Anyone who was worked with me knows I’m a Salesforce super fan. Salesforce has played a major role in every single job I’ve ever had. I’m always advocating for it to play a role in almost all aspects of every business I work for.
But lately I think I might be wrong about Salesforce. There are things Salesforce is best in class at including enterprise Sales and Service cloud implementations and Non Profit Program and Donor management.
But it’s terrible at e-commerce and MarTech.
Simple things like deduping your contacts or adding a new payment method require weeks of developer support and never really work all that well. We’ve had to build custom integrations for things like Apple Pay, not because of something super unique about our needs but just to get it to do basic things like getting it to show on a cart and checkout page.
Shopify on the other hand has an App Store much more like Apple’s or Wordpress's. You install apps by clicking install and sometimes configuring a few settings.
Commerce Cloud hasn’t had a new feature or even any feature refinements in the last 3-4 years. The UX was outdated when they bought Demand Ware, and other then a coat of paint on the menu bar it looks and works just like it did back then.
Sales cloud and Service cloud on the other hand look lightyear better than ERP systems like JDE and get meaningful new feature every month. I get genuinely excited when new releases notes come out. Learning all the new things I can do in flows makes me feel like a kid in a candy shop. It’s like I get performance enhancing drugs for my work life. I’m the king of the world.
But there non of that in Commerce Cloud and there’s sure not any of in Marketing Cloud. Journey building was cool when it launched in 2014 but it hasn’t changed at all since. And it’s papered over this insane architecture that stores millions of copies of all of your customer data. It’s only supports full screen forms out of the box, no on page modals
And don’t get me started on the integration with CRM. CRM still has no out of the box support for merging incoming duplicates, outside of I think it’s commerce cloud integration.
Integrating two different systems is hard modern CDPs have solved this problem. And I hear the comments now, what about Data Cloud. Sure maybe data cloud solves a lot of these problems but that adds even more cost to what is already the most expensive and complex solution available.
I’m not giving up on Salesforce but its time for me to stop thinking of it as the solution to every techincal problem I face and instead treat it as one of many tools in my toolbelt.