In the modern day economy, it is necessary for most businesses to be able to interact with, appeal to, and sell to their customers online. This is because ecommerce is an ever-expanding marketplace that is becoming more and more important every year. The result of the growing digital economy is that companies who are not optimized for ecommerce and online sales can quickly fall behind their competitors who are.
Both Magento and Salesforce are companies who offer products that can help businesses enhance the digital side of their operations. Magento and Salesforce can both be extremely useful for businesses, and they both have some strong similarities but there are also some major differences. Here is a look at some of the key similarities and differences between Magento and Salesforce.
Similarities
Magento and Salesforce both offer sophisticated software solutions that allow businesses to dramatically increase the effectiveness of their online interactions with clients and customers while both relying on cloud technology for data storage. The products offered by Magento and Salesforce can both help businesses to upgrade substantially if they are using more basic ecommerce or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions.
Essentially, both Magento and Salesforce can help businesses reach a much higher level of professionalism and effectiveness when it comes to handling online customers. They are both robust U.S.-based solutions that offer training, custom quotes, and receive high praise from the various industries that employ either solution.
Differences
The most significant difference between Magento and Salesforce is that Magento is, at its core, an ecommerce platform. Salesforce, on the other hand, is primarily a CRM platform. They fundamentally specialize in two different things, meaning your experience may vary depending on your reasons for choosing one or the other.
Magento focuses on allowing you to create an ecommerce site or enhance the look, feel, functionality, and user interface of your existing one. Salesforce focuses on helping you cultivate the best possible relationships with your customers with tools to manage clients, funnels, and more.
Salesforce does have an ecommerce option called Salesforce Commerce Cloud. However, this offering is nowhere near as strong or as robust in the ecommerce platform niche as Magento. In fact, whereas over 160,000 ecommerce sites use Magento, only 1,886 use Salesforce Commerce Cloud. However, over 150,000 use Salesforce across the board. This is because Salesforce has many useful products, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Analytics Cloud.
Magento and Salesforce also greatly differ when it comes to the primary features of their products. Here is a list of some of the top features of Magento:
- Quick checkout option
- Multilingual and multicurrency support
- Cross-browser support
- Specialized for ecommerce
- SEO optimized
- Magento app development
- Catalogue management
- Mobile friendly commerce
- Shipping and payment options
- Full Site Management
Some of the top features of Salesforce are:
- Chatter
- Moble Salesforce options
- Branded email templates
- Email syncing
- Dashboards
- Appexchange
- Web to lead
- Salesforce for Microsoft Outlook
Selecting between the two
Both Salesforce and Magento have the potential to help your company enormously. However, many companies find themselves in the position of having to make a decision between the two software options. If your company is in this position, then there are several things that you should ask yourself before you make the decision:
“Is our current ecommerce site working well?”
If your answer to this question is “no,” then Magento may be the better choice for you. This is because if your current ecommerce site is not working well, it may be necessary for you to create a new one, or to upgrade the style, designs, content, or other features of your site to make it more compelling to your audience. Magento can help you do all of these things, and it makes SEO, or search engine optimization, very simple. SEO is crucial for helping your ecommerce site rank high on search engine sites and draw in the most amount of viewers. If your site is working well, then it may be more important for your company to implement the Salesforce software. If your site is driving in consistent sales, then strengthening your customer relationships through a CRM like Salesforce may be the higher priority.
“Is it easy for us to cultivate strong relationships with our customers?”
If you know that it is easy for your business to grow strong relationships with your customers without the assistance of a CRM, then it may not be highly important that you implement CRM software, such as Salesforce. Instead, enhancing the quality of your ecommerce site might be the higher priority. If this is the case, then it may be wise for your company to choose to implement Magento. You can use Magento to increase the effectiveness and simplicity of your shopping cart, your purchase options, your shipping choices, your currency support, etc.
“Could our company benefit from both?”
There are many companies who can actually benefit by implementing both Magento and Salesforce. Such companies typically have a need to both boost their ecommerce sites and to improve their relationships with their customers. Many of the companies who choose to implement both software solutions experience increased sales and improved customer service as a result. Before you make your final decision, you should first evaluate whether or not your company can benefit from both Magento and Salesforce.
Conclusion
Considering the fact that global ecommerce sales are projected to surpass $4 trillion in 2020, ecommerce is a trend that businesses cannot afford to ignore. One of the best ways businesses can capitalize on the growing use of ecommerce is by implementing Magento software and building a fully optimized ecommerce site. The Magento software can help turn a mediocre site into one that has excellent functionality, a great user interface, SEO optimization, and a great design.
The Salesforce software can also be highly beneficial for businesses in that it can help gain insight into their customer bases, understand and anticipate problems, and to communicate effectively with their customers. CRMs help with companies that require a longer sales cycle or those that need to qualify customers throughout the process.
About the Author: Uwe Weinkauf is the CEO of MW2 Consulting, experts in Enterprise Application Development, eCommerce, IT Outsourcing, and IT Operations that deliver valuable solutions for global business needs.