Shopify’s head of enterprise revenue and head of consumer goods for enterprise are also Salesforce veterans. The Canadian e-commerce platform has hired over a dozen account executives from Salesforce since 2021, and several engineering leaders.

Shopify has also hired some account executives with experience at Adobe and SAP, though at a lower rate.

While Shopify’s bread-and-butter has long been small and midsize businesses, it has made a concerted effort over the last 18 months to introduce more software solutions to win over larger merchants. It has enhanced Shopify Plus, a higher-tier subscription with more features, and launched Hydrogen, a more custom framework geared toward retailers with more complex needs.

During a 2023 appearance at NRF’s Big Show — one of the biggest conferences for large retailers — Shopify introduced Commerce Components, an offering that allows merchants to integrate parts of Shopify’s software into their existing tech stack. Mattel was its first retail partner for that product, and Everlane has since adopted Shop Pay as a stand-alone component.

A Shopify spokesperson said the company is “transforming enterprise commerce.”

“We’re giving the world’s largest and most complex businesses endless ways to build with the highest velocity across full stack, composable or headless,” they said. “The speed, performance, and optionality of our products, combined with the innovation and scale trusted by millions of businesses, has made Shopify the leading commerce solution for enterprises around the world.”

Shopify and Salesforce face off

As it moves further into enterprise, Shopify hasn’t always been subtle about zeroing in on Salesforce as a competitor. It recently launched a webpage comparing its platform with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, encouraging merchants to “join the mass migration” of brands moving from Salesforce to Shopify. The page cites a study from an unnamed “Big Three consulting firm” that found Shopify’s checkout converts 36% faster than Salesforce’s.

It also says that Shopify’s total cost of ownership is 35% better than Salesforce’s on average. Total cost of ownership, or TCO, is a term frequently used in enterprise software marketing materials to describe the all-in costs of purchasing and using a piece of technology.

Michael Affronti, senior vice president and general manager for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, said in an interview that Shopify’s assertion about TCO is like comparing “apples to oranges.” Most of Salesforce’s customers are multinational businesses with hundreds of sites, he said.

“As we’ve talked to our large enterprise customers, they are typically less concerned with the TCO as much as they are about how fast they are going to get a payback for it in terms of site speed improvement, conversion, et cetera,” Affronti said.

Salesforce’s own page comparing its product with Shopify’s says that its customers saw a 27% improvement in their return on investment and a 30% boost in employee productivity after implementing Salesforce.

A company spokesperson said that Salesforce also gets inquiries from Shopify merchants who want to make the switch because Shopify’s platform doesn’t have some advanced capabilities, like the ability to implement dynamic pricing based on state liquor laws, for example.

Affronti emphasized Salesforce’s reliability, saying that it saw 100% uptime across the platform during Cyber Week — or the stretch of time between Black Friday and Cyber Monday — for the second year in a row in 2023.

“We’ve spent a lot of time on our trust and reliability and security, and we’ve considered that a pretty big cornerstone of the platform,” he said. “It’s probably one of the biggest drivers for these large brands to bet their multinational commerce footprint on us.”

‘Not a muscle that Shopify has had to flex in the past’

Rick Watson, the CEO and founder of RMW Commerce Consulting, said it makes sense for Shopify to focus on taking market share from Salesforce. Both platforms are cloud-based and have app stores where merchants can find third-party software. They both charge merchants a percentage of sales, though the exact pricing approach differs.

Salesforce got into e-commerce through its $2.8 billion acquisition of Demandware in 2016.

“The type of customer that would choose Salesforce is also similar to the type of customer that has chosen Shopify,” Watson said. “What I think Shopify believes is that their platform is getting sophisticated enough that they can take other people who believe that cloud platforms are a fit for their business in the same way that Demandware originally did.”

But winning over enterprise retailers requires a different approach, and it’s one where Salesforce has more years of experience than Shopify.

When getting started with Shopify, small businesses typically either sign up for the platform themselves or work with an agency to get onboarded. Signing up an enterprise retailer, however, typically requires more steps and more time, often involving multiple C-suite executives to evaluate the differences between vendors and all of the potential costs involved. Using new software could also mean working with a system integrator like Accenture or EY — which helps large retailers compare offerings from different vendors — to boost adoption.

This work requires a larger team dedicated to enterprise businesses than Shopify has traditionally employed, who are doing the initial selling to large retailers and then continually following up to make sure their needs are being met.

“The thought process of buying new technology in an enterprise is far more in-depth” than, for example, an individual entrepreneur starting up a sneaker store, said Oppenheimer analyst Ken Wong. “That’s not a muscle that Shopify has had to flex in the past.”

Talking the enterprise talk

Poaching employees from Salesforce isn’t the only way Shopify has made an effort to win over enterprise customers. It’s also speaking the lingo of larger retailers, like TCO, and making sure it’s being highlighted in research reports that they follow, like Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and IDC MarketScape.

“They were never on those competitive analyses three years ago,” Wong said. “Now they are consistently mentioned.”

In January, Shopify announced a partnership with Mirakl that enables merchants to sell on larger marketplaces, as well as a partnership with Manhattan Associates to build out omnichannel capabilities for enterprise brands.

Shopify had a large presence at the retail conference Shoptalk in March, too. Ads at the conference described Shopify as “the future of enterprise commerce” and “the only platform focused on commerce,” in what some saw as a subtle dig at legacy providers like Salesforce and Adobe.

Shopify is currently hiring a CTO for its enterprise consumer goods team.

“As a trusted and credible representative, you will play a crucial role in addressing the needs of large customers considering a move to Shopify,” the job listing reads. “Your primary responsibility will be to provide technical expertise, build trust, and guide customers through the transition process, ensuring they have a clear understanding of the benefits and downstream effects of adopting Shopify.”

Shopify has said there is more innovation to come.

“Just as we developed a robust ecosystem for entrepreneurs and SMBs, these partnerships further underscore our strategic positioning as a key player in the enterprise sector across all facets of commerce,” president Harley Finkelstein said during Shopify’s fourth-quarter earnings in February.

“This is steadily paving more enterprise pathways towards Shopify and we plan to amplify our presence this year as we build on our momentum.”

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