Salesforce Commerce Cloud(formerly Demandware) is a user-friendly and seamless eCommerce platform that offers a suite of features intended to transform the experience of how brands connect with their customers at every step of their journey. Salesforce B2C Commerce plays a considerable role in the worldwide market. In 2017 alone, 540 million unique shoppers made a purchase online through a Salesforce Commerce Cloud-powered website, and those sales equalled $21B. Impressive!
But what makes this platform so widely adopted and heavily used? Today, we will dive into exactly what makes Salesforce Commerce Cloud so great, and many argue it has caused a B2C commerce revolution. Enjoy.
Key Features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Commerce Storefront: The B2C Commerce Storefront is an eCommerce module where brands can customize the user experience. The Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) is based on mobile-first best practices helping brands to build and launch sites quickly and easily so they can get their products in front of their customers.
Merchandising and Marketing: Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, Salesforce Commerce Cloud has immense power, giving merchandisers a broader scope and capability to craft and provide their customers with the best-personalized experience. These capabilities help brands fuel eCommerce growth with features that empower product pricing, catalogue management, promotion management, and site search.
Multi-Site Management and Localization: Brands that have an international presence need localized sites for greater success in specific areas. Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers a powerful internalization feature that helps brands to develop geo-specific sites or add features to existing websites according to the local cultures, currencies, and languages. Having localized websites also benefits regional marketing efforts. They can quickly build and launch websites with the help of a global reference storefront.
B2C Commerce Extensions: Through B2C Commerce APIs, brands can integrate with different third-party applications and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to enhance and bolster the marketing efforts of the eCommerce store. Commerce extensions help brands introduce their business to new and diverse markets that might have otherwise been inaccessible.
Benefits of Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Personalized Experience Boost – Salesforce Einstein AI: To improve usability, Salesforce Commerce Cloud has its own built-in Einstein, which utilizes artificial intelligence to help quickly create better experiences for your users. It does so through predictive analysis of available data to give users better search results from the available product catalogue. For most, this uncompromisable as it’s generally accepted that only the best-personalized experiences earn your business more customers.
Mature Marketing Process: Marketing is a crucial element when it comes to eCommerce. Within the boundaries of the Commerce Cloud, merchants can manage and share product information, images, and promotional content across various social media platforms. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud can also be used to customize user search criteria based on different merchant policies.
Enhanced Mobile Experience: Today’s consumer world is all about smartphones and all the things they can empower us to do. The list of things you can do is quickly overshadowing what you can’t do on mobile. That’s why the eCommerce industry introduced mobile storefront to give customers easy access to do online shopping, where they want to shop. At present, we’d say Salesforce Commerce Cloud brings the world the best option for a mobile-friendly eCommerce store. It lays great emphasis on the mobile-first approach, providing optimal shopping experience to users.
Internationalization: Due to multi-site management features, Salesforce made internationalization incredibly robust and easy. It allows organizations to manage multiple storefronts for multiple locations across the globe from a single back-end platform. By having an excellent technical grip over Salesforce Commerce Cloud attributes and features, one can effortlessly manage multi-currency, multi-language, and multiple eCommerce processes.
Scalability: This requirement comes up in any eCommerce or enterprise-level website when the business wants/needs to expand and extend its scope to more markets worldwide. Salesforce solves this problem by providing you with the scalable instance associated with your storefront from which you can easily upgrade your system without impacting user experience.
Single platform: Salesforce Commerce Cloud has one feature that it is extremely proud of and makes a point to emphasize, and it’s empowering merchants to run their business across multiple channels from a single platform. Salesforces Omni Channel Module allows merchants to perform many operations such as order management, inventory management, sales, and marketing campaigns as a single SaaS solution.
The Advantages Salesforce has over its Competitors
There are few competitors in the eCommerce industry that could challenge the power and prestige of Salesforce Commerce Cloud. A few notable mentions include Magento, Bigcommerce, Weebly, and Virto Commerce. Having said that, there is still a great divide between Salesforce and the rest, as it seems Salesforces already have the solution its customers and the development community need, while its competitors are still trying to figure it out.
The capabilities of Salesforce Commerce Cloud are extensive enough to give the development community unprecedented control over creating a web store. You could develop one using Salesforce Commerce Cloud, without having to wrap your head around the in-depth technical aspects of the platform, such as databases or networks. Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers multiple features (as should be clear now) that stand out from the competition, such as multi-store management, channel management, shopping carts, and inventory management. Another significant thing about Salesforce Commerce Cloud is that it is a SaaS platform, meaning the development community won’t need to worry about maintaining its infrastructure. This platform is an easily manageable and user-friendly tool with outstanding customer support and community behind it.
Take Away
It should be clear that Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a powerful, mature, and a scalable platform with amazing features for merchandisers. From having multiple storefronts to an unprecedented level of scalability, and a lot more, there is much the eCommerce industry should be thankful to Salesforce for. And as the world continues to shift to and react to the current situations, the need for such a platform will only grow, much like we’ll all retailers will have to do. Fortunately, Salesforce will likely grow right alongside them.
