Salesforce For Retail: How Can Salesforce Strengthen E-commerce?

Before the global pandemic, retail stores were growing swiftly. They felt like changing their business model strategy when the impact started hitting off their customer base. This crisis had many repercussions, mainly on the retail business operating physically from the stores.

With all the lockdowns and barriers in trading goods and services, retailers had to compromise attracting new customers alongside retaining the existing ones, managing inventory, staying connected with the clients and customers, keeping up with the trends, and so on. But, above everything, the main task was to compete with all those businesses that have shifted their operations online, generating revenues even in those hard times.

So if you have a retail business and juggle the same challenges, you have landed on the right page. In this blog, we will cover all the pain points that retailers are dealing with and which Salesforce Implementation services could be the best solution to address the challenges that retail businesses constantly encounter.

Common Challenges Faced By Retail Businesses

Consumers tend to get influenced by the quality and pricing of the product or service, but one more thing impacts their decision, i.e., the shopping experience.
To stay ahead in the competitive environment and keep consumers satisfied, sometimes businesses get muddled up with lots of challenges, some of which could be:

1. Understanding Consumer Behaviour

A business must be well-acquainted with consumers’ buying behavior and pattern. With no contact and conversation, it took an effort to keep up with what your customers liked, what they were planning to buy, or for which products they were looking for an alternative. In addition, ensuring that customers will be loyal to you took work.

2. Enhance The Quality Of Customer Service

One can only improve if one knows where the correction or enhancement is required. There were times when customers wanted more because of one reason or another. It could be because of a lack of knowledge from your sales representatives, unavailability of supply, or anything else. When there is a delay in addressing the grievances and issues raised, it can become difficult for you to retain your customers.

3. Order Fulfillment

Handling logistics and order fulfillment has always been challenging for small businesses. There could be a time when your website is loaded with upcoming orders, and managing everything all at once might get overwhelming. And Salesforce for retail businesses can be your savior in these situations.

4. Measuring The Business Performance

Managing and manually analyzing the data to generate valuable reports takes time and effort. Plus, you need to deploy people to ensure the quality of information and still need clarification about making an informed decision. For once, you might have wished for something that requires less manual intervention and more automated analysis of data and information so that your choices don’t affect your business.

5. Constantly Evolving Expectations Of Customers

The preferences and expectations of customers keep evolving every second. Being a part of the retail world, you should always stay put with the sudden changes and seasonal trends that directly or indirectly influence customers’ shopping behavior. Another tall order is to identify trends that should be followed to keep customers connected and loyal. To keep your business two steps ahead, you need an expert to help you make the right call and drive a better customer experience.

These are the most common challenges that retail enterprises have encountered once during and after the covid times, and you might be looking for a solution.

And it is high time to secure the future of the retail industry with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and retailers should consider shifting from their conventional channels to online platforms for selling and thriving in this highly flourishing channel.

One-Stop Solution For All The Problems Of Retailers

Retailers need a complete digital solution to adopt omnichannel, i.e., a cloud-based CRM, to overcome all those hurdles, win back all those long-lost customers, and draw the attention of new leads.

Salesforce took this as an opportunity and introduced one of its products that helped retailers deal with business model shifting but also assisted them in scaling up their operations.

They came up with a cloud-based CRM solution, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, that revitalized the functioning of retail businesses and guided them in managing their inventory across all the available channels, simultaneously optimizing the supply chains keeping in mind the preferences and demands of the customers.

This Salesforce for Retail has many exceptional features, out-of-the-box tools, and commerce portals. It enables businesses to streamline their purchasing process, monitor consumers’ buying behavior, create customized buying experiences and deliver a top-notch mobile-friendly shopping experience.

It also keeps track of the ongoing activities of customers on mobile, web, and offline stores, ultimately offering businesses a mode to deliver stimulating and elevated shopping experiences to their customers.

Features Of Salesforce Commerce Cloud

With its robust and intelligent features, Salesforce Commerce Cloud has sorted almost all the issues retail businesses find hard to go through. Some of them are here:

1. Storefront Reference Architecture

The Commerce Cloud feature can build a professional yet creative website in no time. It comes with pre-designed wireframes, several embedded innovation technologies, and prime integrations for different customizations required to maintain your website correctly. It connects the digital platform via an API layer allowing brands to launch new code, integrate with third-party providers, and emphasize onsite designing. Salesforce has recently released some more functionalities like Apple Pay, artificial intelligence, etc., consolidated through the API Layer in Storefront Reference Architecture.

2. Commerce Cloud Endless Aisle

Salesforce for Retail or Commerce Cloud integrates all your shopping channels and makes the purchase process smooth for your store executives and customers. It provides a framework that lets your team members view all the customer-related information via customer databases and information about online inventory, consequently delivering the best-personalized experiences. Customers also get to create their exclusive wishlist of all the items they want to buy soon.

3. CMS (Content Management System)

We can also integrate Salesforce CMS with Commerce Cloud to manage the content on the website. Commerce Cloud has a Page designer tool that supports standard development processes for creating the reusable page and component types. By dragging these pages and components type in the storefront, Merchants can easily use Visual Editor for designing, scheduling, and publishing custom pages in Business Manager. They can also use it to create various pages independently without requiring developers for any update help.

4. Order Management

Commerce Cloud enables retail enterprises to accelerate the process of delivering customer orders worldwide, automating the payment processes, and keeping track of order cancellations or returns.

5. Predictive Analytics

With upscaling of business operations, it becomes a rigorous task to segregate data as per several filters and analyze it to come to a decision finally. Now with each requirement, you can’t sort this vast data and make your projections.

To facilitate the process of analytics and decision-making and smooth the onboarding of artificial intelligence to retail businesses, Salesforce came up with Einstein AI, a next-generation platform. It has the potential to put an end to manual data analysis and the need to use third-party applications. All you need to do is integrate your choice of third-party AI tools with the Commerce Cloud and automate all the processes for more efficiency.

Benefits Of Salesforce Commerce Cloud

According to statistics, the e-commerce market is expected to be worth 18.89 trillion by 2027. When introduced as a protagonist, Salesforce Commerce Cloud will undoubtedly contribute to its upper limits. It will change the game by giving retail businesses a competitive edge with its custom-tailored solution that fulfills all identified and unidentified needs of a company.

It is going to revolutionize the e-commerce industry by putting all these benefits on the table:

1. Improved Scalability

Retailers must scale to pave businesses toward growth. To witness speedy business expansion, your brand must have the capacity to manage significant traffic, high transaction volumes, inventory in bulk, and measures to deal with sudden traffic spikes. Salesforce commerce cloud directs businesses to confront all those traffic spikes, build highly optimized landing pages, facilitate faster and more secure transactions, and scale automatically.

2. Resourceful Marketing Tools

One of the advantages of opting for Salesforce for an online store is that it connects your consumers with the product they are looking for, prices, variety, and active offers. By displaying Engaging content at the right time, it ensures that conversion rates keep going high and average order value keeps growing.
Even though it offers limited marketing tools, contrarily, SEO tools are good enough to develop and win some content for your customers. Furthermore, if required, you can get the marketing and commerce cloud integration to cover the extra mile for your marketing strategies.

It’s like a combo offer that includes paid advertising, social media management, email marketing campaigns, and timely reporting for your business. Users can quickly implement these functions with a marketing cloud. Integrating the commerce cloud with the marketing cloud opens up many SEO capabilities like aliases, meta tags, robots, URL rules, URL redirects, and static and dynamic mapping.

3. Omni-channel Strategies

Retailers can use the commerce cloud’s omnichannel functionalities to run a business through different channels and manage inventory. In addition, it enables companies to use customer data from various channels to design marketing campaigns for a targeted customer base and suggest products considering past purchases. All this data can be taught in up-selling, cross-selling, and personalizing customer journeys.

These omnichannel functionalities can consolidate numerous functions like order and sales management and marketing campaigns and save room for you to focus on another essential thing. Also, you can curate omnichannel fulfillment journeys, manage all your operations in one place, allot carriers on the spot, manage multiple seller accounts by interconnecting them, achieve SLA compliances, and so on.

4. Good Customer Support

One reason why Salesforce Commerce Cloud is popular among retailers is its capability to provide round-the-cloud customer support. From solving problems in real-time to creating cases automatically to creating excellent service strategies, this Solution does everything at its best with its customer care and support team. With its extensive resource library, adoption program, and advisory services, the scope of improvement keeps widening.

5. Mobile Rich Capabilities

As per the research outcomes, mobile devices drive in 73% of online traffic, of which 55% of orders come from mobiles. That’s the reason why retailers should plan on coming up with an interface having mobile-rich capabilities.

Salesforce for retail solutions provides a flawless shopping experience to those purchasing mobile through innovative conversion experiences, predictive sorting, in-store mobile apps, personalized searches, auto-population features, social media integrations, inventory management, and more. In addition, retailers can manage and access their inventories in a couple of clicks & slides on their mobile phones.

6. Salesforce Ecosystem

Other products offered by Customer 360 help businesses in driving benefits in combination with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It facilitates the smooth streamlining of pre-post interaction with clients and ensures that they are getting the services that they have expected. This combo of Customer 360 products ensures that your eCommerce business is all set in the field.

Pricing Model Of Salesforce B2c Commerce Cloud

Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud has divided its pricing into three categories which are:

List Of Industries And Companies That Are Using Salesforce B2c Commerce Cloud

Among all the industries, the Salesforce B2C Commerce cloud is majorly used by Retail industries, reflecting that the maximum profit is extracted by the retail industry when they integrate their business model with Salesforce Commerce Cloud or Salesforce for online stores.

And here are the names of Salesforce Commerce Cloud who have earned a competitive advantage by adopting Salesforce for retail:

Based on the previously discussed points, Salesforce has rightfully earned the reputation of being the best CRM available for businesses. This eCommerce platform comes with excellent AI-based tools that help businesses design personalized shopping experiences for all their customers in different ways, resulting in high conversion rates and unfailing sales strategies.

If you are projecting long-term benefits for your online store, then Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud is your lender of last resort. With an abundance of features and never-ending advantages, it guarantees fast-track growth.

For a detailed consultation, get in touch with our expert!!

Wrapping Up!

Based on the previously discussed points, Salesforce has rightfully earned the reputation of being the best CRM available for businesses. This eCommerce platform comes with excellent AI-based tools that help businesses design personalized shopping experiences for all their customers in different ways, resulting in high conversion rates and unfailing sales strategies.

If you are projecting long-term benefits for your online store, then Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud is your lender of last resort. With an abundance of features and never-ending advantages, it guarantees fast-track growth.

For a detailed consultation, get in touch with our expert!!