Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SCC) is a powerful and versatile platform designed to help e-commerce businesses achieve their ambitious goals with the help of AI and data-driven analytics. Whether you’re a startup looking to establish your online presence or a large enterprise aiming to optimize your operations, it offers the tools and capabilities to help you get more customers and satisfy them with their shopping experience.
In this article, OMI will share some of the insights we’ve accumulated over the past decades and tell you all you need to know about the capabilities and the positive impact of SCC – as well as how to successfully implement it.
What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud?
Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SCC) is a versatile platform that uses AI and data-driven analytics to help e-commerce businesses interact with their customers across mobile, web, social media, and online stores (you can read more on the basics of SCC in our guide here).
Key Features and Capabilities
- Omnichannel Excellence: SCC facilitates seamless customer journeys by integrating their online and offline interactions. This capability allows customers to research, engage, and purchase products through various channels, ensuring a cohesive brand experience.
- AI-Powered Insights: With Salesforce Einstein AI, SCC provides predictive analytics and personalized recommendations. The clever use of AI capability enhances product discoverability and optimizes the sales funnel by anticipating customer needs and behaviors.
- Scalability and Flexibility: Whether you’re a startup or an enterprise-level organization, SCC offers scalability to support your growth. It can handle diverse business needs, from managing multiple sites to accommodating seasonal spikes in traffic.
- Built-in Marketing Tools: SCC also comes equipped with robust marketing and merchandising tools that automate tasks like product syndication, pricing optimization, and A/B testing.
- Mobile Optimization: SCC ensures a responsive and user-friendly experience across every device – mobile included. It supports mobile payment integrations and adapts content and layouts to enhance usability on smartphones and tablets.
How Salesforce Commerce Cloud Can Enhance Your Business
The main purpose of SCC is to make customers more satisfied by offering them a great shopping experience, which, in turn, makes the e-commerce store more profitable and agile, among other things:
Enhanced Customer Experience
SCC truly excels in personalizing customer interactions – it gathers and analyzes data in real-time to deliver tailored product recommendations, promotions, and content. For example, based on a customer’s browsing history and preferences, SCC can dynamically adjust website content and suggest relevant products.
The platform is also great at enabling omnichannel shopping, as it can easily integrate online and offline experiences. Customers can initiate interactions online, continue via mobile, and finalize purchases in-store, all while maintaining a consistent experience.
Increased Sales and Revenue
SCC’s dynamic pricing and promotions capabilities help businesses to implement targeted campaigns that respond to customer behaviors in real time. You can set up personalized offers and discounts based on customer segments or purchase history, encouraging repeat purchases.
Furthermore, SCC supports cross-selling and upselling opportunities through AI-driven product recommendations. By analyzing purchasing patterns, SCC suggests complementary products or upgrades during the checkout process.
Operational Efficiency
SCC offers an advanced order management system that automates order processing, payment, and fulfillment, reducing manual errors. This accelerates order fulfillment and enhances customer satisfaction by ensuring timely delivery and reliable service.
At the same time, the platform’s content management system simplifies the management of product information, images, and promotional content across multiple e-commerce sites. You can centrally manage and update content, ensuring consistency and relevancy across all customer touchpoints.
Agility and Scalability
The platform can also handle sudden increases in website traffic or sales volume without compromising performance or customer experience. Additionally, its multi-site management capabilities allow you to launch and manage multiple e-commerce sites from a single platform.
SCC also supports localization features, with which you can customize your online stores based on regional preferences and various compliance requirements.
Data-Driven Insights
Lastly, SCC provides you with a host of actionable insights – its Einstein AI excels at predictive analytics, which will help you anticipate customer preferences, market trends, and demand fluctuations. You will be able to analyze customer interactions and purchase patterns, and then find new opportunities for growth.
Performance monitoring tools within SCC also provide real-time visibility into key metrics such as sales performance, customer engagement, and marketing effectiveness.
E-commerce Integration with Salesforce
Apart from its basic capabilities, SCC also offers integration opportunities with various Salesforce products, which complements the product’s functionality. Among other options, SCC can match very well with products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Pardot, and CPQ. Now let’s take a look at how exactly SCC integrates with these key Salesforce products:
Integration with Sales Cloud
Integrating SCC with Sales Cloud creates a unified view of customer data and e-commerce activities within the CRM system. Your sales representatives instantly gain visibility into customer purchase history, preferences, and interactions directly from Sales Cloud, which allows them, for instance, to easily identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
Integration with Service Cloud
SCC integration with Service Cloud enables customer service teams to provide better support as they get access to all relevant order details, shipping information, and customer inquiries from Service Cloud’s console. This tends to improve operational efficiency, reduce response times, and enhance customer satisfaction by delivering consistently good service experiences.
Integration with Marketing Cloud
Together, SCC and Marketing Cloud help use e-commerce data for targeted marketing campaigns, personalized promotions, and various customer engagement strategies. Marketers can send targeted emails to customers based on their browsing history, purchase behavior, or demographic information captured by SCC. Through this, you can achieve cohesive messaging across multiple marketing channels and get higher conversion rates.
Integration with Salesforce Community Cloud
Integrating SCC with Salesforce Community Cloud extends e-commerce capabilities to customer communities, partners, and distributors. Community Cloud allows you to create branded portals where your customers can browse products, place orders, and access support resources. For instance, you can enable your distributors to place bulk orders, track shipments, and access product information through a branded community portal powered by SCC, which greatly helps with channel management and strengthens your partner relationships.
Integration with Salesforce Pardot
SCC and Salesforce Pardot automate lead generation, nurture campaigns, and lead scoring processes based on e-commerce interactions. Pardot can effectively use the e-commerce data from SCC to create targeted various automated workflows – for instance, you can use Pardot to automatically score leads based on their purchase behavior, cart abandonment rates, and browsing history captured by SCC.
Integration with Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)
CPQ e-commerce integration with Salesforce CC helps optimize even some of the most complex quoting and pricing processes for e-commerce transactions. CPQ’s advanced pricing rules, and product configuration options allow you to configure product bundles, apply discount rules, and generate detailed quotes, which tends to accelerate quote-to-cash cycles and contract management processes.
Steps to Implement Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Implementing SCC requires a step-by-step methodical approach: strategic assessment, selecting the right implementation partner, platform customization, comprehensive training, and performance optimization are all necessary stages. Let’s dive deep into each of them:
Assessment and Planning
Conduct a thorough assessment of your current e-commerce ecosystem, business goals, and customer expectations. Start by gathering quantitative data such as website traffic, conversion rates, and customer demographics, and add to those your qualitative insights from customer feedback, market research, and competitor analysis.
Best Practices:
- Utilize analytics tools to identify bottlenecks in the current e-commerce platform and prioritize areas for improvement.
- Engage key stakeholders from marketing, IT, and customer service departments to be on the same page on strategic goals and project expectations.
- Establish clear KPIs such as conversion rate improvement, average order value, and customer satisfaction scores to measure SCC’s impact post-implementation.
Choosing the Right Implementation Partner
Evaluate potential partners based on their experience with SCC, industry expertise, client references, and track record of successful implementations. Also, good qualities are being able to create custom solutions for your specific business objectives and provide ongoing support post-launch.
Best Practices:
- Request proposals from multiple SCC implementation partners and conduct detailed interviews to assess their technical expertise and project management capabilities.
- Seek recommendations from peer companies within your industry to gauge partner reliability.
Customization and Configuration
In cooperation with your Salesforce partner, use SCC’s built-in customization tools to design intuitive storefronts and optimize user interfaces based on customer behavior insights. Those tools include drag-and-drop interfaces, configurable workflows, as well as API integrations.
Best Practices:
- Conduct usability testing and gather feedback from beta users to refine website navigation, product categorization, and search functionality.
- Implement smart product recommendations and dynamic pricing for better conversion rates.
- Prioritize responsive design elements and mobile-friendly features to ensure a seamless shopping experience across all devices.
Training and Onboarding
Develop training programs that cater to different user roles, including marketing managers, IT administrators, and customer service representatives. Provide hands-on workshops, online tutorials, and access to SCC’s knowledge base to make continuous learning and skill development as easy as possible.
Best Practices:
- Encourage team members to pursue SCC certifications offered by Salesforce to deepen their understanding of platform functionalities and best practices.
- Assign dedicated mentors or superusers to provide ongoing support and guidance during the initial rollout phase and beyond.
Launch and Optimization
The final stage of SCC implementation involves launching the e-commerce platform and continuously optimizing performance based on the real-time data you receive. Make sure to implement a phased rollout strategy to minimize disruption to existing operations and gather feedback from early adopters.
Best Practices:
- Monitor KPIs post-launch, such as page load times, bounce rates, and conversion funnels, to identify areas for optimization.
- Implement feedback mechanisms, such as online surveys and customer reviews, to identify pain points in the shopping experience.
Real-World Examples of Salesforce Commerce Cloud Success
If you are not yet sold on SCC’s ability to vastly improve your ecommerce store, big or small, let’s look at some of the famous examples of the platform’s contribution to success:
- L’Oréal: L’Oréal employs Salesforce Commerce Cloud features to deliver more personalized beauty experiences all across the world, which has helped them achieve a double-digit increase in average order value over the past few years. Used for more than 200 of L’Oréal’s e-commerce websites, Einstein delivers AI-powered product recommendations – for instance, should you add lightweight sunscreen to your cart, it will recommend SPF lip balms or moisturizers at checkout.
- Fisher & Paykel: Fisher & Paykel, a premium kitchen appliance brand, has estimated savings of up to 3,300 hours per month as a result of SCC’s integration along with some other Salesforce products. They have massively improved their operations, from managing inventory and order fulfillment to providing personalized customer support.
- Neolait: Neolait, a French agricultural company, utilizes Salesforce Commerce Cloud features along with Einstein 1 Commerce to automate the generation of product descriptions, having done so with over 1300 of them. This has enabled Neolait to significantly reduce the time and effort required for copywriting tasks without losing any of the content quality.
- ReserveBar: ReserveBar, a leader in premium beverage e-commerce, partnered with Salesforce Commerce Cloud to overcome limitations in managing their extensive catalog of 150,000 products and 3,500 retailer partners. SCC has enabled real-time inventory updates every 10 to 60 minutes, efficient weekly launches of 80 to 100 new products, and a shift from multi-day shipping to delivery within 20 minutes to a couple of hours.
- Heathrow Airport: Heathrow Airport has used Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Salesforce’s Einstein 1 to boost its digital revenue by 30% through enhanced personalization and seamless integration of various digital services. Real-time service updates and personalized shopping options have resulted in a 25% increase in digital interactions since 2019, while data analytics has helped Heathrow anticipate passenger needs and provide efficient customer support, reducing call handling times and increasing live chat usage by 450%.
Conclusion
SCC’s omnichannel capabilities will help your e-commerce store achieve a seamless and cohesive customer experience, while its AI-powered insights will optimize your sales strategies.
On top of that, SCC’s integration with other Salesforce products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud amplifies its functionality, creating an efficient ecosystem that supports targeted marketing, enhanced customer service, and streamlined sales processes.
That said, implementing SCC requires careful planning, and most importantly – the right partner. And if you feel that your team may benefit from collaborating with an expert Salesforce Commerce Cloud consulting team, don’t hesitate to reach out to OMI – we will make your Salesforce work better than ever.