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Integrating SF with Ecommerce Business | Encaptechno

Benefits of Integrating Salesforce with your Ecommerce Business

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Integrating SF with Ecommerce Business | Encaptechno
Ecommerce customers across B2B and B2C industries demand a connected and unified shopping experience. This also means that they want seamless handoffs between different channels and websites, along with personalized engagements based on previous interactions that happen with a brand.

Most customers feel that these connected processes are important when it comes to choosing a business in the competitive eCommerce landscape. Therefore, all businesses that are hoping to attract the present connected shoppers must unify experiences across all the touchpoints. With Salesforce integration, customers can get a truly cohesive retail experience along their journeys from discovery to delivery and what lies beyond.

A unified customer experience can also provide brands with a clear understanding of customer activity and how it may relate to retail inventory, products, and promotions. Any e-commerce platform that supports excellent user experience design can make the online store of a brand easy to navigate and explore.

The product recommendations and smart search powered by artificial intelligence can inspire millions of shoppers to purchase. Brands can also maximize their conversion rates with e-commerce optimizations such as checkouts without the need for an account sign-up requirement and automated price adjustments for sales and promotions which eliminates sticker shock at checkout.

Salesforce Makes E-commerce Integration Simple


Things are changing quickly in the retail world and the way in which a brand embraces this evolving landscape and connects with today’s customers starts with e-commerce integration. Modern shoppers expect to buy anywhere and fulfill anywhere experience along with an ability to interact with a brand on any channel.

Businesses should look for a way that enables the customers to engage seamlessly as they move across their preferred channels including, social, mobile, and in person. For delivering this kind of customer experience, an online e-commerce business should be integrated with marketing, fulfillment, inventory management, and back-end accounting systems. Most of the legacy commerce platforms cannot handle this kind of e-commerce integration.

The traditional systems were not really designed for a retail online integration nor can they keep up with the pace of innovation that is needed to stay competitive. This is why omnichannel solutions such as e-commerce integration are making innovation easy and many retailers are turning to Salesforce.

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides both B2B and B2C businesses a world-class platform for e-commerce integration. It has a cloud-based and multi-tenant architecture that delivers scalable, reliable, and security-based systems that merchants need for competing in a quickly changing retail environment. The Commerce Cloud enables to unify buying experiences all across channels while streamlining all operations from discovery and purchase to fulfillment and beyond. Using the Commerce Cloud, it becomes easy to integrate e-commerce behind the scenes with unified information across stores, interactions, customers, orders, products, inventory, pricing, etc. This easy e-commerce integration also connects in-store mobile channels and enables them to leverage core e-commerce capabilities and services such as transaction management and merchandising.

With true e-commerce integration, retailers can stay connected to customers anywhere they shop and innovate across the entire customer experience quickly without any problems. The capability of Salesforce for e-commerce integration combines digital commerce, store operations, order management, and AI-powered personalization into a single and unified commerce platform. With Salesforce, e-commerce businesses can do the following things.

  • They can deliver a strategic and personalized shopping experience at each step and on any device.
  • Businesses can roll out continuous innovations with any kind of dependencies, disruptions, and delays.
  • Businesses can launch new websites in weeks and new promotions within minutes.
  • Salesforce makes it possible to unify digital commerce with store operations, order management, and more.
  • It becomes possible to offload IT operations for a unified cloud that is scalable, robust, and stable.
  • Salesforce helps in maximizing productivity with centralized site management and automated tasks.
  • It is possible to explore new regions easily and go global in record time.

Retail Operation Standards


A business must run its retail e-commerce platform with the care and attention that is demanded by a flagship retail location. Online stores have become the primary way in which customers interact with a brand while becoming the new storefront window display. Just as it is with a storefront window display, e-commerce businesses must showcase new products regularly.

Most customers expect to see new merchandise anytime they visit a site of a store. Everyday inventory updates are a must as today’s customers crave fresh product offerings more frequently than ever before. With an intelligent e-commerce platform, businesses can aggregate average customer visit frequency and stagger product launches for meeting the pace of high-value shoppers.

Business owners have to understand that e-commerce is essentially a competition between businesses and it is important for brands to understand what the competition offers and charges. Using automation to run reports on the competition helps businesses to develop compelling deals, counteroffers, and bundles for their customers with state-of-the-art website experiences that stand out and do not just blend in.

Businesses should always remember that great online customer service is equally important as a perfectly presented product inventory or an online e-commerce business website.  Just as in physical retail stores when customers run into issues such as shopping online, businesses should be there for kindness and support. Real-time messaging built into an e-commerce website is an indispensable tool that brands can use for engaging with customers and solving their problems including bounce rates, shopping cart abandonment, and shopper dissatisfaction.

Omni Channel Marketing

 

Omni Channel Marketing
Most modern customers are comfortable with receiving relevant and personalized advertising messages from digital channels. This is valid on the web, email, and social media. Businesses can help deliver an easy shopping experience to these customers by integrating e-commerce with digital marketing.

Offering connected experiences to the customers is considered important across every channel and brands must take care while integrating shopping links into personalized web ads, emails, and social content used in digital marketing campaigns. Micro-targeted omnichannel marketing enables brands to choose the highest value e-commerce customers and other desired niche markets that deliver content to those who are most likely to click and convert.

The Shop sections can also be added to brand profiles on important social media websites such as Facebook. From here, it becomes easy to tag products from the brand’s shop in image and video posts. The content of Stories on Instagram and Snapchat can also be linked to a brand’s retail e-commerce platform leading to the seamless customer journey and omnichannel conversions.

Driving Sales

 

Driving Sales
The Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based e-commerce platform that is powered by innovative technology that helps in connecting businesses and customers in a way that is never done before. It is immensely scalable and it can adapt to suit the needs of B2C and B2B sellers of any shape, size, and scope.

Commerce Cloud features Einstein Artificial Intelligence which helps the brands to inspire and convert e-commerce customers with highly personalized journeys while seamlessly connecting all channels. For ensuring mobile e-commerce success, a responsive mobile design, optimized micropayments, and one-touch payments are all built into the platform.

Artificial Intelligence


The use of Salesforce Commerce Cloud enables the customers to get personal recommendations in a way that they can tailor the shopping experience to each use with Einstein product recommendations that deliver highly personalized product suggestions with all clicks. Businesses can drive revenue using the customer insights using the internet purchasing behavior and optimizing the product bundles, sets, and deals with Einstein Commerce insights which is an AI-powered shopping basket analysis dashboard.

You can use customer data to power personalization across any channel including mobile applications with Einstein Recommendations API. In addition, the conversions can be boosted with intelligent search results by helping the shoppers find what they are looking for and more with Einstein Predictive Sort which automatically tailors category pages and search results to each shopper. The Salesforce Commerce Cloud improves searches with type-ahead guidance. The abandoned searches can be reduced with Einstein Search Recommendations which offers type-ahead suggestions personalized to every shopper in real-time.

Innovative Customer Experiences


The Salesforce integration enables the creation of unified customer journeys across all core functions with the Salesforce platform that connects Commerce Cloud with sales, service, marketing, and more. The API first commerce helps in building and extending shopping experiences using the Open Commerce APIs that surface core B2C e-commerce functionality for developers and third-party applications.

New revenue channels can be unlocked with scalable APIs because headless commerce allows you to mix and match composable capabilities for meeting the business needs. The operations can be launched quickly and the total cost of ownership while delivering agile and innovative customer experiences can also be reduced.

Salesforce helps in extending, customizing, and innovating the sites in a way that the shopping experience can be enhanced with an extensive library with certified integrations, ratings and reviews, payment accelerators, and loyalty programs. There are developer-friendly tools that help in coding as well by responding to business requests and delivering innovation quickly using a dev environment that provides industry standard and JavaScript-based tools.

Salesforce also helps in developing mobile commerce applications using scalable APIs, technology patterns, full development framework, etc. Lastly, the time to market can be accelerated with industry-specific solutions and apps prebuilt for common use cases.

Scalability in Business

 

Scalable Business


The Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers a great deal of scalability in business. You can go global in record time while minimizing the risk, cost, and technical complexity of entering new international markets with borderless infrastructure, and safe interactions. It is easy to quickly customize websites for accounting customs, cultures, languages, and currencies. You can give localized reference architecture for English, Japanese, French, Japanese, etc.

Salesforce also helps in the easy execution of global content strategies. It is easy to build great digital commerce experiences with targeted content, offers, and relevant products that are organized by language, region, city, or country. In addition, it is also possible to manage multiple sites and regions easily because you are able to launch and manage all the B2C e-commerce properties include brands, sites, devices, and geographies from a single and unified framework.

Seamless Customer Experience

 

Seamless Customer Experience
The Salesforce integration enables optimization of conversion funnel while reducing abandoned carts with proven best practices including save carts, payment accelerators, and optimized checkout flows. You can also go mobile with the Master mobile commerce and a full suite of mobile-first capabilities including responsive design, one-touch payment, and a data-driven mobile UX.

Salesforce helps in leveraging social extensions by extending your reach and merging digital commerce with social channels and online communities such as Facebook and Instagram. It is possible to empower customer service teams by helping service agents accelerate over-the-phone orders and check out on behalf of customers with real-time access to digital storefronts and order history. You can connect digital commerce in the store and enable mobile access to digital inventory that store associates can offer to sell and ship in real-time anywhere in the store with a flexible add-on called Commerce Cloud Endless Aisle.

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud manages the complete order lifecycle while connecting commerce and service experiences, unifying customer profiles, and unlocking order history with an add-on called Salesforce Order Management. It becomes makes orders and payments so that customer value and loyalty can be increased with seamless interactions with the customer journey. The integrations can be simplified and commerce payments can be embedded quickly and easily for a better shopping experience.

Conclusion

Salesforce assists the entire customer journeys across commerce including sales, marketing, customer service, communities, and more. It is one of the top-ranking customer relationship management systems in the globe that is home to trailblazing customers, expert partners, and software platforms including Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Sales Cloud all of which integrates with Commerce Cloud to power the entire customer lifecycle from awareness to purchase and retention.

Hence, e-commerce businesses must unify their customer journey with agility, authenticity, and scalability. With the integration of Salesforce, businesses can unlock revenue across channels with customizable commerce experiences.

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How is Salesforce Commerce Cloud Beneficial for your Retail Business? | Encaptechno

How is Salesforce Commerce Cloud Beneficial for your Retail Business?

/ , , , , / Salesforce

How is Salesforce Commerce Cloud Beneficial for your Retail Business? | Encaptechno

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 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

 

Improved Marketing - Benefits of Salesforce Commerce Cloud for Retail Businesses

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

Customer Support - Benefits of Salesforce Commerce Cloud for Retail BusinessesIn 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

 

E-commerce Functionality - Benefits of Salesforce Commerce Cloud for Retail Businesses

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. 

 

How is Salesforce Commerce Cloud Beneficial for your Retail Business? Read More »

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