The tech stack chosen by a retailer will determine their digital performance, thus making the wrong option might be fatal. However, re-platforming is a massive undertaking for any store and should not be underestimated; however, it is frequently a necessity for growth, as many merchants will see minimal (or even negative) year-over-year growth and will have reached the limits of their current platforms’ capabilities.

Demandware / Salesforce Commerce Cloud is one of the biggest names in the B2C eCommerce platform space. They both enable medium to large retailers to effectively sell products online. The platform powers online storefronts for a number of large global brands, including Barbour, Brewdog, Missguided, Harvey Nichols, Converse, Adidas and Charles Tyrwhitt. Remarkable Commerce is used by many leading UK retailers, including Ben Sherman, Moss Bros, Roman, Yours Clothing, Absolute Snow and WoolOvers.

Both solutions are significantly different, and if you’re thinking about using Salesforce or Remarkable Commerce, you’ll need to understand the differences in order to make the best choice. To assist you in doing so, I’ve compiled a list of points of comparison between the platforms, covering all important deciding factors for a re-platforming project.

Any retailer that is growing swiftly needs a solid eCommerce platform that can adapt to its changing needs. They are right to be reading about comparisons between the top players in order to figure out which solution will be the best fit for their specific scenario, given the abundance of possibilities available.

So, what are the core differences and comparisons between these platforms? Below we review the most common features and popular questions.

Cost of Ownership

Remarkable Commerce: Because the Remarkable Commerce Platform is completely tailored for each retailer, it is not an “off-the-shelf” SaaS offering like its competitors. There are no GMV or commission costs, and the licencing charge is simply based on average monthly sessions with tiered price ranges. The cost of building is typically between £70k-£100k. The monthly licence fee covers unlimited use of the Remarkable Commerce platform for an unlimited number of admin users, an unlimited number of API calls, several product variations, phone and email technical support during office hours, server, database, error log, third-party, and browser maintenance.

When reviewing TCO (total cost of ownership), a typical model will span 3-5 years, which is the length of time expected until the software becomes end-of-life and ready for an upgrade. With Remarkable Commerce, the TCO starts low and remains low. Typically, the build development is low enough to be OpEx (operating expenses), instead of CapEx (capital expenditure).

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: As part of the licensing cost, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is provided as a SaaS solution, with their team taking care of platform maintenance, hosting/server management, code quality assessment/validation, upgrades etc. They also tend to be more integrated with the agencies who develop retailers' storefronts, pushing hard for retailer growth – as this benefits SFCC without them doing any extra work. Salesforce Commerce Cloud changed its pricing in 2019 - the new pricing has three core tiers, which are called Starter, Growth and Unlimited. The Starter tier starts at 1% GMV and can be used by retailers with a single store and up to two price books. The Growth tier can be used by retailers with up to 5 stores and up to 10 price books and is set to 2% GMV. The unlimited tier is then for merchants that exceed these areas.

It is commonly known that a Salesforce Commerce Cloud build starts from around £200k and could go all the way to £1m, depending on complexity and requirements. The average build seems to be more in line with £400k – £600k – which is just slightly lower than SAP CX.

Market Sector

Remarkable Commerce: UK Medium-sized B2C retailers – with turnover between £5m and £50m p/a. Particular sectors include fashion and apparel (80%), sporting equipment, luxury jewellery and toys. The technology agility attracts the attention of retailers from many sectors, as the platform allows for infinite options and limitless configurations.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: Seeing steady growth over the last 5 years, SFCC is currently used by around 300 UK B2C retailers, split into the following sectors – apparel/shoes (70%), skincare and fragrances, furniture, and watches. Seen as an enterprise solution, aimed squarely at retailers with annual online revenue above £100m, and known for their high GMV commission model. Retailers of this size are normally not overly agile, which is why SFCC can make sense. Yet, if a retailer wishes to remain agile and unrestricted, they would be better suited to a platform like Remarkable Commerce.

Integration Partners

Remarkable Commerce: The Remarkable Commerce platform has over 300 integrated solutions, covering a wide range of technology types. Although the integrations are not self-serving in the admin, all historic integrations are fairly plug-and-play and available with a short amount of development time. https://remarkable.net/integrations/ the full list of integrations, updated annually.

The biggest advantage of a fully custom hybrid-SaaS solution like Remarkable is that an integration can be tailored to work exactly how a retailer or 3rd-party wishes it to – commonly, going beyond best practice and into ‘perfect practice’.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: Most of the Salesforce Commerce Cloud integrations are based on plug-and-play solutions (integration ‘LINK cartridges’), which are modified for each customer’s requirements and business needs. Usually, the complexity of client-business processes and requirements for global support (for example, multi-brand solutions in Europe, APAC, and the Americas) will require a lot of additional functionality beyond standard integrations. In such cases, it is known to be easier to write each integration from scratch – which has a large cost and long timeline.

APIs & Architecture

Remarkable Commerce: True innovation and development agility is possible when your eCommerce platform can be integrated with any solution and data can be accessed in real-time both manually and dynamically – this is why an open API is critical and why Remarkable Commerce has a suite of APIs which can be used in a headless fashion to retrieve and post data to. Headless architecture and simple, API integrations give you the flexibility to engage customers across every retail touchpoint – web, mobile, apps, marketplaces, and in-store – and deliver seamless omnichannel experiences. Remarkable Commerce has a pre-integrated front-end accelerator that slashes ‘time to web’ for new digital storefronts, so you can focus on UX, brand strategy and optimisation.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: Salesforce has been a cloud-based, fully-hosted SaaS eCommerce platform, which means the headaches and responsibilities around hosting the technology and managing the associated services are handled by Salesforce themselves, and not the retailer or agencies/developers. This setup is ideal for retailers who don’t want to manage server maintenance and software updates – which are frequent and will soak up a large number of additional development resources if this is managed by an agency.

The SFCC Commerce API (which is different to their Open Commerce API, for 3rd parties to call) has around 500 classes that can be called by the platform – these span products, customers, promotions, stores, orders, baskets, content, cryptography, files and web services.

Product & Catalogue Management

Remarkable Commerce: With an endlessly customisable admin (and storefront!), all Remarkable Commerce platform clients have heavily tailored functionality which saves them time and effort, when managing large amounts of products and categories.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: Unfortunately, SFCC retailers need to adjust their URL parameters settings so to avoid the default configuration which negatively affects SEO performance. SFCC’s parameterised site search tends to result in multiple URLs for the same product, each reflecting specific parameters used during a particular search. This can thankfully be avoided with the use of canonical tags referencing the original product page, to avoid duplicate content issues. It is also recommended to set no index robots meta tags for pages that have been filtered or created as a result of a website search.

Order Management

Remarkable Commerce: The OMS module in the Remarkable Commerce platform has many customisable fields and functions, with the base solution including Bulk Orders Management, Returns and Refunds Management, Custom Order tagging, Management of Order status emails, Bespoke Invoicing, Automated Courier Tracking, Automated Payment Tracking, Manual Order (MOTO) functions for Customer Service teams and a full suite of advanced reporting.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: Salesforce Commerce Cloud enables merchants to fulfil orders from specific warehouses, via their order management solution (which was introduced following the acquisition of Mainstreet Commerce) – it gives shoppers flexible delivery/collection options including in-store pickup, ship-from-store, and more.

Extensibility & Flexibility

Remarkable Commerce: One of the biggest USPs of Remarkable Commerce is how extendable the platform is. This is achievable because each retailer who uses the Remarkable Commerce Platform has a tailored version of the storefront, that is connected through APIs, to their fully-custom admin/control panel. Both the front end and the admin are commonly extended to include additional modules, functions and connectors. With full access to every line of architecture code, the Remarkable Commerce agency team have no limitations or restrictions, leading to infinitely customisable customer experiences.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: SFCC doesn’t natively communicate with any third parties, which means it relies heavily on other ‘non-platform’ code to power key areas of the storefront and the admin. Integrating with a third party is required because SFCC itself (being a SaaS solution) cannot be extended to include all desired functionality; instead, it gets augmented. Integrating third parties requires a deep and profound understanding of the SFCC architecture and close collaboration with the third party. SFCC accounts for this technical and resourcing gap through the use of LINK cartridges.

A LINK cartridge is a Salesforce-certified collection of the code, configurations, and documentation needed to implement a certain third-party integration. Salesforce has a set of strict standards for these cartridges that encompass everything from code structure, syntax, architecture, and documentation content, as well as requiring the involvement of a certified Salesforce B2C Commerce developer. To design these cartridges, third-party service providers often engage with teams of SFCC professionals, ensuring that experts on all important issues are involved. An aftermarket cartridge can be developed by anybody, but a LINK cartridge has been approved to meet severe specifications, allowing it to be trusted and installed with confidence. This is an incredibly difficult and prolonged process for retailers wishing to add third-party integrations with speed and agility.

Admin Ease of Use

Remarkable Commerce: The Remarkable Commerce Manager (admin portal) has been moulded over the last 20+ years, with the direction and direct input from clients of various sizes – this has led to a comprehensive and easy-to-use platform, where a retailer can complete key actions much quicker than other platforms. An example of this is promotion/campaign setup and launching, which can be achieved within minutes. Each client has a tailored version of the core admin where they request function and UX updates – ultimately leading the development roadmap for their own version.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: It’s safe to say that the SFCC admin portal is vast and tricky to navigate. It is incredibly easy to get lost in the structure of admin pages and takes several months to understand the architecture of the admin. This makes simple tasks take much longer than they should – as half of the time, you are just looking for the correct functionality. That said, there is a good amount of self-serving functionality – if you can find it.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Remarkable Commerce: Remarkable Commerce is a totally bespoke platform so the admin can be tailored to suit your needs within the build phase. Due to it being flexible, it allows for custom rules and logic to be created to automate certain features that influence SEO, such as a product retirement strategy. It doesn’t, however, have plugins and any mar-tech integration would be actioned as a development project.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: There are many known SEO challenges and problems with the SFCC platform, https://getshogun.com/learn/sfcc-seo-issues gives several examples.

We’ve seen that SFCC stores handle non-existent pages wrongly, which is a widespread SEO issue. They either redirect users to their homepage or return inaccurate status codes instead of returning a 404 error code. These pages are marked by Google as generating a soft 404 error. Soft 404 returns irritate Google because they offer a confusing experience for both users and search engines. Soft 404 answers are a waste of Google’s resources, which may be better spent indexing valid pages.

Roadmap

Remarkable Commerce: Each retailer who uses the Remarkable Commerce Platform has its own unique roadmap of storefront and admin new functionality, change requests and version updates. This enables every retailer to take their own direction but also benefit from the larger frequent platform updates that every client receives.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: With 2 large releases per year, Salesforce Commerce Cloud announce its roadmap plans and release features to its community of partners and retailers – therefore the roadmap is hidden from public view. In 2021, the main developments were the ability to part-pay for gift cards, the ability to either capture funds at the time of purchase, or time or fulfilment, and finally, the release of their PWA site converter function (which allows admin users to convert pages into PWA friendly versions themselves, seemingly without development input).

Internationalisation

Remarkable Commerce: Retailers need the ability to change, adapt and launch as quickly as possible, without needing to repeat tasks. This is the reason that we created functionality for retailers to launch promotions across multiple sites, apply configuration updates to multiple sites and publish content updates to selected sites in real time. Removing restrictions, improving efficiencies and enabling revenue growth. Remarkable Commerce retailers can choose the configuration of their international model – with limitless options for sharing (or separating) product data, stock data, category architecture, third parties and checkout options – all in a truly headless fashion.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) is a platform built with internationalisation in mind, ready to support enterprise retailers to grow internationally. This ‘out-of-the-box’ technology is rigid and does not allow for easily changeable configurations. Therefore this suits retailers looking for quick expansion, and those who are happy to not be agile.

Storefront Speed & Performance

Remarkable Commerce: With an obsession with site speed and storefront performance, the frontend developers at Remarkable Commerce pay particular attention to speed metrics and regularly undertake speed audits, to review what area of code can be optimised further. This continuous exercise ensures that our clients are providing the very best customer experience and the quickest sites possible.

Magento Commerce: Speed is critical in eCommerce; this isn’t new information. As a general guideline, you should not leave a user waiting for more than 3 seconds; else, they will likely go on to a rival who is more responsive. While cached sites are delivered in a matter of seconds, not all pages can be cached. Category pages with dynamic filtering methods are a nice example. Magento retailers are required to alter a category or product data, in order to force a cache refresh. The discrepancy in loading times between cached and uncached pages perplexes users and grows exponentially as the number of page view requests increases.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: SFCC was designed in a way that mainly focuses on core business functionalities: displaying product information along with pricing and giving operators a functional backend to manage their stock. Storefront speed optimisation is left to the platforms’ system integrators and agency developers – who, unfortunately, are not the architects and creators of the platform code – therefore, typically, do not have the technical deep knowledge that is required to make ‘under the bonnet’ changes to meaningfully improve site speed and performance.

Conclusion

The question of what eCommerce platform to use (or migrate to) is always a really tough decision for any business to make, especially when the retailer has a turnover above £50m p/a – as there is a lot more budget at stake, more stakeholders involved etc. Enterprise eCommerce solutions don’t come cheap and they require a huge amount of time (and a lot of people) to implement, run and maintain. This is why it’s incredibly important that you remain highly organised and systematic in your research and decision-making process, as selecting the wrong platform can have a huge impact on your business.

Ultimately, a retailer's platform choice should be in line with both its current online performance and its growth ambitions. There are many pros and cons for both Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Remarkable, and where one excels, the other underperforms.

For retailers with a turnover above £5m p/a and considering a platform move, check out https://remarkable.net/commerce-platform/ to learn more about the Remarkable Commerce Platform.