Did you know that:
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud processes $21 billion in gross merchandise value per year?
- Supports over half a billion global individual shopper site visits each month?
The success in numbers shown above looks like this in real life: last year, Salesforce organized a Dreamforce conference that gathered the biggest names in the IT industry to participate as speakers, attract thousands of developers, partners, and enthusiasts, and you get Red Hot Chili Peppers to deliver an epic performance.
American football has the Superbowl, and the software industry has Dreamforce.
So, if you are having second thoughts about which platform to use or switch to for website development, consider Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
This article will give you an overview of what Salesforce Commerce Cloud is all about and what it can do for you.
This is what you’ll find out:
1. A quick look at Salesforce Commerce Cloud,
2. What Salesforce Commerce Cloud specializes in,
3. Who thrived with Salesforce Commerce Cloud,
4. Why scaling your business has never been easier,
5. What others say about Salesforce Commerce Cloud,
6. What the challenges are and,
7. What it takes to handle Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Let’s get to it right away!
1. A quick look at Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based eCommerce platform that enables businesses to create personalized shopping experiences for their customers across various channels, including online, mobile, social, and in-store.
It gives you various tools to manage your online sales operations – product catalogs, shopping carts, payment systems, and customer accounts.
Who are the main Salesforce Commerce Cloud customers?
The primary target audience includes C-level executives and individuals responsible for driving business growth through digital channels. Additionally, it is highly beneficial for those managing stores and enhancing customer experiences across their brand.
What types of companies benefit the most from Salesforce Commerce Cloud?
It is a platform that can benefit a range of companies. Still, it is particularly well-suited for mid to large-sized businesses with a high sales volume and a need for scalability and advanced features.
What makes Salesforce Commerce Cloud stand out from its competitors?
Apart from all the fantastic features, the most significant advantage is its innovative technologies. And yes, we are talking about artificial intelligence.
The AI tool called Einstein takes a deep dive into customers’ behaviors and creates special and customized recommendations, saving their time and enhancing their overall customer experience.
Now that we’ve seen some basic stuff about Salesforce Commerce Cloud, let’s see what more it can offer you.
2. What Salesforce Commerce Cloud specializes in?
Let’s look through the major Salesforce Commerce Cloud features that will be helpful for your business:
- You can operate all your eCommerce operations (from order management to inventory tracking) on a single platform.
- You can track your customers’ behavior and preferences with powerful analytics and reporting tools and improve the looks and functionalities of your online stores accordingly.
- You can integrate your eCommerce operations with key business systems like CRM, ERP, and POS.
- It’s optimized for mobile devices, meaning customers can shop easily on their smartphones and tablets (for example, it has swipe-based navigation and mobile-friendly checkout pages).
- Order management: real-time inventory tracking, order status updates, and automatic order routing to the appropriate fulfillment center.
- Content management: You can create landing pages, product descriptions, blog posts, and preview and schedule content updates.
- It has marketing automation features such as automated marketing campaigns, email, and social media marketing (through integration with third-party marketing automation tools). This includes segmenting customer data, triggering personalized messages, and tracking campaign performance.
- You can optimize your eCommerce sites for search engines (SEO optimization) by managing meta tags, creating SEO-friendly URLs, and generating sitemaps, among other things.
- As already mentioned, you can go hard on customization with Einstein AI.
- It’s highly secure and reliable.
Check out all features here.
3. Who thrived with Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Are you curious to see what a Salesforce Commerce Cloud website looks like?
Let’s check the websites of famous brands built on SFCC.
New Balance
)
New Balance as a great example of a Website built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud
New Balance and Salesforce Commerce Cloud have been partners for years, and SFCC is behind their online store!
New Balance has seized the opportunity to make the shopping experience more exciting, which is one of the main reasons why their revenue in 2022 was a whopping $5.3 billion!
GUESS
Guess as a great example of a Website built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud
In 2019, Guess embarked on an adventure of its complete digital transformation. Some goals were set (increasing sales to 250 million by $2025, sheesh!), and partnerships were made to help them get there.
With the help of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Guess’s website speed and reliability improved immediately, with the home page loading times reduced by 72%.
Also, Guess customizes its eCommerce experience using Einstein, which promotes specific products to individual customers, resulting in higher conversion rates.
Now, Guess is well on the way to meeting its mark two years ahead of schedule! Talk about making the right moves.
Read Guess’s success story here.
Formula 1
)
Formula 1 as a great example of a Website built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Formula 1 experienced a sudden peak in popularity after being featured in the 2019 Netflix series, “Drive to Survive”. Suddenly, they had millions of new fans, and the next question was – who are these fans, and what do we do with them?
This is where Salesforce came into power because its tools of customer data insights were the key to connecting to the audience and keeping them. Wanna know exactly how they do it?
For example, when fans register for an event organized by Formula 1, the brand’s representatives can instantly access information such as the fans’ names, engagement history, preferred drivers, and previous purchases.
Then, after the race, Formula 1 can tailor follow-up communications to each fan, including references to their favorite driver and product suggestions based on their purchase history. So cool, right?
Check out the whole story HERE.
4. Why scaling your business has never been easier?
Every business strives to become scalable at one point. But even though it may not seem so, scaling your business can be daunting, requiring significant resources and a lot of hard work.
Many eCommerce businesses never become scalable at all. Why is that?
Mainly because running an eCommerce business is hella complex. The top three biggest reasons why companies struggle to become scalable are:
1. Technology isn’t on point
Managing a website’s infrastructure becomes a struggle once your business grows, which requires specialized knowledge and expertise.
2. There is no automation in place
Things like managing inventory, organizing shipping, handling returns, and so on need to run like a clock without errors. You simply do not have the time to deal with that if you are to become scalable.
3. Not enough resources
Many businesses may not have the financial resources or staffing capabilities to invest in the necessary infrastructure and resources to support scalability.
So now that we have identified which challenges you may face, the next step is to test whether you are on the right track to making your business scalable.
Ask yourself a list of questions you can find HERE.
Have you already seen this article? We explained precisely and in detail how to scale your business with Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
In short, the good news is that Salesforce Commerce Cloud has thought about all those issues and offers some pretty great features that can take you to the next level.
So now let’s take a look at how it can help you become scalable.
You can offer personalized shopping experience to your customers
)
Key Personalization Statistics in eCommerce
Salesforce Commerce Cloud lets you collect information from your eCommerce site, social media, and mobile app to learn more about your customers’ behavior and preferences, which you can later use to send them personalized marketing campaigns and product recommendations.
Also, if something is out of stock, there are features to show customers similar products online and to return products easily.
„Mobile-first“ approach
Since so many people are shopping on their mobile phones, it’s super important to ensure that your online store is easy to use on mobile devices. Luckily, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is designed with a “mobile-first” approach, which means it’s optimized for mobile shopping. In short, customer experience is amazing on any device.
Order management without a hitch
Salesforce Commerce Cloud was designed to handle sudden increases in online traffic and allows your eCommerce business to adapt quickly; it lets you manage your entire order process from one platform, keeping track of inventory, orders, and delivery status in real time. This means you can provide customers with up-to-date information and eliminate errors, delays, and lost orders.
Einsten AI to spice it all up
Now this is a mad feature! With Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s Einstein AI, you can analyze data to identify inconsistencies and opportunities and get real-time analytics to monitor sales, customer behavior, product performance, and customer satisfaction.
This information lets you identify trends and make data-driven decisions to improve your operations. Einstein AI can also provide personalized product recommendations and optimize marketing strategies by predicting the most effective campaigns and identifying the best time to send them.
Einstein AI’s five main features are:
1. Einstein Predictive Sort: Provides personalized search results to customers quickly to increase sales.
2. Einstein Product Recommendations: Automatically displays highly relevant product options on every page to improve the shopping experience.
3. Einstein Search Dictionaries: Identifies popular search terms and synonyms to ensure relevant results appear in every search.
4. Einstein Search Recommendations: Recommends related products to shoppers looking for specific items.
5. Einstein Commerce Insights: Analyzes customer behavior and metrics to understand shopping habits and decisions.
Become marketing experts ASAP
Salesforce Commerce Cloud optimizes customer searches and increases the likelihood of conversions through product ranking; offers a range of SEO optimization tools that you can use to enhance their online visibility and attract more potential customers; and you can get the most out of its multi-channel selling feature.
5. What others say about Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Let’s see what others say about Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Is it that good?
Here are the ratings on some of the popular review websites:
- 4.4/5 (99 reviews on Gartner)
- 8.1/10 (383 reviews on TrustRadius)
- 4.2/5 (415 reviews on G2)
Okay, so we could say that the average rating is 4.2 – and that’s really good!
Let’s check out the actual reviews to get a clearer picture of why it has such high ratings.
„Reporting tool is a visual treat to comprehend difficult data into meaningful presentations. All the opportunities are tracked, and followed up with stages. Also, the support has been quick and very positive from the team.”
Reviewer from Gartner
„It is easy to use; it will easily integrate with other Salesforce clouds such as sales, service, and marketing clouds. We were able to manage the end-to-end commerce, including the promo codes distribution, with the help of marketing integration. If you are already a Salesforce user, you will definitely love it.”
Reviewer from TrustRadius
„The best thing about Salesforce Commerce for B2C is that it is very user-friendly and caters to businesses of all sizes. The initial dashboard makes it easy to navigate and find what you’re looking for, and the adaptation features allow users to customize the service according to their specific needs. Additionally, Salesforce’s customer service philosophy is based on providing personalized attention to each client, enhancing the overall experience with this service.”
Reviewer from G2
So, we get that Salesforce Commerce Cloud is pretty awesome – one of the reasons we decided to work with it!
But, like any other platform, it’s not perfect.
So, what are some of the common difficulties that you can come across? Can they be solved?
Let’s find out in the next section.
6. Challenges with Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Here are some things that reviewers pointed out that Salesforce Commerce Cloud lacks:
- Hard to handle:
Developers without specific training in SFCC may find it difficult to read the software programming language.
- Complex to switch to:
If you want to switch to Salesforce Commerce Cloud, you will need a bunch of training, experience, and time to be ready to use the platform.
- Too many features:
Although it offers a bunch of unique features, it’s challenging to make use of all of them and in the same time have people within your team with the expertise to work with them.
Ready to hear how you can quickly solve these issues? Keep reading.
7. What it takes to handle Salesforce Commerce Cloud
One of the biggest challenges that users listed was its complexity and how hard it was to set it up without the help of experienced developers.
We have concluded that Salesforce Commerce Cloud has more advantages than flaws, so opting for it is the right decision. Now, all you have to do is find the best partner!
This is where we from BeeIT hit the stage.
Our team has years-long experience with Salesforce and holds all there is to know in its little finger.
But besides our expertise, it is essential to have an open and transparent relationship with our clients, which is why they are always informed in detail on the progress of each phase.
Finally, our strategy is extremely result-oriented, and we always employ our creativity and our best efforts to deliver beyond our clients’ expectations!
Want to see what we can offer you?
Get in touch with us today by clicking HERE.
8. Key Takeaways about Salesforce Commerce Cloud
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based eCommerce platform best suited for mid to large-sized businesses.
- One of its most significant assets is Einsten AI which takes a deep dive into customers’ behaviors and creates customized recommendations (among other things).
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud helps you be scalable by providing a bunch of features such as SEO optimization, content management, order management, and integration with other key business systems, such as CRM, ERP, POS, marketing automation, multi-channel selling, etc.
- It has ratings of an average 4.2 on popular review websites (800+ reviews).
- Choosing the riught development partner for your SFCC project is crucial for your success.
Aaaaand – that’s a wrap!
I hope this blog post was useful for you – great job if you made it all the way to the end.
