The best e-commerce platform for enterprise retailers with several brands

Salesforce lists 100 sites and 3,500 price books on the Plus edition of B2C Commerce, and its product page says catalogs, price books and promotions can each be shared across sites or kept specific to one. Those two facts make Salesforce Commerce Cloud our pick for an enterprise retailer with several brands that wants merchandising shared across them. The pick holds when your brands fit as sites in the customer environment Salesforce proposes.

Shopify writes each Plus contract for a single brand, so it is the better pick for one brand expanding into regional stores under a published entry fee. commercetools defines a Store as a data and access context that can represent a brand, a region or a physical location, and that suits a retailer whose engineers will build the storefronts on its APIs.

What should a retailer with several brands weigh in an e-commerce platform?

A Salesforce merchant typically uses a single environment for multiple sites with different brandings or locales, the company's Trailhead architecture unit says, and merchants with multiple lines of business or separate global teams often use multiple environments. An environment, a site, a brand and a contract are different units, and the edition allowance is stated in sites. Shopify and commercetools count differently again, by a brand's contract with its stores and by Store objects inside a Project. So give each vendor the same list of brands and regions, and have the proposal state how many of its own units that list consumes.

Stores on Shopify Plus keep their own data, and products, collections, inventory and settings do not synchronize between them by default, Shopify's expansion-store help page says. Third-party apps or an ERP system can synchronize some of that data. commercetools documents that one Product Selection can be assigned to several Stores and that a Store can draw on up to 100 selections. Have each vendor demonstrate how a change to a catalog, a price or a promotion reaches the sites or stores it proposes for your brands.

Each Shopify Plus store beyond the included set costs $300 a month, or a revenue share across stores applies, Shopify's pricing page says. Salesforce's pricing page sends the price of every B2C Commerce edition to sales, and commercetools describes an order-based model that sales quotes. Compare the three as proposals for the same portfolio over the same term, and have each quote name what it includes and what it charges separately.

commercetools publishes a standard SLA that sets minimum availability at 99.9%, measured at the API around the clock over a month defined as 30 days, with fee credits as the remedy. That is a contract term with a definition, which is a different kind of evidence from a vendor's load-test figure or an uptime statistic on a marketing page. Ask each vendor to run the load you expect on your own catalog and checkout, and read the agreement it proposes for how availability is measured and what credit applies when it falls short.

Salesforce commissioned the Forrester Total Economic Impact study of B2C Commerce and Order Management, which interviewed five US retailers and modeled a composite retailer. Shopify commissioned its total cost of ownership study from a consulting firm, and commercetools offers a TCO framework it co-authored with Deloitte Digital. Each vendor paid for or helped write its own cost evidence, and the methods differ, so none of it ranks the three platforms for a group with several brands.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify Plus and commercetools compared

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: shared catalogs, price books and promotions across many sites

B2C Commerce comes in Growth, Plus and Premium editions, and Salesforce's pricing page puts Growth at 5 sites and 10 price books. Plus and Premium carry the larger allowance, and Premium adds full order management. Ask Salesforce to quote the edition and site allowance that fit the architecture it proposes for your brands.

Salesforce's B2C Commerce product page lists price books, promotions, carts, catalogs and content libraries among the objects a merchant defines as shared or site-specific, and it says all sites and locales are managed from one interface, Business Manager. The Trailhead unit adds that sites can share a product catalog or have different catalogs, and that the staging instance is where merchants prepare catalogs, price books and promotions and preview storefronts. That design lets a group keep one catalog for products several brands carry, and each brand's site can hold its own price book and promotions.

MillerKnoll is a collective of brands that includes Herman Miller and Design Within Reach, and Salesforce's customer story says it rebuilt the digital storefronts of both on B2C Commerce. The same story describes a Herman Miller Professional storefront on B2B Commerce, which Salesforce sells as a separate product.

The Forrester study Salesforce commissioned says in its disclosures that it is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis. Its composite pays a license bill sized to that composite's online sales, so read the study as an account of what its interviewees reported and ask Salesforce to quote the sites you plan to run.

Shopify Plus: a published entry fee for one brand and its regional stores

Shopify's Plus pricing page starts the plan at $2,300 a month on a three-year term or $2,500 a month on a one-year term for standard setups and integrations, and that fee covers a main store plus nine expansion stores. More complex, higher-volume businesses move to a platform fee based on revenue and business model, with details from Shopify's sales team.

An expansion store has to use the main brand's name and branding and sell the same types of goods, Shopify's expansion-store help page says. Billing is in US dollars or Indian rupees, and the selling currency can differ, so a store in the included set can sell in another region's currency. A store that does not qualify, such as one for a second brand, can be discussed with Shopify under a multi-brand agreement, and each brand still needs its own Plus subscription. Each store also needs its own theme license, and app charges apply per store.

Shopify reports a load-tested checkout of more than 10,000 checkouts a minute on its Plus page. That figure comes from Shopify's own test, so ask for the uptime terms written into the agreement Shopify offers you.

Escalade Sports used Shopify Plus with third-party tools and custom integrations to bring 11 of its brands onto the platform across 11 sites, each with its own design, Shopify's case study says. Shopify's cost study reports averages from a survey of enterprises in the United States and Canada, and its TCO page makes no representation that a merchant will see the calculator's results.

commercetools: Store contexts and API storefronts for an engineering team

A commercetools Store can restrict which of a Project's resources are available in that context, and API clients can be limited to Store-specific scopes, the Stores documentation says. The storefront a shopper sees is built separately and calls the APIs with the right Store context, which is why this route suits a retailer with its own engineers.

Product Selections shape the catalog each Store shows, and when a Store has none assigned, every Product in the Project is available to it. Prices are either embedded in a product variant or kept as Standalone Prices, and the pricing documentation scopes them by currency, country, customer group, channel and date. The B2C Commerce offering includes Product Discounts, Cart Discounts and Discount Codes, and the Stores documentation covers Store-scoped methods for the last two.

The standard SLA covers API access to the commerce service and the retrieval of application data at the point where traffic leaves the data center. Its scope excludes planned servicing, test and development Projects and named services that include Frontend Studio, so read it as a backend term and ask how the storefront layer you build is covered.

APG & Co., an Australian fashion group, replatformed its Sportscraft, SABA and JAG brands on commercetools Composable Commerce with commercetools Frontend, the vendor's customer story says, and the story's PDF names Overdose as the implementation partner. The paper commercetools wrote with Deloitte Digital is a framework for counting cost across a platform's life.

Which e-commerce platform should an enterprise retailer with several brands choose?

We crown Salesforce Commerce Cloud for an enterprise retailer with several brands, on the condition that those brands can run as sites in the environment arrangement Salesforce proposes. The Plus allowance leaves room for brand and regional sites, and merchandisers decide object by object whether a catalog, a price book or a promotion is shared or belongs to one site. For a retailer whose first requirement is shared merchandising, we weigh those documented controls above a published fee.

Salesforce quotes its license through sales, and sites in different environments share catalog data by import. Shopify prints its entry terms, and commercetools lets engineers scope each Store's data inside one Project. If your brands need separate environments, or you have to fix a budget before any sales call, those two points move up your list. For a group whose brands fit the proposed environment, we weigh them below the shared controls, and the quote should name the brands, sites and environments it covers and what they share.

Choose Shopify Plus when you run one brand and the growth ahead is regional stores that carry the same name and goods. Its entry terms are public, and the included expansion stores cover that growth before any extra-store fee applies.

commercetools is the better pick when your own engineering team will build the storefronts and wants to set in configuration which products, prices and discounts each brand's Store sees. Its published standard SLA lets you read the availability definition before a sales conversation.

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