Why Are Salesforce Commerce Cloud Solutions the Best for E-Commerce Businesses?

 When running an E-Commerce store, it's essential to have a reliable, secure, and customizable platform. This helps you offer your customers the best possible shopping experience while ensuring that your business runs smoothly.

E-Commerce businesses have to rely on technology to support the marketing strategies and growth of their operations. While software development/maintenance (dev-ops) and system administration can be a significant drain on the resources of small and medium-sized businesses, the cloud is increasingly becoming popular as the go-to solution.

How Does the Commerce Cloud Work?

For starters, Salesforce surveyed B2B and B2C buyers in 29 countries to understand customer needs and expectations. The prevalent trends in E-Commerce are:

• 73% of customers want companies to understand their unique expectations and requirements. Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) help meet these expectations at scale.
• 88% of customers stated along with products and services, the shopping experience provided by a company is equally important.
• Customers who used AR/VR, contactless payments, and social media shopping during the pandemic overwhelmingly intend to maintain or further increase the usage of digital-first experiences over the next three years

Against this backdrop, a Commerce Cloud solution, which provides an integrated platform, helps businesses to understand and meet customer expectations.

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a multi-tenant, cloud-based commerce platform. It comprises innovative the-box features and valuable tools to help streamline purchases, personalize shopping experiences, and create mobile-friendly interactions for B2B and B2C customers. It leverages the following principles:

1. Intelligent, unified, omnichannel purchase experiences: It enables E-Commerce businesses to match customers' requirements in terms of technology and policies, all channels - mobile, social, web, and store. For example, customers can purchase online, return in-store, lodge service issues on social media, and expect it to be viewable to the service representatives.
2. Customer data integration: Salesforce’s innovative Commerce Cloud technology enables companies to integrate data from numerous channels and touchpoints. The Commerce Cloud leverages predictive technologies like Einstein to understand customer preferences and profiles from social and multimedia-based data and predict future behavior.
3. Engaging customer experiences: Commerce Cloud aggregates data to enable consumers can have a better experience as they shop, return items, service merchandise, and so on. It helps online stores to launch brands quicker, grow organically, and increase reach. It also helps drive conversions and builds brand loyalty through superior customer experiences.

Furthermore, with next-gen AI infused into the platform, Salesforce Cloud Solutions enables E-Commerce businesses to offer a high degree of personalization. At the same time, a robust technology partner ecosystem and in-house experts support business growth.

Components of Commerce Cloud

The most popular configuration of Salesforce includes the critical components needed for comprehensive, unified commerce. The vital components include:

1. Commerce Cloud Digital: Businesses can create engaging and responsive E-Commerce sites using popular tools, features, and mobile frameworks. Moreover, you can present the online store on social media, extending the target audience. You can also optimize search and mobile payment, reduce cart abandonments and implement enhancements into the app to improve the mobile experience.

2. Storefront Reference Architecture: This component lets you conveniently build an efficient E-Commerce website. The architecture facilitates scalable solutions using pre-designed wireframes, embedded digital technologies, and valued integrations to personalize and manage your website successfully.

3. Endless Aisle: This helps simplify the shopping process for customers and store associates by integrating shopping channels. You can also enable your teams to access the customer database and online inventory details to improve customer experiences and let customers create their wish lists by highlighting special offers in your online store.

4. Commerce Portals and Platforms: The Salesforce Commerce Cloud lets you build long-term and engaging relationships with your customers through account portals, loyalty programs, etc. You can also offer learning materials along the different shopping stages and use social media and communities to provide your customers with content and company news.

Likewise, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform offers various developer tools, templates, and commerce APIs to create E-Сommerce websites without coding skills. Again, E-Commerce stores can consolidate data across all digital channels on a single platform for data-driven insights about customer experiences.

5. Order Management: This software lets businesses optimize fulfillment and delivery processes, automate payment processes, and facilitate returns and cancellations of customers worldwide.

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud is also available as two stand-alone product lines focusing on the B2C and B2B segments.

Commerce Cloud in B2B Businesses

Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud comprises superior analytics and facilitates the implementation of custom and branded storefronts and omnichannel communication.

The Commerce Cloud enables self-service for B2B buyers, facilitating a smooth and convenient shopping experience, which will keep them returning for repeat purchases. In addition, the self-service functionality helps you optimize your business processes and simplify complex and tedious manual tasks while allowing you and your team to concentrate on growth opportunities.

Salesforce B2B Commerce solutions are also designed to support innovation and scalability, increasing the speed to market while adapting to changing customer needs. Moreover, the insights provided by the Commerce Cloud can help businesses implement data-driven strategies for online sales.

In summary, Salesforce B2B Commerce solutions can help streamline your B2B E-Commerce operations and are a valuable tool enabling you to scale your business and boost sales.

Commerce Cloud in B2C Businesses

Salesforce B2C Commerce solutions allow for innovation, scale, and faster achievement of goals leveraging unified digital experiences.

Salesforce B2C Commerce solutions enable businesses to create storefronts seamlessly across multiple platforms, emphasizing Salesforce mobile payments and purchases. The application allows E-Commerce retailers to extensively personalize catalogs, payment options, accounts, ordering processes, and other features.

In addition, customer-relevant features, such as multi-language support, SEO, social media linking, localized shopping, innovative promotions, custom marketing campaigns, and more, are included.  These boost customer experience and satisfaction.

What Business Sizes are suited to Salesforce Commerce Cloud Solutions?

Cloud Commerce solutions cater to the needs of B2C and B2B companies. In general, the Commerce Cloud is used by companies having between 50-200 employees and $1M-10M in revenue. Furthermore, it is popular with teams responsible for managing store and customer experiences across the brand.

Salesforce is one of the innovators and most-known cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. Salesforce’s primary customers are C-level or high-ranking executives.

Along with a wide variety of need-based software solutions, Salesforce’s customized packages are suitable for businesses of every size and anyone looking to grow their E-Commerce business. It helps to successfully integrate sales, marketing, service, commerce, and IT teams with a unified solution for every stage of their customer's shopping process.

To give you an idea, the following is a breakdown of Salesforce Commerce Cloud stores indicating the number of products they typically sell, based on November 2022 figures:

• 17.7% of Salesforce Commerce Cloud stores sell between 250 - 999 different products.
• 16.7% of Salesforce Commerce Cloud stores sell between 1 - 9 different products.
• 13.3% of Salesforce Commerce Cloud stores sell between 1000 - 4999 different products.

The B2C Commerce Solutions are typically used to manage E-Commerce websites with many guest shoppers while enhancing customers' overall shopping experience. Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud solutions are ideal for online retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG), with high volumes and low sale prices.

On the other hand, Salesforce B2B Commerce caters to the needs of B2B customers, who typically make large purchases,  providing them with premium experiences. The application enables small eCommerce businesses seeking to develop their E-Commerce site and business from scratch.

E-Commerce companies using SalesForce Commerce Cloud

According to statistics by a leading database of ecommerce stores, Apparel products (36.1%), Beauty & Fitness products (12.0%), and Home & Garden products (8.5%) were the top three industry verticals using Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

At the same time, as of Nov 2022, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud has 5,070 live stores running on its platform. These also include Sports, Consumer Electronics, Travel, Art & Entertainment, Food & Drink, Health, People & Society, Toys & Hobbies, Autos & Vehicles, Pets & Animals, Gifts & Special Events, Business & Industrial, Mass Merchants & Department Stores, Computers, and Games categories.

The top stores powered by Salesforce Commerce Cloud include Converse Official, Currys UK, Adidas Brasil, The Michaels Companies, Inc.Bath & Body Works.

Likewise, some of the top stores that have switched to Salesforce Commerce Cloud from competitive ecommerce platforms include Lacoste UK Online Boutique, Reebok US, Kate Spade New York, Tiendanimal, and Belkin US.

The United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany, all highly evolved  e-commerce markets, are the countries where Salesforce Commerce Cloud has the most stores.

Conclusion

The key benefits of using the commerce cloud include scalability, unified digital interactions, and mobile optimization.

Businesses can benefit significantly by merging their E-Commerce business with Salesforce Commerce Cloud on a single platform. Using the Commerce Cloud as an E-Commerce platform helps B2B and B2C enterprises to increase sales, generate traffic, and provide superior, user-friendly E-Commerce experiences to new and loyal customers.

Most notably, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud Software as a Service works on real-time metrics to analyze and drive E-Commerce business. In a nutshell, your E-Commerce business can get ahead of the competition, dovetailing on the automated and optimizing processes offered by the Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

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