Salesforce Commerce Cloud delivers the speed, agility, innovation and superior economics required to master the new retail reality of constant and unpredictable change. Their enterprise retail solution is powered by a central cloud platform to drive consumer engagement across all devices, channels and geographies. The cloud platform is open and extensible, and provides retailers with the enterprise scale required for complex operations. It includes a flexible retail data model with core commerce functions that remain consistent across user applications and channel delivery. It also includes a platform API that allows unique development without disrupting the flow of Commerce Cloud’s continuous updates. Commerce Cloud enables both business and technical users within a retail organization to work with intuitive commerce applications. Leveraging omni-channel merchandising and marketing functionality, retailers can develop unique capabilities and create engaging shopping experiences that differentiate their brand and convert consumers to buyers. Unique consumer experiences and business logic are stored centrally and can be quickly deployed across the retail enterprise through the commerce accelerator, a combination of reference applications, Open Commerce APIs and LINK integrations. With this combination, Commerce Cloud removes the barriers and complexities of traditional licensed and hosted software, and allows retailers to execute the strategic business initiatives that drive growth.
In short, this program is a cloud-based commerce platform. Users can craft an intelligent buying experience for their customers while integrating all their sales channels (mobile users, social media platforms, your web store, your brick and mortar shop, etc.) so you can handle the entirety of your business all from one place!
With so many features and tools available, entrepreneurs can build brand loyalty and connect their commerce with all the following branches of their business:
- Sales,
- Customer service,
- Marketing,
- Developing your community,
- Order fulfilment,
All in all, Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers a complete solution for handling the day to day running of your e-commerce business. You can launch an online presence relatively quickly and grow your business by reaching out to a larger pool of customers. With a plethora of sophisticated technology at your fingertips, you can craft fabulous shopping experiences for your customers. As you delve deeper into Salesforce’s resources, you’ll see they offer tons of ways you can personalize your user experience and marketing campaigns to intrigue your target demographic.
Benefits
Salesforce Commerce Cloud is an ecommerce platform designed to help you grow your brand and convert more customers faster. Here are the platform’s top benefits:
Faster Time to Value
Commerce Cloud creates a faster path between your ideas and execution. First, business users do not have to worry about whether the infrastructure is ready to support their initiatives. Because cloud readiness is never an issue, they can launch new sites or execute promotions in days or hours, not months. Role-based, intuitive user interfaces empower the business user with control over the brand experience and site functionality — all with minimal IT involvement, as the cloud automatically scales and supports whatever they have planned. This frees your IT department to focus on driving innovation and strategic initiatives instead of supporting infrastructure and implementing upgrades. By empowering your users in these ways, you empower your business with tremendous agility.
Seamless and Continuous Innovation
Salesforce Commerce Cloud eliminates the barriers to innovation that are common with legacy commerce solutions, empowering you to keep pace with today’s dynamic market and evolving customer needs. The app is seamlessly upgraded up to eight times a year, delivering new features and enhancements without disrupting your day-to-day operations. Its open architecture enables you to build your own unique capabilities without compromising the cloud upgrade path. The vendor makes it easy for you to connect to your choice of third-party technologies through pre-built integrations that are resistant to breakage when upgrades occur.
Supportive Community
Working with Salesforce Commerce Cloud you become part of a large, vibrant community that functions as a source of fresh ideas and insights. Due the fact that this app is built on multi-tenant cloud architecture, all users run it on a single code base using the same version of the software. This makes it easy to share innovation and ideas across the vibrant user community. You also benefit from the intelligence harnessed by the cloud. Because every customer’s shopper interactions run through the Commerce Cloud, the vendor continuously builds a rich behavioral data set that can be used in aggregate as a benchmarking tool to drive continuous improvement. Your ability to tap into the knowledge and experience of this collaborative community creates a powerful network effect to drive your own innovation.
One of the keys to the Success of the Salesforce brand is in the way it services its customers. The company has an open and easily-accessible customer service team that’s made available 24/7 to Commerce Cloud users. And that’s not just limited to issues with code or store customization. In fact, Salesforce Commerce Cloud has an ever-expanding knowledge base and support community to help you tackle any issue you may come across while operating your store.
Shared Revenue Model
The Salesforce Commerce Cloud business model is based on shared success, which means the vendor is fully vested in helping you grow and ensuring you succeed. They offer insights based on data and results pulled from across their entire user set, and their Customer Success Management and Optimization & Growth teams are at your service to provide the advice and support you need to succeed.
Enhanced Customer Segmentation
You’ll find that customer data is a recurring theme in our Salesforce Commerce Cloud Review. Mainly because everything you do with your online business should be based on data, and Commerce Cloud gives it to you in spades. With the sophisticated AI available, you can get maximum insight into the behaviour of your customers. You’re not just limited to historical data, either. All the data within Commerce Cloud is synced in real time so you’ll always be on top of customer shopping trends and habits. Couple that with the advanced segmentation and it is easier than ever to laser focus things like ads and email campaigns, or to discover all the most popular ways your customers are engaging with your brand online – from purchases to conversation.
Better Integration
A common problem retailers run into with some eCommerce platforms is scalability. As the business grows they need more tools and unique functionality to meet their needs as well as those of the customer. When an eCommerce platform won’t scale with you, it can disrupt growth and limit your revenue. Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers business owners the ability to scale and upgrade with minimal limitations. Not only does the platform offer extensive customization so you can develop your store with the unique functionality you require, there’s also open 3rd party integration.
Commerce Cloud has a vast marketplace of approved 3rd party app integrations designed to enhance and supplement the native functionality of the platform. This includes apps for:
- Address verification
- Analytics and site monitoring
- Content management
- Cross-border fulfilment
- Marketing
- Payments
- Taxes
- Testing and segmentation
- Security
- Order management and more
One thing to keep in mind is that Commerce Cloud is a hosted solution. And while they do offer extensive customization there are still some limitations. This is due to the fact that the platform must serve a wide range of brands. As such, the software must run as a core solution with certain functionality that always works a specific way. This means there are limitations to the features that can be implemented and, for heavier customizations, there’s an approval layer in place which can add some time to making feature-specific changes to your online store.
Page Builder Solution
Content is a powerful thing – it’s what drives consumer engagement online. Content is what grabs the attention of an audience and holds it fixed for the desired length of time. For brands, creating engaging content is vital for boosting engagement, building relationships, acquiring new customers, and growing organic search visibility.
This year, Commerce Cloud is rolling out Page Designer, which will empower eCommerce brands to manage existing content and create new content pages in a fast, visual way. This is a great addition to an already feature-packed platform.
Other platforms offer some limited visual page builders. We’ve introduced our own tool, Shogun, that allows for simplified visual page building to expand the native functionality of platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Reduced Hosting and Management Costs
Salesforce Commerce Cloud has always been a cloud-based eCommerce platform that is fully hosted on Salesforce servers. That means all the necessary overhead involved with physical technology, software upgrades, maintenance, hosting and all the associated services/work are handled by the internal teams of Salesforce. This is an ideal approach for smaller brands who don’t want to handle the cost and headache of server management and maintenance. With some hosted eCommerce solution this can create a scalability issue, but as previously mentioned there’s no limit to growth and capability with Commerce Cloud. In fact, there are countless well-known global brands operating their eCommerce sales via Commerce Cloud.
This includes brands like:
- Adidas
- Deckers Brands
- Ugg
- Lacoste
- GoPro
- GAP
- Godiva
- Converse
- New Balance
Broad Multistore Management
For brands selling globally this is one of the leading features that make Commerce Cloud so attractive. The platform allows you to manage multiple storefronts so you can easily host stores for specific currencies, languages, and brands. Each of those stores can be managed from a single dashboard, making it far easier to focus on growing a global enterprise. In addition, Commerce Cloud allows you to manage the products individually for each store. This way a change to a U.S. store, for example, doesn’t interfere with things like description or pricing for a UK facing store. From a data perspective, this multi-store approach is ideal since you’ll be able to see reports and analyse data by store before getting down to granular data at the customer level.
You can even manage marketing efforts for all your sites through a single dashboard.
Inventory Transparency
Salesforce uses an Inventory Availability Service to assist with creating a unified shopping and customer engagement experience. With Commerce Cloud, no matter where your customers look to engage with you they’ll see real-time stock levels across every sales channel.
Not only can customers see what’s in stock, but if you sell through multiple channels/locations they’ll even be able to see where the product is available.
Features Overview
Commerce Cloud comes with a fat list of features packed into the platform. This includes:
- Complete product management
- Multisite management ideal for global and wholesale operations
- Catalog management
- Native targeting and built-in A/B testing for conversion optimization
- Content management
- One-touch payment options to reduce friction and cart abandonment
- Response mobile design to streamline the mobile shopping experience
- Customer segmentation for improved data analysis and targeted marketing
- Merchandising and marketing tools
- Supports multiple payment methods
- Real time dashboard and reports
- Quick order and reorder templates
- Simple pricing management
- Integrated site search
- Customer and segment specific pricing
- Targeted promotion management
- Mobile app design
- Checkout flow optimization
- Process orders on-behalf of customers
- Brick-and-mortar integration and more
Pricing
Salesforce Commerce Cloud is available in either a B2B or B2C version, and pricing can differ based on the add-ons you choose, especially if you wish to integrate third-party technologies. Its price is adjusted per client and is based on a revenue-sharing model. Your license price is based on a percentage of your sales—therefore the more you sell, the more it costs.
While you don’t have to worry about things like hosting costs or server maintenance when factoring the cost of Commerce Cloud, there are other costs to consider. This includes:
- Payment processing and merchant services fees
- Design and development costs
- Premium 3rd party integrations
- Customization of integrations
- App development
- Salesforce add-on solutions
Salesforce Commerce Cloud comes in two pricing editions: Salesforce B2C Commerce and Salesforce B2B Commerce. You can choose from the options depending on your needs and contact the vendor for pricing information.
- FREE TRIAL- Not available
- SALESFORCE B2C COMMERCE-Contact vendor
- SALESFORCE B2B COMMERCE- Contact vendor
Competitors
Wix
Wix is one of world’s leading online website builders with an integrated eCommerce module. The platform combines out-of-the-box production functionalities with online performance management, and delivers in such way compact and modern stores for small and medium retailers. Using Wix, you can create beautiful, branded, and fully optimized storefronts and drive traffic your way thanks to a unified, completely streamlined buying experience. On a moderate and affordable price, Wix invites retailers to produce all sorts of custom web pages, and does so without demanding any particular design or coding skills.
Vend
Cloud-based point-of-sale and retail management platform Vend is designed to help retailers manage their inventory. It allows users to operate their businesses online, in-store and even while on the go. Vend’s core functionalities revolve around inventory management, customer loyalty, eCommerce and analytics. The system, which is built to run on iPad is popular among businesses for its flexibility, able to support mouse, keyboard and touchscreen systems. It can boost product management, track and organize customer data while dashboards provide clear views of products and sales.
Pinnacle Cart
Pinnacle Cart is an attractive, feature-rich, fully-customizable ecommerce solution that distinguishes itself from other solutions by offering additional services like digital marketing, customer support, development and more to their clients. It comes packed with a variety of useful features, neatly arranged on a user-friendly interface, and accompanied by a selection of beautiful and customizable templates. It comes with a quick-start guide to help you through the set-up process and it’s also has support for several languages and currencies which make Pinnacle Cart just as perfect for international businesses as it is for small companies.
Summing Up
Convert more customers and grow your brand with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the world’s leading eCommerce platform. Make online buying easy, generate more revenue, and maximize your online growth with easy-to-use features tailored to B2B customers, like fast reorders, account hierarchies, contract pricing, custom catalogs, and more. Try for free today and give your customers the same easy, consumer-like shopping experiences they enjoy in their personal life anytime, anywhere, on any device.
Commerce Cloud offers an extensive list of features and a level of scalability that makes it the ideal choice for complex omni-channel brands operating on a global level. Commerce Cloud operates with architecture that’s designed to handle significant peaks, among brands with expansive catalogs, with some of the strongest order management and merchandising capabilities available.