Shopify vs SAP Commerce Cloud (Hybris): Which Ecommerce Platform is Best?

Shopify vs SAP Commerce Cloud, which ecommerce solution does your business need? Shopify might be the better-known platform for new entrepreneurs (and the one we recommend most frequently), but SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly Hybris), has a number of unique benefits to offer.

Recently, in 2023, SAP Commerce Cloud even earned SAP a “Leader” title in the Digital Commerce Magic Quadrant (For the 9^th year in a row).

So could SAP Commerce Cloud be the perfect alternative to Shopify? We took a deep dive into both solutions to find out.

How We Conducted Our Research

For this comparison, we accessed demo versions of both Shopify and SAP Commerce Cloud (previous SAP Hybris). This hands-on approach, paired with our years of experience offering custom ecommerce store setup services and growth consultancy, as well as an overview of reviews and testimonials from other consumers, gave us a comprehensive view of both platforms.

Shopify vs Hybris: Pros and Cons

Shopify Pros and Cons

Sap Pros and Cons

What is Shopify?

Shopify is one of the world’s leading commerce platforms, and a solution we’ve used for years here at Ecommerce-Platforms.com.

Launched in 2006, it’s one of the most popular tools available for online store building, and for good reason. Not only is Shopify extremely flexible, and affordable, but it’s easy to use, and ideal for omnichannel selling.

With Shopify, you can create and promote virtually any type of business, and sell any kind of product on your own website, social media, marketplace platforms, and even in-person with Shopify POS.

Shopify is a SaaS solution for ecommerce, offering access to:

• A convenient website builder: Shopify’s straightforward website builder makes it easy to create a branded online experience for your customers. There are dozens of paid and premium templates to choose from, and companies can create any kind of site, from blogs, to stores.
• Selling solutions: Shopify allows companies to sell all kinds of products on any platform. You can sell globally using Shopify Markets, connect to social media channels and marketplaces, and even sell in-person. Plus there’s an integrated payment processor.
• Insights and analytics: Like SAP Hybris, Shopify offers some excellent insights to business leaders. You can track performance metrics, financial reports, inventory reports, and more. Plus, it’s possible to create comprehensive customer profiles for personalized selling.
• Business management: The Shopify backend comes with a variety of solutions for managing business operations. You can access tools for managing shipping and fulfillment, Tax and VAT settings, inventory and product variations, and customer profiles.
• Integrations: One compelling thing about Shopify is its flexibility. The platform can integrate with a huge range of other marketing and business tools, apps, add-ons, social media channels, and payment processors.

What is SAP Commerce Cloud

SAP Commerce Cloud (previously Hybris), is a cloud-based ecommerce and digital marketing solution, included as part of the comprehensive “SAP Customer Experience” portfolio.

The flexible solution supports companies in creating B2B and B2C ecommerce solutions, capable of exceptional scale.

Though the platform is relatively straightforward (based on our experience with the demo), it’s targeted at larger companies looking to expand into new markets and increase revenue.

SAP created this ecommerce solution after purchasing independent ecommerce company, Hybris in 2013.

For a few years, the solution was sold as “SAP Hybris”, before the rebrand to “SAP Commerce Cloud” in 2018. Today, this platform comes with a range of features, including:

• Intelligent selling services: With SAP Commerce Cloud (Hybris), companies can leverage AI to promote unique offerings to customers based on their history and buying journey. You can even use AI and machine learning to automatically maximize ROI with personalization.
• Flexible composability: SAP Commerce Cloud is a flexible, extensible, and modular platform. It features a decoupled JavaScript storefront, omnicommerce APIs, and plug-and-play integrations with shopping carts and checkout solutions.
• Management capabilities: Users can simplify operations with comprehensive product and catalog management tools, and experience management features. Plus, there are order management tools for site-specific sourcing, fulfillment, returns, and more.
• B2B Ecommerce: Unlike most ecommerce vendors, SAP offers dedicated solutions for B2B sellers. You can access B2B self-service tools, complex product support, assisted service capabilities, and online negotiation and quoting tools.
• Enterprise-wide insights: SAP Commerce Cloud excels at reporting and analytics. From the backend, you can maintain a consistent view of your site’s availability, customer experience metrics, performance KPIs, and more. There are even integrations with SAP ERP and other tools.

Shopify vs SAP Hybris: Ease of Use

It’s easy to assume an ecommerce solution targeted at larger brands would come with a significant learning curve. However, we were surprised to find that SAP Commerce Cloud and Shopify are pretty evenly matched in terms of simplicity.

The first thing we should note is that you can’t just “dive straight in” to using SAP Commerce Cloud. You need to request a demo from the sales team, who’ll get in touch with you via email to arrange a guided overview of how everything works.

Of course, you can always get a taste of what you can expect from the platform by watching the video demo here. Once you have an account, getting started is pretty simple.

The backend environment is clean and intuitive, which won’t come as much of a surprise if you’ve used SAP apps before.

In the backend, you’ll find your merchandising, reporting, development, and administration tools all organized into specific segments.

However, there are no simplistic templates for building a website you can use with absolutely no technical knowledge.

On the plus side, you do get some pretty straightforward tools for creating “product mixes” for catalogs, and running A/B tests. Overall, however, we think this service will require a lot more support, which is probably why SAP Commerce Cloud is more expensive.

Alternatively, Shopify is a far more straightforward platform overall. It makes it incredibly easy to build an omnichannel online presence in minutes, with a straightforward back end, convenient website builder and editor, and dozens of templates to choose from.

You can add product collections and variations to your site in seconds, set up your preferred payment gateways, and implement apps and integrations in a couple of clicks.

The biggest downside is that all this simplicity comes at the expense of extra customization options.

SAP Commerce Cloud gives you complete control over the unique commerce experiences you create. To achieve the same results with Shopify, you’ll need to upgrade to Shopify Plus, which can come with added complexity, due to a greater reliance on code configuration.

Design Options and Themes

If you’re looking for simple templates to give you a starting point for your ecommerce storefront, then Shopify is definitely a better choice. Shopify offers users more than 100 pre-built free and premium templates to choose from, all of which are responsive and highly customizable.

You can also choose to build your own theme from scratch, working with a developer.

The theme you choose will give you the initial building blocks you need to create an attractive website, with built-in features for menus, navigation, and other factors.

Once you’ve chosen your theme, you can use the simple theme editor in the Shopify e-commerce system to make changes to certain components and modules. However, there are limitations to how much you can change before you need to dive into code.

SAP Hybris Commerce, or Commerce Cloud, takes a slightly different approach to web design. There are two responsive templates to choose from, depending on whether you’re building a B2B or B2C website, which come with a range of modules and components you can change.

While the design process is relatively user-friendly, it’s not nearly as simple to adapt your website to your brand as it is on Shopify.

You’ll need at least some basic coding knowledge, or you may need to consider working with an expert on your e-commerce project.

SAP gives you more control over the creation of unique frontend ecommerce experiences, offering exceptional scalability to large enterprises and complex companies.

However it’s not the most intuitive option for smaller businesses and beginners.

Sales and Ecommerce Tools

Notably, both Shopify and SAP Commerce cloud give you all the functionality you need to build a thriving online business. But there’s a big difference in how the two solutions work. With SAP Commerce Cloud, the focus is on creating unique frontend experiences for consumers.

The composable commerce solution gives you the opportunity to sell on a range of channels, and create storefront experiences for different devices with APIs. You can enhance your shopping cart and checkout experiences with various payment services, and implement tax management.

Plus, the backend of the ecosystem gives you all the tools you need to manage large and complex catalogues, currencies, pricing structures, orders, inventory, and more.

SAP Commerce Cloud really shines for B2B ecommerce, with dozens of solutions for selling complex products, creating spending limits, and even delivering “assisted service” capabilities.

Shopify is more of a straightforward ecommerce solution., though it does support headless design options, if you want to build more advanced shopping experiences.

With Shopify, you can sell both physical and digital products through a storefront, marketplace integrations, social media channels and in-person (with POS integrations).

The backend comes with a huge variety of business management tools for inventory, product, order, customer, and employee management.

Plus, Shopify offers Shipping and Fulfillment services, automation tools, and integrated payment processing with Shopify Payments.

Shopify also supports tax and VAT management, and offers extensive analytics and reports to help you take your company’s revenue to the next level.

Plugins and Integrations

If you’re looking for extensibility, both SAP Commerce Cloud and Shopify are excellent solutions. SAP Commerce is designed to be ultra-scalable, with pre-built integrations for SAP ERP, SAP S/4HANA, and various third-party systems. It’s a microservices-based platform, so you can easily add all the functionality you need with minimal restrictions.

However, you may find that setting up some integrations and workflows is a little complex, particularly compared to the experience you get from Shopify. With Shopify, there’s a massive app marketplace where you can find hundreds of one-click connection options for any need.

You can link Shopify to your CRM system, marketing tools, shipping providers, and powerful SEO tools. Most of the apps and add-ons are extremely easy to implement. However, some plugin options will incur additional monthly fees.

Notably, Shopify also integrates natively with social media channels, for selling and marketing, and marketplaces like Amazon and Ebay.

Marketing Tools and SEO

Once again, the approach SAP and Shopify take to marketing, promotion, and conversion optimization are very different. With SAP Commerce Cloud, the focus is on giving you all the tools you need to create highly personalized and unique shopping experiences.

The system comes with built-in AI and machine learning tools, that can help you deliver dynamic, relevant, and personalized recommendations to customers as they shop.

You can deliver behavior-based product recommendations, and leverage A/B testing to increase conversions over time.

We were particularly impressed by SAP’s insights, which help you to make granular changes to the customer experience.

However, you might still need to use external tools for social media, and email marketing when working with SAP. On the plus side, it’s easy to build a search-engine friendly experience, since you have a lot of granular control over the store experience.

Shopify doesn’t have the same AI-driven tools built into its platform, but you can integrate your store with a range of advanced apps if you want to create a similar experience.

With Shopify, you get basic SEO capabilities already built-in, to help ensure your site ranks on the search engine result pages.

You can alter your URLs, titles, meta descriptions, alt tags, and more, and even create site maps for Google. Plus, there are excellent content management tools for blogging purposes.

Shopify also has great customer profiles to help you personalize marketing campaigns, as well as built-in tools for email and messaging-based marketing.

It also integrates with solutions like Google analytics and social media, and offers a range of plugins for email marketing and other promotional strategies.

Customer Support and Service

Both SAP and Shopify are committed to supporting their customers with everything from technical issues to initial site setup.

With Shopify, you get a comprehensive range of self-help resources, including guides, FAQs, videos, blogs, and help center articles.

You can also reach out to the Shopify team for support via email or live chat, as well as phone in some regions.

Plus, there’s the option to hire Shopify Experts for more support, or interact with community members on forums and social media.

However, since SAP Commerce Cloud is a little more complex, it does come with a more extensive level of support.

Every company gets direct assistance from an account manager or expert to help them start building their unique commerce experiences.

There’s also phone, chat, and email support available from the SAP team, as well as various guides, videos, and blogs for a DIY approach to addressing any issues you might have.

The Pricing Plans

Comparing the pricing of Shopify and SAP Commerce Cloud is tough. SAP doesn’t share any pricing “plans” on its website for Commerce Cloud. The solution is tailored to the needs of each company, so you’ll need to contact the team for a dedicated quote.

The price you pay depends on everything from the modules you need, to the level of support and guidance you’re looking for.

However, in general, you can expect to pay a lot more for a comprehensive ecommerce solution from SAP.

Shopify is more straightforward with its pricing, and generally more affordable. There’s a 3-day free trial for beginners, and the “Starter” option for $5 per month (with 5% transaction fees) if you just want to sell through messengers and social channels.

Alternatively, there are a variety of plans to choose from, including:

• Basic Shopify: $39 per month with all the marketing, store building, and business management tools you need. Plus, you get 2 staff accounts, 1,000 inventory locations, and basic reporting functionality.
• Shopify: $105 per month with all the features of the Basic plan, plus additional sales channels, advanced reporting, and 5 staff accounts.
• Advanced Shopify: $399 per month for all the features included in “Shopify” plus, custom reports and 15 staff accounts.
• Shopify Plus: Starting at $2,000 per month for all of the Advanced plan features, plus granular customization options, unique add-ons and integrations, and greater flexibility.

There are transaction fees included on Shopify’s plans, as well as extra fees if you use any payment processor outside of Shopify Payments.

Alternatives to Shopify and SAP Commerce Cloud

If neither SAP Commerce Cloud nor Shopify seem like the right options for your business, there are plenty of alternatives to consider. Some of our favorites include:

• Wix: For absolute simplicity, it’s difficult to go wrong with Wix. The platform includes all of the website building and ecommerce tools you might need, as well as AI-driven solutions for store customization, marketing tools, and a host of integration options.
• Freshsales: Freshsales is technically a CRM solution, but it allows you to create custom workflows, access AI-based lead scoring, and experiment with promotional pipelines, similar to SAP Commerce Cloud. You will need a separate site builder, however.
• BigCommerce: Like both SAP Commerce Cloud and Shopify, BigCommerce supports headless store creation, as well as offering a host of tools for ecommerce, marketing, sales, and more. It’s excellent for larger enterprises looking for more flexibility.

The Final Verdict

Ultimately, we chose Shopify as our favorite ecommerce platform here for a few reasons. The platform is much easier to use for beginners, and offers excellent scalability for companies in search of more granular customization options.

Like SAP, it supports headless commerce, and it also offers a range of tools for business management, automation, and online selling. Shopify, however, makes it much easier to launch a store, even if you have no prior technical knowledge.

When to Use Shopify

We recommend using Shopify if you’re looking for:

• A simple and convenient website building solution
• Excellent design options and themes
• Fantastic omnichannel sales capabilities
• Great scalability for businesses of all sizes
• Access to plenty of one-click integrations

When to Use SAP Commerce Cloud

We’d recommend using SAP Commerce Cloud if:

• You’re a larger, enterprise-level business with a higher budget
• You need granular customization options for your store
• You want to create comprehensive, unique commerce experiences
• The level of support you need is much higher
• You’re interested in headless commerce

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