[HN Gopher] Shopify Is Winning Salesforce Clients, Stoking E-Com...
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Shopify Is Winning Salesforce Clients, Stoking E-Commerce Rivalry
Author : mobilio
Score : 119 points
Date : 2024-10-29 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| mobilio wrote:
| And link: https://archive.is/diiM6
| prng2021 wrote:
| "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.
| bhouston wrote:
| 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...
| pwillia7 wrote:
| https://public-media.interaction-
| design.org/images/encyclope...
| dehrmann wrote:
| On the other end, some of the largest customers might bring
| more of the tooling in-house.
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| 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
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| 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.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| Are there any other companies which surprised you with
| their ubiquity?
| iamacyborg wrote:
| 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.
| youngtaff wrote:
| 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
| nusl wrote:
| 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.
| xyst wrote:
| 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.
| leetharris wrote:
| 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.
| ghusto wrote:
| > 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.
| billbrown wrote:
| 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.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > 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.
| rpncreator wrote:
| > 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...
| rawgabbit wrote:
| A third party offers a native Warehouse managed package.
| https://www.akatia.com/
| bearjaws wrote:
| 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...
| beAbU wrote:
| 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.
| xyst wrote:
| 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
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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 ;)
| lemonberry wrote:
| 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.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| 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.
| billbrown wrote:
| 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.)
| scrapcode wrote:
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| 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.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| 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.
| beAbU wrote:
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| 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.
| DowagerDave wrote:
| 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.
| DowagerDave wrote:
| 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.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| 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.
| shmatt wrote:
| 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
| scrapcode wrote:
| My experience with Salesforce outside of sales orgs are it is
| used as an overly complex, bug-ridden phpMyAdmin
| tarentel wrote:
| 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.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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?"
| FredPret wrote:
| "Bankruptcy imminent"
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| "Management"
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| 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.
| nicholasjarnold wrote:
| 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.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > 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.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| 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?
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| 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?)
| delfinom wrote:
| >"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.
| dboreham wrote:
| This thread might help me finally understand what exactly
| Salesforce does/sells.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| 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.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| 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
| rawgabbit wrote:
| I wished they bought Informatica but the deal fell through.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/salesforces-talks-
| buy-...
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| 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.)
| DowagerDave wrote:
| 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>
| inerte wrote:
| 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
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| 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.
| jeromegv wrote:
| > 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.
| rpncreator wrote:
| > 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.
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| To be fair, they bought Quip four years before Slack, so they
| haven't all been winners.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| ianhawes wrote:
| 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.
| billbrown wrote:
| 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_
| ethbr1 wrote:
| 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).
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| skipants wrote:
| 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.
| lesuorac wrote:
| 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.
| arwhatever wrote:
| Salesforce certainly doesn't compete by making themselves appear
| desirable to software engineers, with their circa 1997 Java-like
| dialect.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| 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?
| youngtaff wrote:
| Software developers don't really have money to buy services
| though... that's why Salesforce sell to higher levels of an org
| rubayeet wrote:
| 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.
| lesuorac wrote:
| 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.
| rubayeet wrote:
| 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.
| crowcroft wrote:
| 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.
| rubayeet wrote:
| 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.
| awad wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _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.
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