Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Shopify: What Enterprise Teams Are Actually Choosing Between

If you’re setting next year’s platform budget, Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Shopify comes down to two things: total cost of ownership, meaning everything you’ll spend to build and run the store, and how much custom engineering you want to keep funding. License price won’t settle it, because neither platform gives you a final number without a quote.

BLKDG builds on Shopify Plus, so weigh our position with that in mind. Shopify Plus should be your default if you sell mostly direct to consumers, run ten stores or fewer, and don’t depend on Salesforce’s shared sales data. Salesforce earns its place when your sales team runs B2B accounts inside Salesforce, or when you run far more sites than a Shopify contract covers.

Salesforce shows “Contact for pricing” (opens in new tab) on every Commerce Cloud product, so there’s no list price to put in a budget. The B2C Commerce editions (opens in new tab) are Growth, Plus and Premium, and they carry no stated billing basis beyond “Billed annually” on Premium. Ask how your edition is billed before you model it.

The B2B side states its basis. On the B2B Commerce Growth and Advanced editions (opens in new tab), Salesforce says, “We take a percentage of Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) based on commerce functionality needed.” GMV there means revenue through your website, minus tax and shipping, and no rate is printed. Add-ons are sold separately, and orders from outside the storefront that run through Salesforce Order Management carry their own charge past the edition’s limits.

Shopify Plus lists $2,500 a month on a 1-year term and $2,300 a month on a 3-year term (opens in new tab). That’s $30,000 or $27,600 a year, so the longer term saves $7,200 across three years. There are no setup fees (opens in new tab), and you can cancel when your term ends.

That flat price isn’t the whole Shopify number. Higher-volume businesses might pay a variable platform fee (opens in new tab) based on revenue and business model, and it differs for B2B and direct-to-consumer sales. Shopify doesn’t publish the rate or the revenue level where it starts, so get both in writing.

Percentages deserve the most attention on either side. On $50 million in annual revenue, every tenth of a percentage point is $50,000 a year. That’s more than the gap between any two published Shopify Plus terms, so one line in a quote can outweigh the list price.

The payment row is a point for Salesforce. Shopify Plus charges 0.2% (opens in new tab) if you use another payment provider, which comes to $40,000 a year on $20 million in sales. Salesforce says you can bring your own provider to B2C Commerce without a penalty fee.

Shopify commissioned the total cost of ownership research behind this comparison from a consulting firm it doesn’t name. From that research, Shopify claims (opens in new tab) Salesforce’s platform costs ran 14% higher and its operating costs 6% higher. Shopify’s one-pager (opens in new tab) adds a claim of 16% higher implementation cost. The research dates from late 2023 and early 2024, before Storefront Next existed.

The same one-pager claims a 54% higher total on Salesforce. That headline isn’t a sum of those category figures, and the list under it includes something that isn’t spending at all: a 3.6% offset that treats a 36% higher checkout rate, at an assumed 10% margin, as a cost. Leave the 54% out of your budget.

Shopify’s newer speed-to-launch figures have a similar limit. Shopify claims merchants moving from Salesforce saw 22% faster implementation and budgeted 35% lower implementation costs (opens in new tab).

Both come from research Shopify commissioned and EY published (opens in new tab) in October 2025. Across seven sets of competitors and more than 300 organizations, that research found 23% lower budgeted costs. A budget isn’t what the project finally cost.

Shopify also claims up to 36% higher checkout conversion (opens in new tab) than Salesforce Commerce Cloud, from an April 2023 study by a consulting company it doesn’t name. If that number is going in a board deck, label it as Shopify’s and test it against your own checkout data.

Salesforce offers no head-to-head figure. It claims a Forrester study it commissioned (opens in new tab) found 119% ROI and a 7-month payback for a composite retailer built from five interviews, which measures return on Salesforce, not cost against Shopify. It also says a platform vendor’s partner network can “significantly reduce your time to market and your total cost of ownership” (opens in new tab), with no number attached. Shopify offers a TCO calculator (opens in new tab), which is worth using as long as you check the inputs yourself.

Your own model will beat all of these. Shopify’s list of what to count (opens in new tab) is a fair one for either platform:

This is where the two budgets separate most, and it’s a line you control. Every custom piece of a store needs maintenance, upgrades and someone who knows the code, year after year.

Salesforce has moved on this. In its June 2026 B2C Commerce release (opens in new tab), which made Storefront Next generally available, it said enterprise implementations had “meant high costs and lengthy timelines” and pitched its Commerce Apps framework on faster launches, lower implementation costs and less custom development. It now claims Storefront Next compresses site launches from months to weeks (opens in new tab).

So don’t budget Salesforce as a heavy custom build by default. Partner agency Astound Digital told Salesforce (opens in new tab) it’s seeing 30% improvements in implementation timelines and costs with Storefront Next. That’s a partner’s figure with no outside check. Salesforce’s September release (opens in new tab) names three storefront approaches, Storefront Next, SFRA and Composable Storefronts, so your cost to stay depends on which one your site runs on today.

Storefront Next is a headless frontend (opens in new tab), meaning the site shoppers see runs separately from the commerce system behind it. Shopify Plus allows up to 25 Hydrogen-based headless storefronts (opens in new tab), but you don’t have to go that way. Headless on Shopify keeps products, orders and checkout on Shopify while you take on the storefront, its hosting and much of the daily operations, and we’d start most stores on a theme.

Shopify’s model trades freedom for less code to own. You change its checkout through extensions and Functions (opens in new tab) at the points Shopify allows, and the old checkout.liquid file is unsupported on the information, shipping and payment steps. If your business depends on a checkout flow those tools can’t produce, that’s a real limit.

Before you compare quotes, list every custom piece your store runs. Mark which ones a Shopify app, extension or Function could replace, and which ones your business truly needs. The second list is the engineering you’d keep funding on either platform, and the first list is where the savings would come from.

Compare a specific edition, not the Salesforce name. On B2C Commerce, full order management, Data Cloud credits and CRM Analytics (opens in new tab) come only with Premium, and the Growth edition allows 10 price books where Plus and Premium allow 3,500. The name “Plus” also appears on both sides, so keep Salesforce’s B2C Commerce Plus edition separate from Shopify Plus in your notes.

Salesforce has the clear edge at scale. Its B2C Commerce Plus and Premium editions (opens in new tab) allow 100 sites, and it pitches a multi-site setup for managing multiple brands and regions.

A Shopify Plus contract covers ten stores at no added cost, and stores past that carry an extra fee. Multiple brands (opens in new tab) under one company need a separate Plus subscription per brand, so a portfolio of brands should price that before anything else.

Shopify also limits what the extra stores are for. Expansion stores (opens in new tab) exist for international selling, separate physical locations and related purposes. Each must carry the main brand’s name and branding and the same types of goods, each live one needs its own theme license, and a contract gets one free B2B store.

Shopify’s B2B tools cover a lot of wholesale. Companies, location-level permissions, quantity rules, price breaks, net terms and PO numbers (opens in new tab) are all available from the Basic plan. Plus adds deposits, partial payments, payment requests per fulfillment and unlimited active catalog assignments, where other plans get 3.

Salesforce B2B Commerce (opens in new tab) goes further into how a sales team works. It offers account and buyer entitlements, negotiated pricing, personalized catalogs and buying on behalf of other accounts or locations, and Salesforce says it includes over 200 promotion types. If your buyers mostly reorder from a catalog at agreed prices, Shopify can handle it. If reps negotiate and quote each deal, look hard at Salesforce.

Salesforce says B2C Commerce “supports over 7,000 languages alongside 169 global currencies.” (opens in new tab) On Shopify, Markets (opens in new tab) lets you change currency, product availability, theme content, languages and domains by customer location, and those selling tools are included on all plans (opens in new tab), though local currencies need Shopify Payments.

Shopify also offers something you may not want to build. With Managed Markets (opens in new tab), Global-e becomes the merchant of record and handles tax registration, duties and customs, and customers see a checkout notice that they’re buying from Global-e.

The fee is 3.25% per transaction on Shopify Plus (opens in new tab), or $32,500 on $1 million in cross-border sales. Shipping and payment processing are charged separately, and a 1.5% currency conversion fee is built into the buyer’s price. Eligibility is limited to continental US businesses and certain stores in Canada and the UK (opens in new tab), and it needs Shopify Payments.

Advanced checkout customization is Plus-only (opens in new tab). UI extensions add things like offers, surveys, banners and fields, and Functions (opens in new tab) handle logic such as discounts, hiding payment options, renaming delivery options and blocking checkout under validation rules.

If checkout is a deciding factor, write down the changes you need and have a Salesforce implementer and a Shopify one each show how they’d build them.

Shared data with Sales is Salesforce’s strongest case. On B2B Commerce (opens in new tab), sales and commerce share a data model, digital contracts and physical orders sit in one place, and quotes and fulfillment connect natively with Sales. Service agents can check orders, handle returns and place orders from their customer service console, and Marketing can build segments from engagement and purchase data.

If your team already works that way, that’s a strong reason to stay. Connecting Shopify to Salesforce CRM is integration work you’d need to scope and then keep paying to maintain.

Keep that argument on the B2B side unless your own setup proves otherwise. If you run B2C Commerce, have Salesforce show you how your store’s data reaches your other Salesforce products. It pitches Shopper Profile Sync (opens in new tab) as removing the development cost of custom integrations between clouds, so ask how much of that work your setup would still need.

Scale is the other case. If you run dozens of sites under one company, Salesforce’s 100-site editions fit in a way a ten-store contract doesn’t. And if you’re already on Commerce Cloud with a working site, price a move to Storefront Next before you price a move off the platform. Replatforming is a much bigger project than an upgrade or a new front end, and it only makes sense when the platform itself is the problem.

Shopify Plus is the better buy for a direct-to-consumer brand with ten stores or fewer, wholesale that fits company accounts and net terms, and no daily dependence on Salesforce’s shared sales data. In that setup, themes, apps, extensions and Functions can cover much of what would otherwise be custom work.

It’s also the better fit if your team would rather spend on marketing and merchandising than on developers. You won’t escape every cost, since a variable fee, a third-party payment fee or a custom integration can all raise the bill. What you get is a published base price, and a smaller share of your budget tied up in code you have to maintain.

Moving from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify is a replatform, and your budget should treat it as its own project. Shopify features MZ Wallace, Decor Steals, Bauer, Keen, Rainbow Shops, NYDJ and Rémy Cointreau (opens in new tab) as case studies on its Salesforce comparison page. Shopify claims Decor Steals replatformed in less than 6 months (opens in new tab) and that MZ Wallace cut its total cost of ownership by 64%. Those are single customers Shopify chose to feature, so don’t use them as your estimate.

Timing depends on scope. A template site with few customizations moves faster than an enterprise site with many third-party integrations, and the data work starts with auditing your data, mapping fields between platforms and deciding whether to move in stages.

Our service for replatforming to Shopify covers URL mapping and 301 redirects, customer accounts and order history, the catalog, reconnected integrations, testing in staging and 90 days of monitoring after launch. Whoever does the work, each of those belongs in your estimate.

List every connected system before you ask for a number, because each one is its own cost line. On Salesforce, systems without a built-in integration (opens in new tab) mean MuleSoft licenses, integration partners or AgentExchange apps. Shopify says Salesforce’s implementation costs may run higher partly because of more complex back-end integrations (opens in new tab) with ERPs and financial systems. Treat that as Shopify’s view.

For your ERP, the system that runs finance, inventory and orders, the first job isn’t the connection. It’s deciding which system owns each piece of data, and our guide to ERP integration walks through how to settle that before you sign a contract.

Ask for the same things from both sides, in writing and on the same scope. Your comparison needs these numbers:

Run the comparison over the same number of years on both sides, and include the cost of moving only on the side that requires one. If the two totals land close together, choose the platform that leaves you with less custom code to maintain.

BLKDG’s Shopify Plus agency team starts by checking whether your roadmap needs Plus at all. Schedule a free Growth Audit, bring your quote, and we’ll show you which items truly require Plus and how the cost compares with what you’re on now.