Salesforce expands Commerce Cloud in a bid to help retailers grappling with complexity
- Summary:
- Salesforce is positioning its Commerce Cloud as a ‘composable platform’ that allows retailers to adapt their systems to meet customers where they are.
The nature of retail and commerce is changing rapidly. During the course of the COVID-19 pandemic the retail market has seen shifts to new models in a matter of months, which otherwise would have taken years. Shoppers' expectations are higher, where they expect to be able to navigate a number of channels and fulfillment options at their own ease, and buyers are increasingly shifting their buying habits away from a retailer's website or store.
Choice and flexibility are front of mind for the consumer, whilst retailers are having to introduce systems - at a rapid rate - that are constantly changing, in order to build a closer relationship with the customer. All the while grappling with legacy and increased competition from new entrants and the internet giants.
With this context in mind, Salesforce is expanding its Commerce Cloud with a number of new partnerships and features that essentially surmount to the idea of a ‘headless commerce platform'. The aim is to be as composable as possible, whilst offering flexibility and choice for buyers, so that they can adapt to their individual market and customer needs.
We got the chance to speak with Robert Amezaga, VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, where he explains how customers are looking for tools and platforms that can bring forward real change, quickly. He says:
A lot of customers talked about digital transformation, and they had a roadmap to do all of these things, but COVID-19 really accelerated that. So something that they had planned for three to five years out had to happen within the year. A perfect example is what we call buy online, pick up in store, or click and collect. How, as a retailer, am I going to get my product to you? I can ship it to you, but there are problems with logistics as well.
Claire's is a good example, they're a jewellery and accessories retailer with stores in the US in the UK. And when the pandemic hit, all their stores basically went offline. So we helped them with a new order management solution, which is built natively on Salesforce and connects to Commerce Cloud. We helped them change their model very quickly, where they turned the retail stores into fulfilment centres. They had lots of goods in store, which are local in people's neighborhoods, which serve customers, so we helped them unlock that.
Headless commerce
As already noted, Salesforce's ambition is to pursue a ‘headless commerce' model, whereby retailers can build shopping experiences that best suit customer needs and meet their expectations, with easy integrations and plug and play capabilities. Salesforce also states that it wants to help its customers meet their customers where they are, including new regions and markets.
Some of the recent announcements to support this, include:
-
PayPal at Checkout for Salesforce Payments - Salesforce has added PayPal to their checkout experience with a click-based configuration. Brands using Salesforce Payments now have more options, with the aim of reducing checkout friction and to drive sales.
-
Salesforce Commerce for B2B Wholesale Retail - built on Commerce Cloud by ISV partner XCentium, this new digital portal for wholesale apparel and fashion companies supports preseason ordering, in-season re-supply, and fully automated interactions across self-service and sales teams.
-
New Datorama and Tableau features - these aim to help companies connect and visualize data from their cross-channel marketing campaigns with customer order data from Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Amazon, providing real-time insights and analytics. Salesforce hopes that this will help customers optimize relationships, ROI, and revenue.
-
Salesforce Social Commerce for China with Alibaba - first announced in September and now generally available, this platform supports e-commerce across China-specific channels, including social networks and .CN websites. This goes back to Salesforce aiming to help customers expand their reach into new markets.
Amezaga points to the B2B wholesale announcement as being of particular interest, as he's seeing evidence of a ‘unification' of retailers' B2C and B2B sides of the business. He says:
I think one of the things that we're seeing is the convergence of the B2C side of the world, which retailers heavily play in. But there's also this other side that we don't talk about as much, the B2B side - wholesalers, suppliers, distributors. There's this unification happening and customers are wanting to see both sides. Our customers are saying: ‘We don't just have a B2C side of our business, how are you helping us on the B2B side to help us grow?'
In a nutshell, we're trying to make the B2B side of the commerce business as easy to use as the B2C side. With B2C, if you think about you or I as a consumer, we can go online, we can browse, we can search, we get recommendations, click, click, click, add to the cart, and then click on your payments and you're on your way.
Well, if you're a B2B customer, you've got hundreds of stores, you've got tens of thousands of skews, possibly. You've got inventory that you've got to fulfil, you've got to ship to different locations, you've got to pay with split invoices and purchase orders. You don't just put the credit card down.
So with our partner at XCentirum, they've taken our B2B commerce platform and made it even easier in the form of an app for B2B customers and those B2B buyers, to use to do all the things that they need to do for their business. For example, they're not buying one shirt or two shirts, they're ordering in bulk and they're ordering different sizes and quantities. It's a beautiful interface that allows them to shop as if they're shopping as a normal B2C consumer.
Flexibility for buyers
Salesforce's key message is one of flexibility in its Commerce Cloud. How do you adapt quickly to change? Amezaga says that a lot of companies grapple with e-commerce systems or ERPs that are archaic and essentially a ‘black box' - making it hard to quickly change processes.
The future of Salesforce Commerce Cloud is allowing buyers to bring together different components to suit their customers' needs. He says:
It's hard to change your operation. It's hard to change to go where your customers are. So we also are taking a composable approach to commerce, which is one of headless commerce. The whole idea of headless is to create a kind of decoupled front end that's a lot more agile and robust. With Salesforce Commerce Cloud, we are giving folks the ability to deliver those headless experiences, but also compose or orchestrate a commerce experience - not just within commerce, but connected to the journey, from marketing, to sales, to commerce, to service. It's the entire journey. It's not commerce in a silo anymore.
The Commerce Cloud provides a spectrum of click base to code base tools. Enterprise customers want choice, right? But they also don't want to do everything themselves, necessarily. They may have developer teams, which is great, but anything we can give them to make their developers lives easier is a win, because then they can focus on their business.
And so the shopping cart is a great example, where we offer a template for a shopping cart. But we are also offering a shopping cart as a composable service. So you can take that and say, I want to move where the button goes, or I want to bring in these other payment methods, or I want to serve up recommendations right at the point of sale. We give customers choice and flexibility to enable them to create the experience that they want to deliver for their customers.