CRM company Salesforce has launched Commerce Cloud today, which is based on
Demandware that it acquired earlier this year. The
new product is designed to enable brands to track customers and provide personalized experiences for shoppers that span web, mobile, social and in-store.
According to Salesforce, Commerce Cloud will allow brands to deliver completely unified shopping experiences for customers that include marketing and customer service.
“The connected customer is transforming commerce, creating new opportunities for brands to transform the buying experience,” said Jeff Barnett, CEO, Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
“By bringing together the leader in enterprise cloud commerce with the world’s #1 CRM, we’re empowering brands to deliver personalized and unified customer experiences.”
Brands to focus on personalized experience
According to the
Demandware Shopping Index, consumers will place more orders on phones than on any other device by the end of 2017; however, a Wall Street Journal
study claims that 90% of purchases are still made in stores.
Salesforce observes that today, the costly legacy systems that many brands and retailers use to power their commerce do not support the entire customer journey and lack the flexibility required to connect the variety of channels consumers use for shopping.
Hence, to stay competitive in this quickly changing landscape, it believes that brands need a platform that allows them to engage directly with shoppers on any channel and deliver a personalized experience throughout the customer lifecycle.
By leveraging Salesforce’s leading sales, service, marketing, communities, analytics, IoT and platform solutions, Commerce Cloud claims to enable brands and retailers engage actively with the customers irrespective of the channel or device.
New innovations that Commerce Cloud would deliver:
One-Touch Checkout with Apple Pay: The new product would support Apple Pay for mobile web, allowing Commerce Cloud customers to offer shoppers the ability to easily make secure and private payments in Safari on iPhone, iPad and on the Mac.
Merchants can also take advantage of Apple Pay’s benefits with the option of enabling the feature through a quick and simple configuration. This eliminates the extra steps in the checkout process, particularly in mobile, that Salesforce believes has kept mobile conversion lower than conversion rates seen on desktop and laptop devices.
Commerce Cloud Einstein: This
AI-based solution would integrate artificial intelligence into every commerce journey providing customized product recommendations to shoppers.
Furthermore,
Predictive Sort will infuse personalized sort and search results based on likelihood to engage; and
Commerce Insights will help retailers understand product purchase correlations to power smarter merchandising and store planning.
As of now, global brands including
Design Within Reach,
L’Oreal USA and
Suitsupply are leveraging Commerce Cloud to deliver personalized shopping experiences.
Commerce Cloud has been made generally available today. Apple Pay was also made generally available to all
Commerce Cloud customers at no additional cost. Commerce Cloud Einstein’s Product Recommendations feature is currently integrated and included as part of a Commerce Cloud license.
