Welcome back to another dive into the Salesforce Clouds! If you’re new to our Head in the Clouds series, you can take a look at the full list of Clouds we’ve covered.
Communication with customers is important for every business. Effective communication comes from understanding your customers well (listening to their needs) and building a good relationship with them (meeting their needs). As a customer relationship management (CRM) system, Salesforce allows businesses to communicate with customers, and vice versa, at any time over any channel and device, through its digital commerce solutions.
In this blog you will learn what Commerce Cloud offers and what exactly you can do with it.
What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud?
Commerce Cloud is a key part of the Salesforce Customer Success Platform which provides world-leading B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) ecommerce solutions. Created in July 2016, Commerce Cloud enables users to create intelligent and customised unified purchasing experiences across different channels, including mobile, social, web and store, helping brands launch sooner, grow faster, and reach more customers.
After that brief introduction to Commerce Cloud, let’s take a quick pause to define some terminology.
Quick glossary
Salesforce Commerce Cloud: Created in July 2016, when Salesforce acquired Demandware. The Demandware technology has grown and evolved to become foundational to Salesforce’s B2C Commerce offering.
Demandware: The old name of Salesforce Commerce Cloud – a software company aquired by Salesforce.
CloudCraze: Acquired by Salesforce in 2018, which is now the Salesforce B2B Commerce product.
Customer 360 Platform: Salesforce’s integrated CRM platform, allowing every team of the company to manage and develop its role in the customer journey.
Genie: Also known as Salesforce Data Cloud. A customer data platform that works with Customer 360, bringing real-time data power to Customer 360.
B2B2C commerce: Business-to-business-to-consumer, is an ecommerce model where businesses access customers through a third party e.g., Amazon, The App Store. Learn more with this Trailhead Module.
D2C commerce: Direct-to-consumer commerce, when a brand sells their product directly to the end user via digital channels without third party involvement. Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers ecommerce solutions to quickly create D2C sites.
Salesforce storefront: the user-facing website where your buyers can browse products, place orders, and manage their accounts. These sites are built using Salesforce Experience Cloud – learn more about Experience Cloud and digital experiences in this blog.
Headless commerce – you might have seen this term being used in Salesforce blogs: “In its simplest form, headless commerce is a type of ecommerce architecture involving a separation of the front end and back end of an ecommerce application.” Headless commerce was a response to reports that ecommerce vendors were falling behind user experience and design trends since vendors were beholden to ecommerce platforms updating their back-end systems.
With these terms in mind, Salesforce’s online learning platform, Trailhead describes the power of Commerce Cloud:
“Design and execute your own commerce strategy at your own pace, according to your particular needs.”
From Get Started with Commerce Cloud
Now we are clear about some key terms and their definitions, let’s examine what they mean in real business environments!
What can you do using Salesforce Commerce Cloud?
Salesforce Commerce Cloud is built on the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. You can use Commerce Cloud to offer the best ecommerce experience to your customers with native online shopping sites!
Here are some real-life applications of Commerce Cloud:
- Create B2B and B2C stores using best-in-class templates to get you started
- Specify profiles and permissions for who can access your store, this can include self-registration
- Use Commerce Einstein AI to automate tasks and personalise the experience
- Build customisable reports to examine your data on the #1 CRM software – Salesforce
- Link your commerce operations with other Salesforce products, like Experience Cloud and Health Cloud to have a 360 view of your customers and business
💡 Top tip: Watch the free demo to learn more about Commerce Cloud!
Why should you use Salesforce Commerce Cloud?
Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s value proposition is that you can grow your business faster. Not only does it promise a fast time to value but it highlights the agility that the platform offers in response to the fast-paced ecommerce climate. Commerce Cloud also promises to increase sales and reduce the cost of order placement by up to 26%, which ultimately maximises your profit! Thanks to Salesforce Genie, you are getting real-time data that allows you to deliver personalised experiences to each customer throughout their journey, which helps you to deliver success!
Some benefits of using Commerce Cloud summarised:
- Unify your commerce operations by leveraging Salesforce CRM as your single source of truth for your commerce site, order management, partnership ecosystem, service offering and more
- Quickly launch best-in-class stores with no-code needed
- Provide the very best customer experience using Commerce Einstein’s AI and Salesforce Genie’s real-time data insights
- Leverage all of the above benefits to ultimately maximise your profit and reduce your lost sales
Salesforce Commerce Cloud and ProvenWorks in action
Import B2B line items easily with SimpleImport
Working with online orders manually can be challenging, especially when faced with complex orders that include rows and rows of products. These longer manual jobs are not only time consuming but also increase the chance of human error. Empower users to upload these large orders via a spreadsheet, importing these line items directly into Salesforce quickly and easily.
Reduce cart abandonment with fast address verification
When it comes to ecommerce, one of the biggest challenges is cart abandonment at checkout. Create a powerful user experience with our Address Verification Flow Component that verifies address data at the point of entry in 5 keystrokes or less.