, I do phone calls. I need the laptop in front of me to register using the keyboard. It is not straightforward—it is a challenge to do that. The advantage is that we need that structure so that we have a more professional sales team. If I know that for each 100 proposals I put forward, I convert 50% of them, then to achieve those 100 proposals, I need to make 500 contacts. We do not have those metrics, but we need them. Only with this information can I have a commercial team, a sales team that does what needs to be done to achieve our goals; otherwise, it is guesswork.

I have been working with Salesforce Commerce Cloud for four years.

I would rate the stability of Salesforce Commerce Cloud as nine out of ten.

I believe we are not a big team, with 20 people, but I would rate the ability to scale as nine out of ten.

I do not have visibility on the technical support from Salesforce Commerce Cloud, but I believe it is good as I have not heard anyone complaining about the support.

Positive

I can compare Salesforce Commerce Cloud with Dynamics from Microsoft, which we used before.

The initial setup process for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, in my experience, was quite simple, completed by one of my colleagues because we are a Salesforce partner and we implement Salesforce solutions as well. From my recollection, this was quite simple—one person spent two to three weeks setting up, configuring, and creating the dashboards we wanted. However, we have maintained continuous updating since then.

I believe Salesforce Commerce Cloud is better than Microsoft; it is a more comprehensive solution. Even with the problems I mentioned, we have a very customizable solution. It is very easy to customize and create different views and different fields.

I personally use Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It is totally cloud-based deployment. I would rate this solution seven out of ten.

We have multiple lines of business, such as supply chain and order to cash processes. We try to create business intelligence out of the data we collect, measuring metrics like average order volume, lifetime value of the customer, how many leads we have, percentage conversion, and lead density in specific geographic locations. 

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is used for retail operations like merchandising, product creation, discounts, and integrating with third-party systems for payments and reviews.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers effective architecture, ease of integration with third-party systems, and environments to test web store functionalities. Users can manage the site independently with the administration panel and benefit from features like easy marketing submissions, discount codes, and integration with Apple Pay and Bazaarvoice for reviews. 

The platform is also robust, with managed infrastructure by Salesforce.

The extensibility of end-to-end lifecycle management for an order can be enhanced. Salesforce Commerce Cloud should integrate more seamlessly with various systems, providing full order tracking from entry to delivery. Improving robustness in communication with diverse systems is essential, as not all companies use Salesforce ecosystems.

I have been working with Salesforce Commerce Cloud for three years.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a stable platform, with outages typically due to underlying infrastructure or human error. It remains dependable through regular product updates and supports scalability across different regions.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is highly scalable, allowing horizontal scaling with additional servers for expanded business regions. The platform is managed by Salesforce, ensuring uptime and accommodating volume spikes during high-traffic periods. Flexibility in scaling supports a seamless extension of business operations globally.

I rate the technical support at an eight out of ten. Salesforce offers models with different levels of service through their standard, premier, or signature support subscriptions. The customer service facilitates expedient resolution times and maintains effective support.

Positive

Before Salesforce Commerce Cloud, I did not use another solution. Although I considered Shopify, it was not implemented.

I would rate the initial setup a seven out of ten. It requires technological understanding and knowledge of Salesforce’s architecture. Clear business requirements and storefront setup guidelines are critical for a smooth implementation, typically taking one to one and a half quarters, or two to three quarters for highly customized deployments.

The implementation involves a scrum team, potentially more if there are many customizations. The team should include around five people, focusing on deployments and customizations, to ensure a seamless process.

As a system integrator, I am not privy to the client's ROI benefits and cannot quantify it, as it is generally business-driven. The ROI for businesses would depend on faster implementation and market reach.

I am not involved in the pricing or licensing details, so I cannot provide specific insights into the setup costs.

We did not evaluate other solutions aside from Salesforce Commerce Cloud, though I had an interest in Shopify.

For those implementing Salesforce Commerce Cloud, it is crucial to have clear business goals and process documentation. Ensure active business involvement and support, with a sponsor vested in the project's success. This clarity helps achieve quicker go-live timelines and improves ROI.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I work on various projects implemented and managed for many retailers, ranging from luxury to classic products. Therefore, I handle projects of significant scale, ranging from half a million to two million in scope. We engage in a variety of business cases with different teams.

Commerce Cloud has a comprehensive nature, encompassing both production infrastructure and user-friendly tools that enhance daily operational efficiency and provide extensive experience and solutions.

Clients benefit from robust infrastructure with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, ensuring seamless performance even during peak activities like Black Friday. This stability eliminates pain points and boosts revenue through personalized customer experience and integrated solutions that replace advertising fees. 

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is quite robust and can do many functions. The solution enables extensive personalization. It provides accelerators tailored to your website, simplifying deployment. It seamlessly integrates with other solutions, facilitating data integration. With Salesforce alone, you can achieve comprehensive capabilities without needing additional solutions.

The back office of Salesforce could be more user-friendly.

I have been using Salesforce Commerce Cloud as a system integrator for seven years.

Support is good.

Positive

The initial setup can be complex.

The license costs between 50-100K per year, which is more expensive than competitors' licenses. The enterprise license cost ranges between two hundred thousand and one million dollars based on the project's GMV. It charges a fee of one to three percent of the revenue.

Integration depends on how you build your website. It can become complex if you make many customizations to meet customer needs. However, if you adhere to best practices, integration will be straightforward.

You can integrate data from these solutions with Salesforce Commerce, Tableau, Slack, and other platforms, making these actions more interactive. If you want to integrate Commerce Cloud with other systems, you can integrate it with ERP systems, CRM systems, or other third-party applications. You can also use Commerce Cloud on its own. Additionally, you can integrate it with Shopify, although Shopify is a smaller platform.

I recommend the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We have a client onboarding their B2B customers onto Salesforce Commerce Cloud. They aim to organize their product offerings to provide various clients with different experiences. In B2B commerce, there are functionalities to customize pricing and user experience for each customer. 

The Salesforce platform for B2B commerce is designed to allow extensive customization on top of its standard features. For example, we can assign certain customers entitlements to specific products while hiding those from others. Pricing can vary based on factors such as geographic location, such as selling a product in the United States versus the UK. These costs can be managed effectively. 

The platform is highly integrable. We can integrate it with billing systems and external OMS. Although Salesforce provides its own OMS, we currently use it, but it can be customized to work seamlessly with other applications. We have onboarded several clients and are working on enhancing the platform further. This includes modifying the product list and detail pages and customizing the content displayed. We also handle notifications and create custom Lightning components for the UI to tailor the experience to each client's needs.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers a personalized experience tailored to each B2B client. It allows for easy customization according to specific customer needs. Additionally, once a customer finalizes a product with pricing, negotiations and settled prices can be logged into the transcript for future reference and reuse. These features make the platform highly adaptable and efficient, providing a seamless and customizable process tailored to individual preferences. 

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based multi-tenant platform. Customizing the application requires a significant level of technical expertise, particularly in native Lightning Web Components development and Apex Development, which are the platform's native languages. It's essential to be aware of these limitations and any related recommendations.

The limitation is the restriction on data storage, which can be crucial when dealing with clients who generate large orders and invoices. In such cases, alternative solutions may need to be considered, and integration with other applications may be necessary. While it offers streamlined integration capabilities with various applications, the data storage limit is a factor that must be considered when planning marketing strategies and solutions.

I have been using Salesforce Commerce Cloud for a year.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud prioritizes security and stability, ensuring minimal downtime and effective communication with clients about potential issues. Salesforce maintains transparency regarding potential risks or downtimes and offers support to address them promptly. Overall, Salesforce has demonstrated a solid commitment to stability across its platform and various clouds, ensuring uninterrupted service delivery to its clients and supporting their business continuity efforts.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is scalable. We have just onboarded a couple of customers. However, to avoid potential challenges, it's important to ensure proper data management and integration frameworks are in place. By following Salesforce's best practices, the solutions can be made highly scalable with minimal issues.

I have communicated with the Salesforce teams on behalf of multiple customers thousands of times. It's not uncommon for issues to require three or four days or even a week for resolution, especially when they involve critical matters that necessitate the intervention of development or technical teams. However, when P1 issues cause business blockages, the support from Salesforce is commendable. They promptly join calls and make every effort to resolve the issues swiftly. Overall, the support team is highly efficient.

One of Salesforce Commerce Cloud's USPs is its user-friendly nature. Salesforce has consistently prioritized making its products easy to use, install, and configure, even for those who may not be familiar with technical intricacies. With a simple point-and-click interface, its products are accessible and straightforward to install and operate.

We need to analyze the usage scenario for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, determining the number of users who will require access to both Salesforce and Commerce Cloud licenses and the number of administrators involved in developing the application. By considering these factors alongside any additional requirements, we can calculate the overall cost and establish a budget for the project. Pricing is based on a per-user-per-month model, where the number of users utilizing Salesforce services significantly determines the final cost. 

There is a feature within Salesforce Commerce Cloud that needs to be enabled. This enablement process typically involves coordination with Salesforce's account manager. However, if the account manager is based in the US and the issue you're facing relates to an ISP, there may be limitations in what immediate actions can be taken, as you would need to wait for their availability to address the matter. This could involve waiting for them to respond to emails or phone calls and provide necessary approvals to move the process forward. While there are some limitations regarding global support for enablement, they are rare cases, and overall, the platform performs well.

Before deciding to implement Salesforce Commerce Cloud, it's essential to assess your current business landscape thoroughly. Factors such as compatibility with your business model, the type and volume of products you offer, and your overall business needs should all be considered. Depending on your background and familiarity with Commerce Cloud, the configuration process may vary in complexity. However, the process can be relatively straightforward with a Commerce background and knowledge of terms like product listing page and product catalog page. Onboarding customers and setting up data correctly are crucial steps in maximizing the platform's benefits.

One significant advantage of using Salesforce Commerce Cloud is its integration with the broader Salesforce platform. This includes features specific to Commerce Cloud and extends to other functionalities such as data security, user access control, and integration with sales and service clouds. This integration allows highly customizable applications to streamline sales and service cycles, address customer issues, and enhance sales efforts. Overall, Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers a robust solution beyond typical commerce solutions available.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I mainly work with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Consumer Goods Cloud.

I currently use and oversee the implementation of AI features from Salesforce for customer engagement.

I automate some marketing and operation tasks through the Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

The main functionality I find valuable in Salesforce Commerce Cloud is the fact that it shares the same database as Service and Sales Cloud, which allows me to develop more quickly in terms of integration, because I already have all the accounts, contacts, leads, sales, and invoice data already on one platform, so I don't need to have many more integrations if I already have Salesforce as the core.

Both the multi-currency and multi-language capabilities of Salesforce Commerce Cloud are useful for me.

The main benefits that Salesforce provides for me are simplification of the operation and also saving effort and time.

One of the main points for improvement right now is still the user interface, the front end of Salesforce, because I only have one layout theme, which is the main B2B Commerce layout, while different vendors and competitors have multiple themes to choose from when implementing an e-commerce portal, so this is one of the main pain points for me.

They need to improve the quality of the support.

Positive

In the last few years, the inventory management features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud were not useful for me because the software was not ready, but it has become more useful, although I don't have a project right now involving inventory management.

I don't have any thoughts on functionality suggestions for Salesforce on what they can add to the product.

I would rate the pricing as a three, where one is a high price and ten is a low price.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Salesforce Commerce Cloud an overall rating of eight.

I primarily use it for automation testing of the applications. 

There are a lot of valuable features. We have different models that allow us to perform various tasks. It's an end-to-end process, and we use it for our life sciences clients. It helps with tasks like calling, sampling, and more. So it is a very flexible solution.

In terms of application performance, it could be a bit quicker. Additionally, the customization options made it challenging to automate certain aspects of the application. These areas have room for improvement.

In the next version, it would be beneficial to have easier out-of-the-box automation capabilities and improved application performance. The performance should increase. The speed of the application should increase.

I have used Salesforce Commerce Cloud for around two and a half years. I currently use the latest version. 

I would rate the stability of this solution a six out of ten.

Overall, I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten. Currently, around 70 to 80 users are using this solution. 

Sometimes we don't get the replies quickly. The response time is not fast.

Neutral

I would rate the pricing model a seven out of ten, where one being low and ten being high. 

I would recommend using this solution. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. I am happy with the solution but there are still some areas of improvement. 

We use the solution for business development, account management, lead management, and pipeline management activities.

The pipeline and lead management features are the most valuable.

The performance of the solution has room for improvement. We sometimes experience some delays.

I have been using the solution for 12 months.

I give the stability a ten out of ten.

I give the scalability of the solution a ten out of ten.

We previously used SAP CRM and switched to Salesforce because of its stability, scalability, and UI.

I give the initial setup an eight out of ten. The deployment was difficult because the engineers had to deploy across multiple global locations and the configuration and business rules were complex. The deployment took one year for my location.

We have seen a return on investment. The solution helps to create revenue. Salesforce helps us identify missing opportunities so at the end of the day missing revenue. 

I give the price of the solution a three out of ten.

I give the solution a nine out of ten because of its usability, attractive UI, a small learning curve for end users, and scalability.

90 percent of our management team is using the solution daily.

I suggest keeping the master data clean as much as possible because it is very important to apply and then use the same rules during the customer life cycle so all the users need to have a team to maintain and manage all the master data and leave little to the users to the end customers regarding the market date. No flexibility concerning market data. Avoid using customization or customization because the Salesforce cloud, commercial cloud, as we want, has a lot of configurations that we can use. We need to search for this. So don't go with any customization that will impact the systems or mustard systems functionality.

We use Salesforce Commerce Cloud mostly for reporting. We know exactly how to use the reports, which are either filtered by time, customer IDs, accounts, or region. It becomes very easy when you're using such a platform.

The most valuable feature of Salesforce Commerce Cloud is the frequent updates. There will be a significant increase in the look and feel. You will be using the solution and think you might want a new feature to be added and then when they release the next release it is there. There are constantly improving the solution.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud could improve overall customization. Having a template deployment would be a useful feature.

I have been using Salesforce Commerce Cloud for approximately eight years.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is reliable. I have never had to raise a ticket. It is a fast solution. 

The scalability of Salesforce Commerce Cloud is good.

We have approximately 20,000 or 30,000 people using this solution in my company.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud support and ticketing are easy once you face a problem, but I've never faced a problem.

The initial setup of Salesforce Commerce Cloud is straightforward.

We have a deployment team that does the implementation of Salesforce Commerce Cloud. In corporations, you have your OS upgrades along with that, you have all your installations being upgraded. Whether you have Microsoft, Salesforce, or Oracle, it's a very smooth process. You don't have to wait for updates and walk up to your IT manager or IT team for help. This has never happened, the maintenance is smooth.

The licensing of Salesforce Commerce Cloud is something that will depend on the customer's usability. For us as a company, we are in a position where we will be paying the premium for licensing. If we go to the customer who is seeking a B2C solution quickly, we will definitely look at the pricing when it comes to the user base and receive good discounts. Discount is something that depends on the volume and that is where we need to work on. It is a little sensitive market when it comes to licensing procurement. There are some good competitors.

Most of our retail customers who are in the B2C market, are all on Salesforce Commerce Cloud. I would this solution to others.

I rate Salesforce Commerce Cloud a ten out of ten.

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 repositories? 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.