SFCC offers ecommerce businesses all the necessary tools to plan, launch, market, and track their online stores. Content management, customer service management, inventory, order fulfillment, and personalized shopping are only a few of the top-of-the-line features this solution offers.
What Does Salesforce Commerce Cloud Do?
Commerce Cloud helps businesses connect with customers or potential customers at every stage of the buyer's journey and across every channel—social, web, store, and mobile. It equips businesses to effectively launch one or more brands from one location, nurture leads, drive conversions, and inspire loyal brand evangelists.
Commerce Cloud will help B2B and B2C businesses reach their ideal customers quickly and efficiently. Its cloud-based technology enables enterprises to create personalized experiences for potential buyers. By combining innovative design with artificial intelligence (AI) and seamless multichannel integrations, the Commerce Cloud ecosystem facilitates the entire buying process.
As the buying process becomes more complex—with prospects engaging with brands across multiple channels—businesses must adapt. A successful brand can no longer remain on the cutting edge through simple marketing methods. Brands must incorporate intelligent systems that track users to analyze buying patterns and complex customer behavior.
SFCC makes this possible through its predictive intelligence and omnichannel commerce capabilities. Businesses can now gather data, gain insights, and create innovative opportunities for customers across all marketing channels.
Is Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2B or B2C?
Salesforce calls Commerce Cloud "the world's leading B2C and B2B commerce solution." With two core products—B2B Commerce and B2C Commerce—SFCC offers various types and sizes of companies effective and innovative ecommerce solutions.
- B2B Commerce has the power and features to handle large orders, fast checkouts, and complex shipping functionality for business buyers. The platform enables large and small businesses to scale quickly and efficiently while giving customers personalized, streamlined experiences online.
- B2C Commerce empowers brands to create custom buying experiences on both web and mobile sites. Retailers can also launch multiple branded websites and manage them within a single space. Since customer interactions extend beyond a brand's website, B2C Commerce is explicitly designed to interact with prospects through social media and email.
What Are the Top Benefits of Salesforce Commerce Cloud?
Commerce Cloud offers users a plethora of unique advantages to help retailers optimize the customer journey. Innovative, intelligent, and interactive are three terms often used to describe this popular ecommerce platform. Here are 11 of the top benefits businesses can gain from implementing SFCC.
1. Predictive Intelligence
Einstein AI is Commerce Cloud's predictive intelligence platform. Modern shoppers expect a more personalized online experience now than they ever have in the past. With Einstein, retailers can automate processes, show more individualized results, and facilitate unique buyers’ journeys to close more sales and build customer loyalty.
With Einstein, ecommerce businesses can
- Tailor specific product recommendations for every shopper
- Offer smart search suggestions
- Improve the accuracy and order of products with Predictive Sort
- Create a consistent experience for the customer across multiple platforms
- Automate manual tasks
- Gather data about shoppers
- Harness data to deliver personalized experiences and boost conversions
- Add newly discovered synonyms of related products or popular terms to the website database with Einstein Search Dictionaries
- Reduce cart abandonment
2. Personalized Customer Experiences
A business can customize every aspect of its ecommerce site to give shoppers a unique experience with Commerce Cloud. SFCC makes it easy to create a distinct and personalized experience for customers, leading to an optimal online experience.
Brands can personalize the buying experience with
- Open commerce application programming interfaces (APIs)
- Intelligence-driven experiences on all devices and channels
- Location-level product visibility
- Inventory records management
- Customized digital storefronts and mobile apps
- Storefront workflows
- Smart recommendations to upsell customers at checkout
- Custom content and storefronts
- Personalized product recommendations
- Relevant search results
- Accurate, tailored product sorting
- Automated personalized merchandising
- Customer habit analyzation to create better shopping experiences
3. Enhanced Scalability
Today, many large brands require the capacity to handle high traffic, sudden traffic spikes, high transaction volumes, and mass amounts of inventory. As businesses expand and demand change, ecommerce platforms need to scale accordingly.
Businesses can use SFCC to
- Implement new technology quickly
- Handle high traffic volumes and massive orders
- Cope with traffic spikes on the spot
- Easily customize and deploy prebuilt storefront templates
- Create, edit, and manage content easily with Page Designer
- Expand site functionality using Salesforce's network of more than 250 technology partners
- Ensure operations comply with industry and regulatory standards
- Scale automatically
- Grow based on shopper demands (versus volume or platform)
- Build pages that load fast
- Ensure secure transactions
4. Powerful Growth Strategies
Digital commerce is proliferating at a rate of 17 percent year over year (as of Q3 CY2018). Modern ecommerce is driving business for the world's leading brands. Developing companies must have powerful growth strategies in place to continue expanding profitably.
SFCC can help businesses
- Identify industry trends and benchmarks
- Increase quality traffic and customer conversion rates
- Use content marketing to drive traffic
- Implement abandoned cart retargeting campaigns
- Streamline the checkout process
- Implement automated upselling and cross-selling strategies to increase sales
- Prioritize responsive design for mobile shoppers
- Use AI for data-driven insights into customer behavior
- Optimize messaging and offers to personalize customer touchpoints
5. A Unified Shopping Experience
Commerce Cloud can connect all digital and physical channels to create a cohesive customer journey. In other words, it follows customers on their unique journeys and connects all touchpoints to give retailers a comprehensive picture.
Commerce Cloud's Endless Aisle functionality empowers associates to exceed customer expectations by
- Creating customized mobile apps
- Empowering associates to complete purchases online or in-store
- Giving associates a complete view of each customer's shopping activity
- Accessing inventory in real time
- Reducing lost sales
- Accessing product information quickly and easily
- Adding products to a shopper’s wish lists online
6. Mobile-First Capabilities
73 percent of online traffic comes from mobile devices, and 55 percent of all orders are placed on mobile devices. Having a responsive website that prioritizes mobile users is no longer optional. Commerce Cloud offers users a rich mobile experience, so shopping and making purchases are quick and cohesive for buyers.
SFCC's mobile commerce features include
- Reporting
- Inventory management
- Innovative conversion experiences
- Optimized micromoments
- Mobile apps for in-store use
- One-to-one product recommendations
- Predictive sorting
- Personalized searches
- Auto-population features and accordion layouts for easy checkout
- Guest, express, and one-touch payment options at checkout
- Social channel and online community integration features
7. Robust Marketing Tools
Commerce Cloud's marketing toolkit enables customers to quickly and efficiently find the right products to increase conversions and sales. It also allows businesses to create, manage, and share engaging, optimized content in all the right places to help individuals make educated buying decisions.
Here are a few of SFCC's marketing tool capabilities.
- Share optimized content across multiple sites and in various languages
- Launch email, social media, and paid advertising campaigns
- Run successful promotions
- Manage social media profiles
- Run reports
- Run A/B tests
- Recommend the best products for individuals wherever they are in the buyer's journey
- Generate one-to-one predictions for shoppers
- Automate merchandising tasks
- Analyze data-based commerce insights to increase conversions
- Create a personalized shopping experience for every customer
8. Management for Multiple Stores
With Salesforce Commerce Cloud, organizations can manage multiple storefronts or brands from a single platform. Even for businesses with brands spanning across different time zones, countries, currencies, and languages, SFCC offers the perfect solution.
Commerce Cloud's multistore management opportunities comprise
- Localization and multisite management
- Unique websites for every country
- Optimal content that matches the culture and language
9. Continuous, Comprehensive Support
If there's ever a hiccup, such as a coding error or purchase concern, SFCC's support team and resource library are available to help promptly, at any time—day or night.
- 24/7 support resources: Available through Trailblazer and Help Portal
- Advisory services: Including Commerce Architects and Readiness Assessment
- Adoption programs: Like webinars, Circles of Success, and Accelerators
10. Multitenant Cloud Platform
SFCC is a multitenant cloud platform, meaning all users share the same software infrastructure and can access the same services, benefits, updates, and website maintenance. SFCC also provides a core set of services to all customers and automatically upgrades them three times a year, avoiding the need to install updates manually.
Multitenant architecture allows businesses to grow, change, and scale. Here are a few other advantages that accompany this feature.
- Fewer bug fixes
- Less service disruption
- Greater stability
- Seamless upgrade process
- Quick deployment
- Innovative features delivered throughout the year
11. Speed
Shoppers have short attention spans, which means online shopping experiences need to be flawless, convenient, and flexible. Websites need to give customers what they're looking for fast. A small delay in page loading can result in lost sales.
Besides quickly connecting customers with inventory and product catalog data, MuleSoft Accelerator for Commerce Cloud produces
- Fast load times on desktop and mobile
- Real-time data delivery
- Powerful storefront presentation
What Is Demandware?
Salesforce acquired Demandware in 2016 and turned it into what it is today: Salesforce B2C Commerce. A couple of years later, in 2018, Salesforce acquired CloudCraze, which evolved into Salesforce B2B Commerce. Salesforce now offers both B2B and B2C businesses the software needed to sell products and services successfully online.
How Much Does Salesforce Commerce Cloud Cost?
Commerce Cloud pricing can vary based on a business's individual needs. If you're interested in implementing SFCC on your business website, you can speak with a sales representative directly to discuss your overarching goals for Commerce Cloud. The SFCC team will then create a unique package that fits your needs and budget.
Supercharge Your Efforts with Commerce Cloud
If you need help determining exactly how Commerce Cloud can help your business best, Astound Commerce can help. Astound has more than 15 years of experience using Salesforce Commerce Cloud and will help you choose the right package for your budget and business needs.
Partner with Astound to implement and configure SFCC to supercharge your ecommerce efforts. Astound is a leading implementation partner for Salesforce, with more than 200 certified architects and engineers and 400 launched SFCC sites on record.
Contact us today to set up a consultation.