How is Salesforce Commerce Cloud Beneficial for your Retail Business?

Retail business owners find it important to include multiple channels into their sales and distribution aspects for staying competitive. The world that we live in is largely driven by online shopping. This is to a point that the total number of customers purchasing products on the internet has grown dramatically in the past few years.

People are comfortable pulling out their phones in a crowded restaurant for making an impulsive purchase decision based on the recommendation of a friend. It is natural for an increasing number of businesses to continue opening and pushing themselves into gaps for a small share of revenue that makes for a competitive market.

It has become important for businesses to choose a platform that handles operations, agility, scalability, and the customer experience as well. In this scenario, Salesforce Commerce Cloud has actually emerged as one of the best and most functional platforms.

What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a future-proof and comprehensive cloud-based e-commerce platform that helps organizations to create an engaging and intelligent shopping experience. This is for customers across a series of channels including social media, web, mobile, store, etc.

The retail e-commerce platform of Salesforce offers a highly functional suite of amazing features and functions using which enterprises can easily connect with existing and potential customers at each stage of the sales funnel. One of the best things about the Salesforce commerce cloud is that it also helps in excellent customer service and support across a wide range of channels and platforms.

It helps enterprises to leverage omnichannel insights for effortlessly delivering and analyzing engagement and behaviour of users across all channels. Another great advantage of Salesforce Commerce Cloud over other cloud-based e-commerce platforms is its unique and built-in predictive intelligence.

Salesforce Einstein AI is an advanced and powerful built-in predictive intelligence system that helps many enterprises to deliver some of the best shopping experiences. This is facilitated by identifying and offering smart insights on the purchasing pattern and customer behaviors.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud Serves Both B2B and B2C Businesses

 

Salesforce calls Commerce Cloud the world’s leading B2C and B2B commerce solutions. With two main products called B2B Commerce and B2C Commerce, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides various types of company effective and innovative e-commerce solutions.

• B2B Commerce: The B2B Commerce solution comes with the power to handle large orders, complex shipping functionalities, and fast checkouts for business buyers. The Commerce Cloud platform is such that it enables all kinds of businesses to scale up quickly and efficiently while giving the customers a personalized and streamlined experience on the internet.
• B2C Commerce: B2C Commerce version of the Salesforce Commerce Cloud to create buying experiences on both the web and mobile sites. The retailers have an option to launch multiple branded websites while managing them within a single space. Since all customer interactions go way beyond the brand’s website, the B2C Commerce Cloud is designed to interact with prospects on social media and email.

Benefits of Salesforce Commerce Cloud for Retail Businesses

 

1. Predictive Intelligence

 

The feature of predictive intelligence along with Commerce Cloud eliminates any need for manual data analysis and a host of third-party tools. Einstein is the next-generation artificial intelligence embedded in the Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It is a system that enables brands to offer a delightful and personalized shopping experience across all channels without any interruption in the user experience.

With Salesforce Einstein, brands are empowered to recommend the best products at each touchpoint; generate predictions for all shoppers; get smart conversions with data-driven insights; save time because of automated merchandising tasks. The personalization offered by the Salesforce Commerce Cloud is important for brands that wish to stay competitive because with every passing day customers are demanding personalization.

Einstein and Commerce Cloud offers everything considered important in terms of personalization. By offering a smart, predictive, and a personalized experience, brands can depend on the Commerce Cloud to enhance loyalty and facilitate conversions. If we add a unified buying experience and commerce cloud benefits to that then it becomes easier for the customer to buy from anywhere including social media, mobile, website, and store.

2. Seamless Ordering Experience

 

It is important to create customized shopping experiences along with a seamless ordering process. Oftentimes, companies get overwhelmed in the process of integrating systems with their legacy management systems and this makes for a slow and error-filled end-to-end commerce experience.

This is where the lightning order management add-on comes into play. It is a single unified platform that integrates all of the systems while allowing a person to visually manage important workflows. With a single look at the inventory, it becomes possible to prevent all sell-throughs and overstocks.

When the Salesforce Lightning Order Management is your ordering command center, you can customize the shipping, processing, and delivery process used for simple drag and drop tools. No coding is required and there is also an option to automate payment capture and invoices.

What’s notable is that Salesforce noticed the self-service option power for boosting customer loyalty and driving purchases from returning customers. Lightning can make it all a reality for you by giving customers the ability to check the order status or manage cancellations, returns, and exchanges.

3. Improved Marketing

 

In between the confines of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the retailers can manage and share product content, information, and images across various categories, sites, and catalogs. In fact, it is also possible to unify all of those things across multiple sites with different currencies and languages.

It is a CRM for the retail industry that enables us to connect with customers with the right product, price, assortment, offer and content at just the right time for maximizing conversion rates and increasing average order value.

Finally, the brand marketers, content creators, and merchants are all empowered to drive the business, launch campaigns, run promotions, refresh regularly, and launch A/B tests for optimizing conversions without any technical support. One can also optimize customer searches and conversions by using the merchant rules based on search intent and profitability of products.

If we add this feature to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud then the retailers have a one-stop solution for handling almost everything from paid advertising, social media management to email campaigns and reports for each touchpoint and experience with a brand.

4. Great Sales Opportunities

 

When we talk about the inventory, statistics show that out of stocks cost the retailers a significant amount of money in sales. Even though online shopping has become a norm, there are still many people who prefer shopping from brick and mortar stores.

But the fact is that when the shelves are not restocked with the products that the customers are looking for, the customers go to a competitor to buy a product. This is both online and physically.

A Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud add-on called Endless Aisle is meant to minimize sales lost because of OOS or unavailable products by tying the in-store and digital experiences together. Instead of leaving the customers entirely empty-handed or disappointed, a brand can have its associates greet the customers with a smile.

If a brand allows the customers to place digital orders for products that are out of stock with an option of getting them delivered to the customer’s homes whenever the product is in stock, it is always helpful.

Even better, the shoppers can help themselves using the in-store kiosks. Other than seeing an increase in sales and brand engagement, the use of endless aisle technology can enable a team to improve forecast accuracy as well.

5. Customer Support

In terms of the customer support offered by Salesforce, there is an extraordinary level of promptness shown by the organization. The customers of Salesforce think of the platform as a lot more than just a CRM software provider.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud can be considered as a strategic advisor on innovating and enabling the business to grow. This is a great deal because it is actually something rare that only a few competitors can match up to.

The Salesforce team does not just respond at the right time but also ensures that the user is not facing any problem. Also, if the consumer partners with a certified Salesforce consulting partner, the road becomes much simpler to walk on for the development objects and the business process adjustments.

An online case submission with a two-day response time is included in the subscription fee. However, if the customer wants an added support with a prompt response time then signing a premium and useful admin support becomes important.

6. Content Management

 

In the present competitive world of B2C businesses, a strong online presence is important. With the help of Commerce Page Designer, one can create an appealing website that is both easy and efficient.

The Commerce Page Designer offers easy-to-use capabilities that enable the marketers and merchandisers to design some of the most engaging and feature rich experiences without any code. What’s more, pre-built templates and tools can be used for converting complex data into customized content such as lookbooks, promotional banners, and landing pages.

All of this can be done within a matter of seconds without any need for an outside agency. In fact, it is also possible to embed Einstein Product recommendations for showcasing relevant content to users based on geographical area, customer group, language, and device type. A major percentage of customers expect a connected experience across various channels which is why this tool is made to keep the content consistent.

7. Omni Channel Capabilities

 

The retail e-commerce platform of Salesforce Commerce Cloud unifies e-commerce, offline store operations, and order management in just one SaaS solution. This platform is largely focused on allowing the retailers to run their business across various channels from a single platform while being widely respected for streamlining sales, operations, and fulfillment at scale.

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud also enables the merchants to implement services such as buying anywhere and fulfilling anywhere with the help of an order management solution. This offers many flexible purchasing options to the shoppers including shipping from stores, in-store pickup, etc.

8. Pricing

 

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a CRM for the retail industry that comes with an income-sharing pricing model. An important part of Salesforce’s contractual obligation is that it takes a license fee reliant on a percentage commission of the online sales. The Salesforce team recently changed pricing so that the small businesses could use the platform effectively and make their best use.

The pricing model that is applied to help small businesses use the platform is based on Salesforce Commerce Cloud Starter Tier, Growth Tier, and Unlimited Tier. Other than this, Salesforce CRM also offers SMB and enterprise pricing plans that can be billed annually. Some bundles called Sales Cloud Lightning and Service Cloud Lightning are also available on requests.

9. E-commerce Functionality

 

The platform comes integrated with some of the most important e-commerce functionalities such as catalog management, internalization, and omnichannel benefits which makes Salesforce Commerce Cloud the best b2c ecommerce platform. These functions are all integrated with machine learning, personalization, and reporting which makes all the more effective.

That being said, it must be noted that the Salesforce Commerce Cloud comes from Demandware acquisition which means that the platform works independently and is not integrated with Salesforce products. More often than not, custom development is required to leverage the optional features which can create some complications in case the tools needed are not already present in the Salesforce Marketplace.

Conclusion

 

Given the benefits offered by Salesforce Commerce Cloud, it will be safe to say that it is a functional and scalable e-commerce platform with multiple native capabilities of merchandising, multiple store management, internationalization, and customer segmentation.

The platform is used by many retail brands because of features such as endless aisle, point of sale, internalization features, advanced merchandising, machine learning, and proven cloud-based solutions.

One of the best decisions to choose Salesforce Commerce Cloud relies on the nature of a business, priorities, customization needed, the amount of freedom, and agility needed in a platform. In case you wish to make the best out of a proven cloud-based platform then Salesforce Commerce Cloud is the best choice for you.

For any more information on the implementation and use of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, get in touch with the team of Encaptechno today.