Shopify Is Winning Salesforce Clients, Stoking E-Commerce Rivalry | Hacker News Reader

Shopify Is Winning Salesforce Clients, Stoking E-Commerce Rivalry

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136 pointsmobilio92 comments

As a certified Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud Architect who has been out of a job for months, this alarmingly impacts me. Looks like I'm gonna need to replatform my skills to be relevant.

I've been working on the platform since it was called Demandware, and I've been on numerous implementations and sites while working for a partner/consulting firm. I was laid off in January. It seems that Salesforce is pushing a mircoservices architecture for e-commerce (headless SFCC) hard. Separate systems are used to support features that Commerce Cloud can do on its own, but isn't setup that way for reasons I've yet to fully comprehend. Perhaps its more scalable, but Commerce Cloud already allowed you to scale up and down the number of backend servers with load. Perhaps they sell the idea that deployments can happen separately, so that you can update your homepage without bringing along any partially complete backend features, but in my years of doing releases, that's never once been an issue. Page redesigns aren't as big of a headache anymore thanks to a page designer feature. My cynical side says Big Cloud wants to sell more so it can charge more.

I got a job during the summer that used such a microservices system (first time I've ever worked on one), but that job ultimately didn't work out for reasons that weren't entirely technical.

AMA, I guess.

When you say "SF is pushing a microservices architecture for e-commerce hard", I wonder if you mean they attempt to rope customers into buying into the Mulesoft ecosystem (most of which, btw, is old versions of Spring on old JVM under the hood). They now own Mulesoft, and there is an army of sales people whom are presumably really good at getting the execs excited for groundbreaking features like "API Governance", "API Gateway", "low-code" and my favorite "security".

A company I worked with suffered some serious setbacks after a lot of promises, many months and many many millions burned on this stuff. I'll be a happy man if I never have to hear about SAPI/BAPI/CRAPPI from ProServices people that don't even understand their own products let alone sound engineering principles again. I must admit that I wasn't directly involved with SF/Mulesoft impls, but I did suffer through many regrettable touch points with it.

> When you say "SF is pushing a microservices architecture for e-commerce hard", I wonder if you mean they attempt to rope customers into buying into the Mulesoft ecosystem

Yup, bingo!

Before I got laid off, I was working on... monolithic (for the lack of a better term) SFCC systems, never headless. The vast majority of the few SFCC job postings I've come across have been asking for Mulesoft experience, and that summer job also featured it, though I never worked directly on it, only the SFCC instances that sat behind it.

I've never worked with any Salesforce sales team prior to actually getting to work, and in fact, all of my work in the past 7-ish years (and most of it before) has been post-launch development and support.

EDIT: And when I started looking at what Mulesoft was, why, and how to use it, all I found was hype about APIs; nothing about why you would point web browsers at it for HTML. The documentation might as well have said it was a genie that made all your wishes come true.

This is the risk of a being a product expert. I've been through a few cycles. Transitioning can be done. You can also seek clients who are looking to migrate away from Demandware.

I have inadvertently made a name for myself inside Salesforce for migrating people off of it in short timeframes. My last meeting with them for a company, they asked if I was the same [Name] who worked with X, Y, and Z, all companies I moved from Salesforce. I actually got them to settle a contract for 50 cents on the dollar for early termination. There's a real market for people who will pay to move from SF to see huge savings. Being a Saleforce export would only help.

Curious what you see people are moving to. We migrated to SF from a super legacy piece of shit so it's been a big improvement but it's a beast for a company our size and wicked expensive.

It's usually either another CRM, like Nutshell, Sugar, Zoho, or a dozen other CRMs, or pointing out that what they built out Salesforce is another type of app all together, and direct them to a proper app for that market. The latter type tends to be ticket systems, document management ssytems, and in the case of one company they used it as an EMR. The EMR they used was open source but did very little. They liked the "free" aspect of it, but they were paying $400k/yr on Salesforce to do all the things their EMR didn't, as well as another app platform they were building out on. I pointed out they were spending $600k/yr on an EMR, not zero dollars. The COO pitched a HUGE fit but they did move to a $200k/yr EMR that did everything and they saved tremendous amounts of time in clinic, and money in administrator salaries.

If you want a batteries-included platform on which to quickly build CRUD apps, Salesforce is actually a very good choice so long as you're not at all worried about money.

> super legacy piece of shit

That's a very common nickname for Siebel.

What incentives lead companies to adopt heavyweight, vendor-specific platforms for core business functions... and then outsource all the operation and support of it?

I've seen this with a ton of Salesforce/adjacent platforms, and it's always confused me.

For something that critical, doesn't it make sense to have inhouse expertise?

For most companies, there are in-house people there who are trained on the vendor specific platform, and understand (at least at a high-level) how it works. When they want to make big changes, they start talking to their partners/outsourcing companies about it, so that they, themselves, won't have to hire more people just for this one project. (afterwards, what will they be doing?)

>“The reason most enterprise software is so expensive is because it takes so many steak dinners to put it in your hand,” Shopify Chief Operating Officer Kaz Nejatian said in an interview.

This is why.

"Lobbying" aka "business dinners" aka "kickbacks" and more.

I had the pleasure of leading a project of migration from an old commerce stack to Salesforce Open Commerce. Terrible experience filled with empty promises, non-existant features, and suggestions to write complex hacks to create features that were promised as already built into their product.

They are great at signing CIO/CTOs up, but come migration and operations time they were an empty box of promises

My experience with Salesforce outside of sales orgs are it is used as an overly complex, bug-ridden phpMyAdmin

I had to implement a salesforce SDK a while back. It half worked, a bunch of things were broken, and it was an overall bad experience. We hopped on a call with someone from salesforce who was perplexed by all the bugs. Their sales rep was able to help though. Apparently, everything was fixed and working in the new SDK which the company hadn't paid for.

Great company.

I had the same experience migrating to their CRM. Half of what they promised was technically possible, but oh, we actually need the next tier of licensing which was like 10x more per month than the licensing we were told would work. The other half, like you said, was hacky and "in development". It was an a absolute nightmare and made me look incompetent because I had to explain to my superiors that I was essentially lied to.

Is there a name for "when leadership makes an objectively terrible decision but then everyone has to put in double time making it a success ensuring leadership learns nothing?"

“Bankruptcy imminent”

"Management"

I hardly even understand what Salesforce does. I thought it was a sales lead/CRM software. I didn't even know it has an ecommerce function, and I've been surprised to see it pop up in non-sales spaces (ex. the CFPB complaint system).

Shopify is like the easiest software in the world to set up, looks really good and professional right out of the box, and has tons of integrations. It's rapidly taking over other product areas (ex the Shop Pay wallet across different Shopify tenants) but super easy to understand. It can be set up and used by a one-person non-technical business, but you also see it in larger stores with considerable revenue.

I don't see how anyone would ever wind up doing Salesforce unless they are large enough to do the whole RFP/bids thing that needs some kind of specialist to write and compete for.

> I hardly even understand what Salesforce does. I thought it was a sales lead/CRM software. I didn't even know it has an ecommerce function

Salesforce Commerce is an entirely different stack than Saleforce CRM. It's essentially DemandWare that was rebranded. It is the same parent company but think of it as a separate software entirely.

> and I've been surprised to see it pop up in non-sales spaces (ex. the CFPB complaint system).

Look at the billions Salesforce makes every year, they are in a lot of industries you might not have thought of.

> I didn't even know it has an ecommerce function

It has at least two (2) ecommerce functions (more if you count B2B Classic / CloudCraze)

1. Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2C - 2016 Demandware acquisition, somewhere in the spectrum of PaaS to SaaS, separate offering compared to the rest of the Salesforce platform. Customizations are done in ISML (JSP/JSTL/JSF-like) and an ECMAScript-like language in modern implementations (not going to cover SiteGenesis, Pipelines, and SiteGenesis Controllers for you old folks here). APIs are provided by the legacy OCAPI layer, and SCAPI layer, which has a thin Mulesoft API layer on top

2. Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2B/D2C - Salesforce-native platform (e.g. native Salesforce objects). Customizations done via Lightning (front-end) and Apex (Java-like language). More-or-less fully integrated into the Salesforce platform. More or less fully SaaS.

Demandware (and subsequently, SFCC) was one of the first ecommerce platforms to pioneer licensing a commerce platform based on revenue sharing (given the SaaS-like model), as opposed to legacy self-hosted platforms (ATG, Hybris, IBM WebSphere) which initially focused on licensing per seats or CPU.

I only understand Salesforce in that they purchase any successful company they can, and take what seems like 30 minutes of effort for each acquisition to integrate it with the rest of their businesses in a sensible, synergistic way.

The original Salesforce, people now call SFDC (Salesforce Dot Com) which as you know is a CRM but more broadly speaking, a database backend & a GUI, with a construction kit to let ~customers~ Salesforce Consultants model and build simple tooling for business processes of any kind.

They have snapped up various companies like ExactTarget (bulk email), Demandware (aka SFCC, probably what's being discussed here), Heroku, and Slack.

I assume the main synergy is just of the business kind. You can include Slack in a big overall Salesforce "deal" and have one big (steak dinners and alcohol-style) contract negotiation.

And honestly even though I teased above about the lack of integration or consistency (it took like 10 years for one to be able to even log into ET with Salesforce creds), I'm glad that they don't really do anything to their acquisitions to integrate them, since I have no desire to have any integration between say, Slack, and our bulk emailing platform, and anything like that would surely make Slack worse.

To be fair, they bought Quip four years before Slack, so they haven't all been winners.

My org decided rather suddenly to adopt Salesforce Marketing Cloud which sounded like a plausible decision until I found out it was ExactTarget and looked pretty much the same as it did in 2004 and also doesn't really integrate with Salesforce CRM in any useful way.

Is the steak dinner and alcohol-fueled (and I'll throw in golf) contract negotiation real? I keep hearing about it on HN comments but my experience with enterprise sales has been almost the complete opposite. Lots of meetings on Zoom and occasionally a drink at industry events.

The Salesforce account executives will definitely drop by before or around negotiations and take decision makers to dinner. They'll even host a Top Golf evening for the team, just to put faces with names. eyeroll

Oh yeah, although probably less steak now than used to be. But enterprise sales is always (and will forever be) sales.

Caveat: the further you get into non-tech, as a customer base, the more prevalent this is. On the tech side, there's at least a thin veneer of objectivity (often masking a quiet steak dinner, in which the actual solution was picked).

I heard it firsthand from my last company's head of digital marketing, who was the most key decision maker in that area there. These Salesforce sales guys, it seems, are able to spend lavishly on literal wining and dining, which is probably very effective in terms of getting them to win over other teams on why they should add on (insert SF service here) to increase deal size.

The last negotiation I was there for, for instance, in late 2021, the SF guys were pitching (hard) a product called "Salesforce Einstein" which was promised to be everything to everyone. I see they are now calling it "AI" which wasn't the main way they described it then before AI was such a hot buzzword. I think it was just branding for some kind of marketing workflow tooling, but to hear them tell it, it would do anything we could imagine.

I don’t know about sales force, but once you get high enough, vendors will spend tens of thousands on meals, tickets to conferences, etc to win you over and keep you.

The current place I work will call up Microsoft, databricks, or someone else and have them pay for a hackathon with ~100 participants including catered meals and dinners out for a week.

I sat next to one vendor, I saw the total bill for the dinner (30k). He didn’t flinch and slapped down his Amex

With every acquisition, Uncle Marc always has some grand, though nebulous integration vision to go with the announcement. But it never happens.

Mirroring what you're saying: I've worked with a company who has a "Salesforce Product Manager". A whole person dedicated to managing their Salesforce integration. I haven't used it myself, but seeing that role exists makes Salesforce sound both complicated and expensive.

IIUC, the big advantage of Salesforce is that it forces you to be in a singular ecosystem and that it's a re-org for data instead of people.

Most of the top 1000 e-commerce sites are built on Salesforce, but most of the rest are built on Shopify and it's a very long tail. Salesforce acquired Demandware which was strong at very custom requirements. As time goes on, the number of companies who need that level of customization is closer to 100 than 1000, so customers number 100-1000 is really what this is about.

Disclosure: worked at Shopify

A few months back, I was doing some scraping for e-commerce and absolutely shocked at the number of Shopify properties (easy to tell from robots, sitemap, or DNS).

I remember taking note of Shopify's stock price at the time and having a discussion with another member of the team. All I can say is I regret not investing.

I still run uMatrix, and with paranoid settings, you become very aware of who hosts the web. Yes, Shopify is a biggie in the space.

Are there any other companies which surprised you with their ubiquity?

Maybe not surprised, but Squarespace, Wix, Bigcommerce, AWS, Cloudflare.

Another lens to look at Shopify is through the publicly traded email marketing company Klaviyo, which tends to be the default email platform for smb’s.

They’ve basically built a $10bn business purely from serving shopify customers.

Yeh but Demandware is pretty awful software… the clients I work with who use it end up with front ends that are complicated and horrible under the hood

Reminds me of when WebSphere commerce was the thing and every site seemed to have been built from the same IBM base example

My very brief time working with the Salesforce tool, both as a user and integrating with its API, were honestly quite negative. It's massively complex and fiddly. I'd not be surprised if folks might want something relatively simpler for things that Salesforce is overkill. I think Salesforce is overkill for much of what it's used for simply because it's "the tool" to use.

Having also worked with Shopify quite a bit in my day job, it has its warts but is largely easier to grok.

Has anybody actually seen a fully integrated salesforce at big or small companies?

SF pitches their platform as essential tools for businesses and facilitating cross team collaboration/communication.

But in reality, I have only seen maybe 1-2 teams using a subset of their platform then using legacy equipment to manage other parts of their business and customer relationships.

SF seems more like a flex than an actual essential tool.

Yes I've seen it a couple of times and it is unbelievably expensive and always a mess. The amount of Salesforce consultants, Salesforce developers, plugins, tools, etc to keep it all stable is wild.

Still, there's a reason people keep using it. Salesforce is basically a pseudo ERP at this point.

> there's a reason people keep using it

I believe that reason is that they've figured out quality matters not at all when you're pitching to C-levels.

Sunk cost fallacy: they've spent so much money on it already, they have to keep using it or that was a waste.

Salesforce's view of this: lock-in.

> Salesforce is basically a pseudo ERP at this point.

Wait, is that not what Salesforce is? I thought it was supposed to be a more modern SAP alternative with "cloudy" vibes.

> Salesforce is basically a pseudo ERP at this point.

Not quite there just yet.

Salesforce has commerce, OMS, CPQ, reporting (Tableau). Just missing the WMS (warehouse management system) and I think we should be there…

A third party offers a native Warehouse managed package. https://www.akatia.com/

And a lot of companies have built their own on Salesforce.

I've only seen Salesforce grow like a cancer in your org.

We were acquired and forced to integrate Salesforce into our product onboarding and user management.

They ended up having to hire a dev just for this project, it still wasn't done after 2 years. I left shortly after the "MVP" was launched.

Early on I wondered how our new parent company ended up with 8 Salesforce devs... and boy did I learn how.

8 devs was an entire team in my mind, our Epic + Cerner EHR team was 6 people working on significantly more complicated items...

My experience is that it's a very very expensive hammer, and suddenly everything in the org becomes a nail.

Somewhere a higher-up decides SF is the way to go, and then it's use and implementation is mandated for everyone in the org. They need to justify that cost somehow.

I worked on a small side-project for a major South African bank recently, and they closed a MASSIVE deal with SF a couple of years back. At some point we wanted to employ a customer support desk, because we had a legit need for it. In 30 minutes I had FreshDesk set up and running and working, with custom email domains and a ticketing system and everything. A week later it was shut down because we were not allowed to use anything but SF. It's been 2 years, and the salesforce replacement system is still not live, and the team's forced to support customer directly over the phone or email.

Sunk cost fallacy :).

Then when the SF contract isn’t renewed, you get to spend another 2-3 years ripping it out, migrating out data, re-writing contracts with other vendors.

Future work is guaranteed

My day job is architecting and leading very large Salesforce implementations (thousands of users). I have seen clients run their entire customer service, from portal self serve to call centers, on it in a fully integrated way.

Some of my more memorable projects were standing up very large front-end and backend process for US state governments during the pandemic. When you heard “contact tracing” a LOT of that was done on SF. I did entire fully integrated vaccine information management systems on Salesforce because legacy systems couldn’t adapt to the specifics of the COVID vaccine in time. I think back on it fondly but hope I never have to work like that again.

For small companies Salesforce is just too expensive both in terms of licensing and implementation to be worth it.

/pretty sure I got Dr. Mandy Cohen her job at the CDC ;)

I built a website for a small nonprofit last year. They were using MailChimp for their newsletter and something else for lead management. Some board members insisted that since their companies used Salesforce this non-profit should too. They even donated the $20,000 to pay for it. The nonprofit has a lot of turnover - terrible leadership - and no one knows how to use it. Terrible decision for this organization even when "free". I spent some time trying to help them, but it's clearly a platform that you need to specialize in.

On another note, during the pandemic I built a vaccine signup website for a small hospital in Maine. It was really basic, but the amount of traffic it received and the sense of urgency we felt were overwhelming. Wild times.

I am in the same boat as you. At our company only the sales team uses Salesforce. The support team uses Oracle Service Cloud, the development and product teams use JIRA, and operations uses Redmine.

Quite the cluster we have going on.

Who is the happiest out of those groups?

I am a long term redmine user not even using source code version control features or e-mail integration. One org adopted a supported fork with an updated UI.

I haven’t found anything that can replace redmine for me, and the 16 year old UI is a bonus at this stage it is so functional without any gimmicks

I was laid off from a company that spent two and a half years transitioning to Salesforce (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Experience Cloud, Scheduler, 600+ seats) and decided to re-platform to Shopify plus a constellation—like 14 in total—of supporting startups to serve the various needs that Salesforce fulfilled. I was the tech lead and architect of the Salesforce move so I was intimately involved in every use by various teams.

I entered the move skeptical of Salesforce's value; I left impressed with the flexibility of the platform but aghast at the costs and development effort required to do much of anything. (I was also disgusted by the rough edges of its myriad acquisitions and their partial integration into the ecosystem—even after many years.)

I honestly still don't even understand what Salesforce is.

I have never worked in eCommerce, yet still keep running into areas of the orgs I've worked for that use it's plugin ecosystem to try and accomplish... things- things which usually have nothing to do with sales.

Salesforce is the technical backing of the middle manager layer. The lemmings feed it data and neighboring software feeds it data so that middle managers can make fancy reports and presentations about how all the lines are going up that everyone forgets immediately as soon as they leave the room.

I'm sure it has some actual legitimate functions too but they're so utterly lost in a deluge of MBA bullshit that I don't think it's remotely worth the price. We don't have one where I work. We run a pieces-parts setup of custom apps alongside ancient code in our website, and it definitely has issues and we are addressing, but the CEO has no desire to buy anything like Salesforce. He calls it "data noise:" it looks like data and it looks important but it doesn't mean shit.

Hm, I think it’s slightly more useful than that.

Imagine a company that is driven by actual salespeople — like car dealerships, or any telemarketing or charity operation — where someone is making phone calls and trying to make sales.

Salesforce is their CRM, a Customer Relation Manager. You can get a complete history of an individual and their buying history within your company.

I worked for a travel-adjacent company a couple years ago, the entire thing was predicated on a half-dozen sales reps making handfuls of deals worth $50k+ each. Nothing like e-commerce. Salesforce was their Rolodex and their beating heart.

That said, it isn't a good CRM. It's nineties tech that became very essential to very very big companies. Someone else here described it as akin to PhpMyAdmin and he absolutely nailed it.

I think Salesforce is likely to be worth more someday for their Slack acquisition, not unlike how Meta is worth more for Instagram than Facebook.

Salesforce is not sold as a CRM though, and that's the problem. They position themselves as the do-everything-you-can-dream-of engine for your business' IT transformation. It's like it's rule 34 of the business word: If you can think of it, Salesforce has a checkbox on a powerpoint somewhere about it.

What this results in is that upper management sees all the features and capabilities in a flashy sales pitch, they close a deal with Salesforce (probably after some less-than-noble negotiation tactics deployed by SF salespeople), and then the mandate comes from the top: "We must implement Salesforce!" And all the tech people look awkwardly at each other not having the faintest fucking clue what that even means.

And this is just my experience but like: every single product I have ever used, from anything, that claims to be the "do anything!" solution, always, always, always is shit.

It seems to be a hard and fast rule of the universe that the more things your thing is designed to do, the worse it does all of those constituent things.

maybe a counter-example? Zoho doesn't have one product that does everything but does seem to have A product for everything. None of them are fantastic, but many are decent or good enough, and they are cheap. I've been pleasantly surprised with the experience, as I thought it would be similar to the GoDaddy or AWS perpetual dark-pattern upsell.

I've worked in Ecommerce, but SF was not a concern, especially compared to how big a deal Shopify was for us. Now In EdTech we need to interface with SF for the bigger clients and it is a wild, painful ride. They have their own tooling/language/architecture for EVERYTHING. Oh, and good luck doing SF development locally. To (mis)quote Homer Simpson, there's the right way, the wrong way and the Salesforce way - which is the wrong way but way slower and more complex.

Where I work, Salesforce is the ERP and also powers a lot of our front end.

Its core strength (if you don't fall for all their salesy mumbo jumbo magical mystery tour weasel words) is that "native applications" require zero integrations/configurations. They "just work".

Salesforce is the CRM. It is the source of truth for our customers, orders, vendors. It is also the service (help desk agents use their VOIP to help customers and transcripts are automatically logged). It does the marketing. It also does our financials. It also integrates with our survey SaaS.

It also powers a lot of front end because our front end stack sucks. We use SOSL to power our front end search. It also creates micro-sites that our front end points to.

They also have an ecosystem of third-party apps that "just works".

With all that said. It is very expensive. Mulesoft is horrible. I wish they tone-down the salesy bullshit; they don't need the Microsoft-Azure level of bullshit -- Salesforce actually works.

I've only seen it used as a side tool for some specific stuff and never as anything business critical (that I could see anyway).

I have, and I've helped several companies move away from it with no negative impact on business and a HUGE savings. But in a lot it's a flex, a demand from an exec or board member who wants to tell people they're on Salesforce. Seriously. I had one COO tell me, "but then I can't tell [prospective acquisitions] we're on Salesforce." I said, "true, but they don't care about that, they're seemly impressed because it's expensive, not because they think it's the best tool. You could save that money as profit." He blinked and the conversation was over.

“Salesforce will still appeal to big businesses with annual sales of $300 million or more since it has more sophisticated tools”

I question how much Salesforce cares about these smaller businesses. They might have let Shopify take this segment of the market to focus on bigger companies.

This is the classic disruption strategy though. Each time Salesforce may be like, yeah I can retreat from that territory, it wasn't that profitable anyhow compared to what I will keep. But in disruptive strategies, this repeats over and over again, until there is no territory left that is safe.

<quote>

Incumbent businesses innovate and develop their products or services in order to appeal to their most demanding and/or profitable customers, ignoring the needs of those downmarket.

Entrants target this ignored market segment and gain traction by meeting their needs at a reduced cost compared to what is offered by the incumbent.

Incumbents don’t respond to the new entrant, continuing to focus on their more profitable segments.

Entrants eventually move upmarket by offering solutions that appeal to the incumbent’s “mainstream” customers.

Once the new entrant has begun to attract the incumbent business’s mainstream customers en masse, disruption has occurred.

</quote>

https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/4-keys-to-understanding-cla...

https://public-media.interaction-design.org/images/encyclope...

On the other end, some of the largest customers might bring more of the tooling in-house.

Former Shopify employee here. The company loves narratives like this where there is an enemy and there is a cause to unite the team behind it to battle with the said enemy. In my time there, the enemy was Amazon, and the cause was “we are arming the rebels against the Empire”. The had ambitions plans to fight Amazon at their terrain (shipping and logistics), made significant acquisitions (Deliverr, 6 River Systems). But at the end they had to shut down those divisions. In my last year at that company, I noticed the mission moving away from “mom and pop businesses” and towards enterprise. To me this fills like yet another narrative engineering by the execs to sustain the significant growth they have seen in the stock valuation.

Heh, everybody loves to be an army fighting against evil so like as it doesn't involve any actual army or fighting concepts like bullets and blood.

Yes, except Shopify is very intentional about us vs them narratives like this. The CEO is an avid consumer of Video games / SciFi / Nerd culture, and the leadership finds ways to inject these themes into the mission statements.

Curious if your experience of this is good or bad?

Setting up a clear us vs. them mission at least makes it clear across the company what you should be focussing on.

My experience at bigcos is that the mission is some hand wavey 'we exist to make life better for our customers' statement, and no one ever could agree on what that meant.

Neither good or bad to me. Mission is important some people, I have been in the industry long enough to realize companies will change their mission if the business is no longer viable / profitable, so I have taught myself to be indifferent to it. As long as I am working with smart and easy to work with people, on a business that is legal / ethical, I’m good.

That's funny, as Salesforce used a similar tactic when they first started with their 'End of Software' campaign against Siebel. Benioff himself detailed this strategy in Behind the Cloud, where he suggests, 'Always Go After Goliath.'

Tobi Lütke doesn't do these kinds of things just because he likes games and nerdy stuff or because he just wants his stock to go up (who doesn't).

And link: https://archive.is/diiM6

This thread might help me finally understand what exactly Salesforce does/sells.

Haha. I kinda hoped that too but am still left wondering. I know back 20 years ago it was a CRM. I worked for at least one company who spent years and millions trying to replace their homegrown CRM with Salesforce. I know it can support customer help desk things too and even has a knowledge base feature.

I’m sure somewhere somehow it can probably do a bunch of other “enterprise” things and somebody somewhere is probably using it for their general ledger or doing payroll through it somehow… but I have no idea if that is true.

Salesforce has been on a buying spree over the last 10 years.[0] Not only do they have have that CRM, they bought ExactTarget, an email marketing system, now Marketing Cloud. They bought Demandware and CloudCraze for their B2C and B2B storefront platforms. And don't forget Chat Cloud, I mean, Slack.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce#Acquisitions

I wished they bought Informatica but the deal fell through.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/salesforces-talks-buy-...

As a former vendor working with customers across the e-commerce spectrum, Shopify were certainly the best to work with from both a technology integration and ease of use standpoint. They're a rare example of a company that started very self service and remained that way while growing to significantly more complex client bases so has a wide appeal. Working with them was generally a treat.

Demandware weren't strictly speaking the worst to work with, but it was certainly better days when they were an independent organization vs part of the Salesforce behemoth. There's just a lot more red tape slowing everything down, which I think carries over to the customer experience....things take days/weeks/months in SFCC land that can be done in minutes/hours/days in Shopify land.

All that is to say I'm not at all surprised by the headline, that I'd be long Shopify as an investor, and I'd seriously look at them first as a developer if I were building in the e-commerce space.

> They're a rare example of a company that started very self service and remained that way while growing to significantly more complex client bases

From my experience, anything with a self-serve option tends to be a better product.

It sets up all sorts of incentives (Have functioning support! Fix bugs! Have accurate documentation! Build understandable features!) that disappear when you remove "have to support self serve customers" from the equation.

Then all those nice things disappear into a morass of professional services custom implementations and big customer feature chasing.

Salesforce certainly doesn't compete by making themselves appear desirable to software engineers, with their circa 1997 Java-like dialect.

When I just spent years and thousands of dollars for a software programming degree and their slogan is "No software", why would I bother wasting time applying to work for them?

Pretty good comp with (until the last year or so), unbeatable WLB.

Software developers don’t really have money to buy services though… that’s why Salesforce sell to higher levels of an org

Given quality of shopify platform and quality fo their support, Salesforce has nothing to worry about.

In case it isn’t obvious:

You pay a salesforce architect (like the ones in this thread) thousands of dollars per day and not get jack shit in return for years.

Or you can DIY one of these small shopify sites, grow from a small business to a large business, and be one of these success stories that Shopify is attracting.

(nb. Shopify already covered some of this in various podcasts awhile ago, so Bloomberg as usual is asleep at the wheel.)

I would describe Shopify, even with it's huge ecosystem, as laser-focused in this area, when compared to Salesforce. Thinking of using SF for your enterprise ecommerce solution? Why not go with the agile, startup competition, SAP? </s>

You're right, but the article is mostly focusing on already big companies switching from Salesforce to Shopify.

foonote: I used to work for Shopify 1.5 years ago

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