In the ever-evolving landscape of online commerce, selecting the right eCommerce platform can significantly impact the success of your business. Two prominent contenders in this competitive arena are Shopify and commercebuild. Both platforms offer a myriad of features designed to help entrepreneurs and enterprises establish, manage, and grow their online stores. Yet, the choice between these eCommerce giants is far from a one-size-fits-all decision.
In this comprehensive comparison, we delve into the core strengths, unique offerings, and distinct characteristics of Shopify and commercebuild. From user-friendliness and customization options to security, and support, we explore every facet that matters to businesses seeking a robust online presence. By examining these eCommerce solutions, we aim to empower you with the knowledge needed to make an informed choice tailored to your specific needs.
Join us as we navigate the intricate world of eCommerce, dissecting the features, benefits, and drawbacks of Shopify and commercebuild. By the end of this exploration, you’ll be equipped with the insights necessary to embark on your online business journey confidently. Let’s unravel the nuances of these platforms and pave the way for your eCommerce success.
Quick commercebuild vs Shopify: Competitor Overview
Trying to decide if commercebuild or Shopify is the ideal solution for your eCommerce store? Quickly compare commercebuild to Shopify and Shopify Plus with this overview:
| Shopify | Shopify Plus | commercebuild | |
| Sage ERP Integration | Connector | Connector | Fully Integrated |
| Business Central ERP Integration | Limited Integration | Limited Integration | Fully Integrated |
| Pricing | $39 – $399 mo USD | $2,500 mo USD up to $431,034 sales, then 0.58%mo on all sales | $775 – $2,500 mo USD |
| Payment Begins | At Sign Up | At Sign Up | At Kickoff |
| Agreement Length | Monthly | 1 year minimum | Monthly |
| Customers | 0 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| B2C | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| B2B | No | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-Language | 0 – 5 | 0 – 20 | Unlimited |
| Multi-Currency | Yes | Yes | Any currency supported by your ERP |
| Multi-Warehouse | Limited | Limited | Unlimited |
| ERP Pricing Rules | No | Limited | Yes |
| Sales Rep Account Impersonation | No | No | Yes |
| Local Pick-Up/Delivery | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Credit Card Fees | 2.9% (+ $0.30) – 2.4%USD/per transaction | 0.15 % – 0.30% (+ $0.30) USD/per transaction | Fees are charged by the selected gateway/merchant, commercebuild does not charge any credit card fees |
| ERP Integrated | No | Limited | Automated |
| Tax Automation | No | Yes | Yes |
| Customizations | Limited | Limited | Flexible |
| Customer Support | Limited | Basic | Advanced |
| Customer Portal | Basic | Basic | Advanced |
| In-House Implementation and Design | No | Limited | Yes |
Ease of Use
When investing in an eCommerce platform, it’s important that it offers a great user experience, not just on the front-end for consumers, but also on the backend for you and your eCom team.
Shopify
Shopify is known for being very user-friendly, with drag-and-drop functionality making customization easy, with an effortless setup process. It should be noted though, that for every additional functionality that needs to be added to the website after the initial build comes with a price tag. This costing structure can end up being rather expensive as the business grows and expands.
commercebuild
commercebuild offers a webstore that is quick to deploy and easy-to-use, with all the functionality you need right out-of-the-box. This makes it a great option for beginners wanting to break into the eCommerce space, as well as big businesses looking for an eCommerce solution that can scale with them. In the long run, commercebuild offers a more cost-effective option out-of-the-box, however, if you want additional functionality added to your webstore at a later stage, it will come with an additional cost.
Customization and Design
Customization and design is an important factor to consider when assessing which eCommerce platform will provide a better solution for your business. The ability to create a unique look, feel and user-experience for your online space will provide the freedom to grow your eCommerce business without restriction.
Shopify
Shopify is a well-established company that has been around for many years, so the number of themes and templates available are almost endless. You can even head over to Etsy or other online marketplaces and find themes for Shopify created by third-party designers.
These themes can also be customized further using Liquid (Shopify’s own templating language), HTML, and CSS.
commercebuild
commercebuild has also been around for many years and has many responsive templates and layouts to choose from, all of which can be modified using commercebuild’s intuitive webstore admin tools, as well as JS and CSS. These can also be used to embed third-party apps and add-ons.
Catalog Management
Catalog management acts as the backbone of your eCommerce success, providing product visibility, driving digital sales, and improving customer experience.
Shopify
Users with Shopify Plus can organize products into collections and share collections between different channels. However, the lack of flexibility makes this a less than ideal solution for large catalogs of over 1,000 SKUs.
commercebuild
commercebuild allows you to categorize items up to 5 levels deep, and add powerful product filtering for a truly flexible user experience. You’ll also have the functionality to import items to categories or sync to ERP category assignments, which is useful for both small and large categories.
Inventory Availability
Inventory availability is a pivotal part of running an eCommerce store. Visibility of inventory availability across multiple locations is a great feature that can maximize sales, and provide the user the answers they need 24/7.
Shopify
Shopify Plus users have access to a simplified inventory management system. You will be able to run reports and identify stock patterns, however this functionality is not flexible. Inventory availability is synchronized with the ERP only via scheduled data imports. Min and Max order quantities are limited and not controlled by the ERP
commercebuild
commercebuild automatically synchronizes multi-location inventory quantity and status from your ERP system, eliminating the need to manage inventory online. You can create custom webstore fields to augment display of product attributes, control access to items by customer, and even require web users to enter a valid security code for sensitive items. You’ll also be able to set a minimum and maximum on order quantities and map custom fields to ERP fields, and transform data, providing you with a robust inventory management solution.
On our Enterprise package, customers can also build a unique item from a series of SKUs on a single page in a configurator. Take a bike for example, we can associate several items (frame, wheels, hubs) and force a customer to add each of those items to a cart. Additionally, we can include optional add-ons easily within the product configuration.
Shipping
Shipping plays an important role in buyer satisfaction. While you may believe your interaction with customers ends when a product has been purchased, the truth is that a purchase is just the beginning. In order to make a customer happy, their purchase needs to be delivered in a timely manner, with updates provided regularly about the shipping process.
Shopify
Shopify Plus users are privy to discounted rates for USPS, UPS, and DHL. Shipping information is automatically generated and advanced shipping rules can be set up for different products and locations.
commercebuild
commercebuild allows users to order products for delivery or pick-up, from multiple locations, and comes out-of-the-box with a powerful built-in shipping calculator plus integration to popular carriers including FedEx, UPS, USPS, Canada Post, Purolator, and LTL services, just to name a few.
commercebuild’s Enterprise package also allows for backordering of items currently out of stock thus allowing customers to place an order beyond what is available in stock. Orders can be split, allowing users to see what has been shipped, and what is backordered.
Customers can access their order history online so can easily place repeat purchases at any time.
Price Lists & Discounts
eCommerce stores should provide accurate, up-to-date and personalized pricing and discounting in order to increase sales.
Shopify
Shopify makes use of built-in price lists, but allows eCommerce stores to implement percentage discounts and volume-based discounts to those making bulk purchases.
commercebuild
commercebuild utilizes pricing and discounting data and logic from your ERP system, eliminating the need to manage pricing manually. You can optionally augment with online promotions providing targeted $ and % discounts to select groups of webstore users. This flexibility to provide custom promotions and discounts gives you greater freedom to satisfy your online users.
Product Search
Having an effective search function allows customers to easily find the products they are looking for. A hassle-free experience increases the chances of landing the sale, and greatly improving customer experience.
Shopify
Shopify provides the ability for users to search based on product names and descriptions. As long as titles and descriptions on your website are thorough, this search function works adequately. The built-in search function is able to browse vendor names, price, tags, collections, variants, and availability. If you want functions like elastic search or AI search, you can use a third-party add-on to provide this additional functionality.
commercebuild
commercebuild is powered by Elastic Search, which supports searching by item code and description, item attributes, meta data, plus user-configurable, multi-language free-text searches, dynamic product filters based upon search results, plus structured product filtering tools to lead the user through the search process (e.g. year, make, model). Shop managers are able to further define search parameters such as weighting and priority giving a unique edge over out-of-the-box statically set search parameters. This gives the user a much more robust and satisfying user experience. Additionally, customer item codes and descriptions are fully supported allowing a customer to search using their item code and description for an item.
Customer Portal
Providing up-to-date access to sales orders, shipments, and invoices, specifically for B2B customers, is a key benefit to a true B2B solution. Reducing the volume of inbound calls to Customer Service Reps with requests for order status updates, or copies of invoices, is an expense and an inconvenience. With B2B customer portal features, users can access the data they need 24/7.
Shopify
Shopify provides lists of orders placed through Shopify webstores, and displays Shopify-generated invoices. There is no ability to see non-webstore transactions, pay invoices online, nor generate a payment receipt in the ERP’s Account Receivable ledger.
commercebuild
commercebuild provides lists of all sales orders that exist in the ERP regardless of where they originated (webstores, EDI, importing, punchout, hand-keyed), plus their corresponding shipments and invoices. Furthermore, commercebuild users can download copies of invoices, and elect to pay the open balances either in part, or in full. You can also provide buyers with invoice discounts. For invoices paid online, a receipt is created in the ERP’s Accounts Receivable ledger ready for a subsequent bank reconciliation.
Payment Gateways
Offering webstore users multiple ways to make a payment on your eCommerce store increases the convenience factor, and increases your chance of making a sale, and allows users to pay their open invoices.
Shopify
Shopify Payments is the default, and dlocked in gateway for most plans. The platform also supports one-click payments and integrates with 65 payment solutions. Shopify users can only pay invoices generated by Shopify and not those generated by the ERP. Shopify also charges a surcharge for not using Shopify Payments
commercebuild
commercebuild offers a wide range of payment gateways and payment methods. The choice of gateway can determine the availability of advanced payment features. We also streamline pre-authorizations and payments from the webstore to the ERP, cutting back on any need for manual data entry. Invoices are generated in the ERP and can be paid online using any of the available payment gateways.
Expert Implementation and Support
When you are building a webstore from the ground up using a platform that you are not 100% familiar with, having a robust and well thought out implementation and support plan is crucial to your success.
Shopify
While Shopify Plus members do have access to support, they can be difficult to get in contact with, often leaving customers feeling a little underwhelmed. This causes many users to turn to online forums and communities to seek help.
commercebuild
commercebuild provides industry-leading, expert project management and eCommerce consultancy services throughout the implementation and launch phases of your webstore, ensuring success. But access to the experts doesn’t stop after you’ve launched. We provide 24 hour support during business days globally, with teams across the world to provide live chat through our ticketing platform. Our response time is typically less than 1 hour for non emergencies, so you don’t have to wait long to get the help you require.
We provide a 24/7/365 emergency contact to reach, if immediate assistance is required. Our mission is to provide best-in-class support. Each client has their very own account manager to ensure you always have a friendly face who is familiar with your webstore to provide assistance when needed.
Pricing and Plans
Pricing is a big factor to consider when deciding on the ideal eCommerce platform. This is a particularly big concern for small to medium size businesses that need to keep their overhead costs to a minimum.
Shopify
Shopify’s most basic plan will cost you between $39 and $399, but the features it provides are minimal and wouldn’t be suitable for the majority of eCommerce stores. Shopify Plus will set you back $2,500 per month, as well as 0.40% revenue per month, and an additional .18% for B2B transactions after $431k in sales – this percentage adds up to a significant number, and means that your Shopify fees will increase every month as your store becomes more successful.
commercebuild
commercebuild charges $775 – $4,300 per month, depending on the package you choose. Small retailers will be in the range of $775 – $1500, while enterprises will be charged in the region of $2,500 for most stores. The advantage of having a static price tag on your eCommerce platform is that your fees won’t increase as your store becomes more successful selling more products, (unless you decide to upgrade your package of course).
Find out more about our packages and pricing here.
Final Thoughts on Shopify vs commercebuild
While Shopify is one of the most well-known platforms in the eCommerce industry, popularity doesn’t always mean it’s the best choice. Shopify does offer great flexibility, and it’s ease-of-use is certainly a selling point, but it becomes more and more expensive as your business grows and doesn’t offer quite the same benefits you can expect from commercebuild.
Regarding commercebuild, on the other hand, our B2B eCommerce platform and our B2C eCommerce platform are created with the user in mind. Our platform integrates seamlessly with both Microsoft and Sage ERPs such as Sage X3, Sage 300, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
This integration reduces the maintenance load on the webstore as orders and payments are pushed directly to the ERP. Our ERP integrated eCommerce solution means that inventory availability, items, prices, customers, orders, shipments and invoices all seamlessly sync between the ERP and the webstore, maximizing customer satisfaction and store usability.
If you’re looking for the ultimate eCommerce solution for your business, request a demo with one of our knowledgeable experts to find out how we can help you!
About commercebuild
commercebuild is the missing piece in transforming your ERP data into a truly personalized eCommerce experience. Flexible and frictionless, our turnkey eCommerce solution delivers 24/7 revenue opportunities to you and your customers. Quick to deploy and easy-to-use, we eliminate the need for middleware between the storefront and ERP data to enable seamless online buying and selling.
Our solutions can be live in 30-days and offer complete eCommerce capabilities at a price B2B and B2C businesses can afford.
Drive revenue growth for you, and your customers, while enjoying rapid ROI for both. Go head-to-head with the online retail giants of the world, and win. Experience a solution that integrates with your ERP data and provides automagical cross-sell and upsell opportunities to every customer on your site.
At the height of ecommerce growth, commercebuild offers scalable, reliable, and robust eCommerce solutions for everyone.
If your business is using Sage 300, Sage X3 or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERPs, commercebuild can build a ERP-driven B2B and B2C eCommerce webstore or Customer Portal.