Salesforce Commerce Cloud Reviews and Pricing

Solution Architect with 51-200 employees

Oct 3, 2014

Merchandizing and website features are easy to master and set up but integration with other systems is not easy

Demandware is a SaaS based Ecommerce platform. Most of its customers are US based but it is rapidly making inroads into Europe.

Its strength lies in it being SaaS and being extremely feature rich. The downside is lack of easy integration capabilities with other IT systems.

Strengths

1. Rich in features:

Demandware has rich Merchandizing and website features which are easy to master and set up in its merchant facing interface called Business Manager. Some of them are listed below

·Promotions – About 70-80 type of different promotions can be set up in Business Manager.

·Search – It has it’s own search engine (no need to integrate with any third party search engines if your SKU count is not exceeding half a million). Various search specific features such as Synonyms, Hypernyms, redirects can be easily set up.

·Product Types – Supports various product types such as sets and bundles

·SEO- There are various features within Demandware to enhance the SEO awareness of the site

·Geo targeting – Recently they have added inbuilt support for Geo-IP based targeting. This means merchants can easily merchandize their goods based on customer’s browsing location.

Apart from these, included are other standard Ecommerce platform features such as Catalogue management, Pricebook management, multi-site roll out feature exists.

2. SaaS

Demandware has achieved a good degree of maturity in regularly upgrading the platform. Being SaaS means clients don’t have to be bother with the release process, upgrading etc. They can just sit back and enjoy the new features offered by Demandware.

Business Model

Its licensing model is transaction based (you pay Demandware a percentage of your revenue) . So retailers/clients don’t have to do a huge capital expenditure.

Weakness

1. Integration capability

It is not very easy to integrate Demandware with other systems. For most of the key interfaces like Catalogue, PriceBook or inventory you have to get a file in Demandware XML format from other systems (like Warehouse management system, Product Management system etc.). Though technically it is possible to do XML transformation and use of web services etc, the only thing I am saying is, it is not as easy as some other platforms.

2. Proprietary development language

To customize or enhance any features within Demandware, you have to work in Demandware Scripting language, which is a proprietary Demandware language. Though it is based on server side Javascripting, you still have to learn it along with Demandware component architecture. As a result, the availability of trained developers in the market is scarce. The learning curve here is steeper than Hybris or ATG (for developers).

After having worked on ATG and Demandware and having self taught Hybris to some extent, I would recommend Demandware for retailers who make anywhere between USD 10 and USD 50 Million/year in online revenue and do not want to operate a large in-house IT team.

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Update 2014

1) New multicurrency feature released - A Demandware based transactional site can now have more than one currency.

2) Improved Search As You Type feature

3) Same host name for multiple sites (i.e. www.somesite.com/US points to US site and www.somesite.com/UK points to UK site)

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user72771Info Sec Consultant at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

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Aug 18, 2016

Did you have any major problems with your demandware install?

it_user136839

Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jun 29, 2014

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Good product, which allows a lot of customization and the ability to handle a large volume of orders.

Pros and Cons

"The platform is capable of handling thousands of orders per hour and Demandware take care of the scalability and hosting infrastructure, so you do not have to worry about that."

"If you have followed the best practices you will not have a problem, however you are allowed to change the caching for different pages and that may cause a lot of problems with the performance."

Valuable Features:

The customization and the ability to extend every feature, as well the integration with 3rd parties is very good.

Use of Solution:

I have used this product for 4 years.

Stability Issues:

All the changes in the platform are made backward compatible.

Scalability Issues:

If you have followed the best practices you will not have a problem, however you are allowed to change the caching for different pages and that may cause a lot of problems with the performance.

Other Advice:

All the solutions based on the platform should be implemented by people who have experience. The platform is capable of handling thousands of orders per hour and Demandware take care of the scalability and hosting infrastructure, so you do not have to worry about that.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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it_user4938

Director of eCommerce at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Mar 10, 2013

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Lots of great features. I just wish it were easier to integrate in our environment.

Pros and Cons

"I like the dashboard which provides centralized access to all management, policies, rules, etc."

"Expensive!!!"

Valuable Features:

We evaluated Demandware last year. Here are some of my team's impressions: - Excellent support for mobile devices, which is important for us - Social hooks into FB, etc. - I like the dashboard which provides centralized access to all management, policies, rules, etc. - Extensive partner ecosystem

Room for Improvement:

- Expensive!!! - Our architecture team raised questions about how it would fit in our environment, as there would be a good amount of internal work to get everything integrated together. You may want to look into this as part of your evaluation. It's not SaaS after all.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user6060Architect with 51-200 employees

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Oct 21, 2013

With my personal experience i can say please look at the following advantages only:
-Caching
-Build management and disaster recovery in a very small amount of time.
-Good plug-ability from a technical point of view.
-Same version of code can serve multiple devices with responsive design.
-No database :)

There are problems related to the API (a bit) and maintenance but these are not significant if we follow best practices.