How eCommerce businesses can use Commerce Cloud to create unified experiences across channels

Post covid, as the world moves towards digitalization at a turbo speed, people are showing their reliance on eCommerce mediums more than ever. Salesforce stated that the unique visitor count on eCommerce sites rose by 43% in the year 2020 alone. In 2021, more than 2 billion people bought goods and services online. As predicted for 2023, the world will see digital sales accounting for up to 22% of all retail sales worldwide.

Considering the huge and increasing customer base of eCommerce platforms, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud is undoubtedly the best choice to create a unified experience. It can help eCommerce businesses, small and big, strategize and create unique experiences for their customer.

In this article, we’ll cover Salesforce Commerce Cloud and how it can help your eCommerce business grow.

What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based eCommerce platform that proposes a one-stop solution for eCommerce businesses. It offers various out-of-the-box tools and consumer and seller portals along with numerous other B2B and B2C features to build your eCommerce business.

It helps you create a unique and smooth device-friendly shopping experience, dashboards for your business metrics, and streamlines the whole eCommerce process. In June 2021, Salesforce released its full on-platform version with B2B2C Cloud, i.e., B2B and B2C both.

Primary Features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Commerce Cloud has several robust features for managing and growing your eCommerce business. Moreover, it is an integral part of Salesforce Digital 360, a Salesforce platform that provides a medium to utilize digital channels for eCommerce selling and engaging with customers. 

Salesforce Digital 360 hosts some primary components of Commerce Cloud. A few of them are:

1. Commerce portals: Build quality relations with your customer base by delivering content, introducing loyalty benefits, account management, etc.
2. Order Management: This offers a robust way to manage and deliver customer orders, automating the process as much as possible and unifying the customer experience.
3. Salesforce architecture: Allows you to build eCommerce sites using pre-built frameworks, technologies, and Salesforce integrations.

What businesses use the Commerce Cloud?

Commerce Cloud is specifically designed for B2B and B2C companies. 

B2B (Business to Business)

The B2B (Business to Business) Commerce Cloud strategizes the eCommerce experience for B2B needs. These are generally other companies and organizations buying in bulk. The B2B cloud helps provide these businesses with a premium experience and onboarding. 

As it is the product of Demandware, the B2B Lightning Cloud has the advantage of smoothness and speed. It gives you the power to configure the whole UI within clicks. The main target of this application is small eCommerce businesses looking to build their eCommerce site and business from scratch.

If you already have a website you built on older versions of Salesforce, you can still use B2B Classic mode in Salesforce. However, the new lightning experience is far better and easy to use.

B2C (Business to Consumer)

The B2C (Business to consumer) Commerce Cloud is the product of CloudCraze. It is for brands that deal with many retail shoppers and guest users worldwide. It helps eCommerce brands deliver a smooth customer experience and dedicated metrics to strategize further selling for new and returning customers.

The B2C Cloud allows retail businesses to create and modify their unique platform-agnostic storefronts. The main focus goes towards Salesforce mobile payments with total customization of payment options, catalogs, order management, and many more.

This application is perfect for your business if you have a high volume and low price eCommerce business model.
The dashboard feature of Commerce Cloud helps view past metrics and future predictions in a pictorial form. This makes it easy for eCommerce businesses to refactor their business model and take further steps.

In short, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud is the perfect tool for B2B and B2C eCommerce businesses.

How can Commerce Cloud help your business create a Unified Experience?

Easy Website Creation

The Storefront Reference Architecture provided by Commerce Cloud helps you build a great eCommerce website for your business. The SRA comes with pre-designed wireframes that make web development much faster.

If your team lacks developers, you can also use pre-built templates, APIs, and other tools within the Commerce Cloud to kickstart your eCommerce website.

Personalized Customer Experience

People love personalization. Commerce Cloud gives your business an excellent customer-focused solution. You can use it to analyze and remember each user’s choices and details and provide them with a personalized shopping experience.

You get favorable insights about your customers and the store presented in pictorial dashboards. You can measure almost everything, from order history to customer behavior.

Power of AI

Data is the biggest asset of the 21st century. As an eCommerce business, you can’t analyze vast data manually. Salesforce Commerce Cloud covers you by providing the Einstein AI:
1. Personalized suggestions for returning users
2. Analysis of user behavior
3. Smart search suggestion and experience by Einstein Search Dictionary and Einstein Search Recommendations, respectively.
4. Third-party app elimination

Scalability

Be it a small eCommerce business or a business with millions of users; everyone wants to scale. You need to sell and grow simultaneously to survive in the market. Commerce Cloud offers scalability for your business and operational tools and benefits to manage traffic and increase customer base.

You need to set metrics as you scale, and the Commerce Cloud has many integrations at the platform level that adapt to your business modifications and growth.

Marketing Partner

Salesforce Commerce Cloud proves to be your end-to-end marketing ally. Many businesses use different tools for different purposes, say Mailchimp for email campaigns and Google Analytics for metrics. The Commerce Cloud gives you all in one place.

You can create and run easy campaigns, identify leads, launch promo codes, follow conversions, etc. You can also perform content management, i.e., create, edit, and deliver content over the site.

Mobile optimization

Every desk may not have a laptop or desktop, but every palm has a smartphone. Most online customers shop through mobile, and it is super important to design a mobile-friendly interface. Compromising with mobile optimization may harm your business in unforeseen ways.

Salesforce Commerce Clouds works with a mobile-first approach and ensures a great mobile-friendly experience for your customers.

Commerce Cloud Endless Aisle

A smooth payment process is the key to your customer’s experience and business profits. The Commerce Cloud Endless Aisle serves as a smooth way to make purchases online and speed up the after-payment process.

You get a clear view of every individual customer process, i.e., order fulfilment, cancellation, returns, etc. Moreover, you also get actionable options over out-of-stock or unavailable products. This helps customers know the stock metric and reduce their walkover from the website. 

Conclusion

Merging your eCommerce business with Salesforce Commerce Cloud can give you endless benefits on a single platform. The key advantages of using the commerce cloud are scalability, unified commerce, and mobile optimization.

With Commerce Cloud as your eCommerce business handler, you can generate more sales, drive traffic, and deliver impeccable eCommerce experiences to your new and returning customers. The best part is: that it is Software as a Service that works on instant real-time metrics to analyze and boost your eCommerce business.

Among the countless competitors, your eCommerce business can stand tall by automating and optimizing eCommerce processes with the Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Need help with managing your Salesforce platform? You can hire our certified offshore Salesforce Admins to work as your extended team!