9 Ways Salesforce Commerce Cloud Can Take Your eCommerce Strategy to the Next Level

We’ve seen the rise of digital in the recent past, but after the paradoxes of 2020, the shift to digital went into turbo speed and we witnessed a heavy reliance of customers on digital channels for purchase and sale.

According to Salesforce, the number of unique online visitors on a commerce site rose by over 43% across the globe in 2020!^[i]. In fact, according to research in the year 2023^[ii], digital sales are forecasted to reach 22% of all retail sales worldwide.

The numbers depict the fast development of the eCommerce market and the ever-increasing interest of users in online shopping. However, small businesses still face the age-old challenge – how to build and grow their small business eCommerce strategy with limited budget and resources.

That’s where Salesforce Commerce Cloud chimes in. With an array of powerful features, it can help to deliver unified and personalized commerce experiences.

In this blog post, we’ll cover how Salesforce Commerce Cloud can help small eCommerce businesses grow and create unique shopping experiences for customers.

What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a powerful cloud-based commerce platform, packed with multiple out-of-the-box features, useful tools, and commerce portals for scaling your online business and helping you ace your digital impression.

It is widely used by organizations, mostly with 50-200 employees and a revenue of $1M-10M. It’s in no way a platform solely for big businesses.

Types of Organizations That Can Use Commerce Cloud

Both B2B buyers and B2C shoppers differ in the way they use eCommerce sites/apps and the functionality they need.

That’s why Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers two commerce products:

• B2B Commerce
• B2C Commerce

Both these products have innovative capabilities with artificial intelligence (AI) and seamless multichannel integrations so that you can streamline the entire buying process be it for B2B or B2C.

How Does Salesforce Commerce Cloud Help Small Businesses?

In the age of unified commerce, for small businesses, Salesforce Commerce Cloud can be your best bet to shift to the digital world, all while creating and sustaining customer engagement.

Let’s look into how it ensures success for now and in the future.

1. Hassle-Free Website Creation

Salesforce Commerce Cloud has an advanced framework Storefront Reference Architecture to help you easily build a professional eCommerce website with pre-designed wireframes.

Another edge over other similar platforms is that even if you or your team doesn’t have the coding skills to create an eCommerce website, you can use the Commerce Platform that offers you templates, developer tools, and commerce APIs.

2. Unified and Personalized Shopping Experiences

The number of your customers may be small but you can’t remember every detail to deliver superlative personalized experiences.

Enter – Customer Service Center.

It can get you insights about your digital store and each shopper. Also, you get a dashboard that has back-end details of products, customer behavior, order histories, and more for a comprehensive view.

3. Added Power of Artificial Intelligence

Data is an organization’s biggest asset, only when it is analyzed effectively. As a small business, you can’t always rely solely on manual ways of analyzing and applying your data. Salesforce Commerce Cloud has the powerful Einstein AI that isn’t common among other platforms. This gets you an AI edge for better decision-making.

Einstein AI can:

• Track and analyze user behavior
• Provide personalized recommendations to users
• Provide smart search suggestions with Einstein Search Dictionaries
• Improve search experience with Einstein Search Recommendations
• Eliminate the need to use third-party apps for data analysis

4. Scalability

You may be a small business for now, but as you grow, you must ensure that any platform that you use can support your future growth. Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a scalable cloud platform that offers operational benefits and business tools that can easily manage huge demand and traffic spikes without any prior planning from your end. It has various platform-level integrations that adapt and scale as your requirements change.

5. Marketing Ally

Let’s look at an example to see how Commerce Cloud can be your marketing ally. Let’s say, you use MailChimp as an email marketing tool and Google Analytics to track the data of the users. With Salesforce Commerce Cloud added to the mix, you can manage all your data in one place. This can help with better customer insights, efficiency, and team collaboration.

With Salesforce Commerce Cloud, you can create and launch campaigns, roll out offers or promo codes, run A/B tests to check for conversion with ease. Also, it has advanced features for content management that let users create, tailor, and deliver content quickly.

6. Mobile Optimization

In our mobile world, you must ensure that your digital store is user-friendly and mobile-optimized. Salesforce Commerce Cloud follows a mobile-first approach to give end-users a great mobile experience. Additionally, you can manage your inventory with the ease of a few clicks on your phone.

7. Omni-Channel Functionalities

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is packed with features to simplify and streamline processes like inventory management, launching campaigns, and more using a single platform. Additionally, merchants can implement services (such as ‘buy anywhere and fulfill anywhere’) via their order management solution, which extends multiple flexible purchasing options to the shoppers.

8. Merchandising and Catalog Management

Salesforce Commerce Cloud has powerful features that allow you to support complex product types (master products, bundled products, product sets, grouped products, etc). Also, you can schedule tasks and create multiple catalogs easily.

9. Easier Purchasing Process

With Salesforce Commerce Cloud, you get the Commerce Cloud Endless Aisle – a smarter way to make the purchasing process easier for your customers and your store associates. It gives your team members better access to a single view of each customer’s order fulfillment, return activity, information about online inventory, and promotions.

Additionally, you can reduce store walkouts because of out-of-stock or unavailable products by giving in-store customers product options, including online-only products. Its numerous features enable customers to not just buy with ease but also return products anywhere which isn’t common for other platforms.

As a small business or start-up, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform offers three fundamental differentiators: faster innovation, predictive intelligence, and unified commerce.

And the best part, unlike other Platform as a Service (PaaS) it is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that isn’t limited to a one-size-fits-all approach and gives constant access to real-time information for your online as well as offline operations.

With Commerce Cloud in your corner, you can move to market faster, drive revenue, and deliver consistent shopping experiences across channels.

Wish to scale your eCommerce business with the power of Salesforce Commerce Cloud? Talk to us!

Statistics References

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