WHEN DOES SALESFORCE B2C COMMERCE CLOUD FIT YOUR BUSINESS?

If you are running an e-commerce business today there is a great chance that you have bumped into the tech giant Salesforce at some point. In 2016 Salesforce acquired the company Demandware and could hence offer the e-commerce platform Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which delivers a very scalable, digital e-commerce solution. A native cloud solution that makes it possible for e-retailers to focus more on driving the business than driving IT projects.

Alpha Solutions have delivered on the platform from the very start. Back in 2012 we became the first partner in Scandinavia to deliver solutions on Demandware. Eight years later, Commerce Cloud today is one of the most popular platforms in the market of enterprise B2C Commerce and every month a total of a half billion people visits Commerce Cloud based webshops.

With so convincing numbers it is difficult to ignore the platform as a candidate when selecting a new commerce platform. But it does not necessarily mean that it is the perfect fit for your business. Every business has different needs.

If one or more of the characteristics below fits to your company, you might consider Salesforce Commerce Cloud when choosing your future platform:

• A campaign-driven site with multiple high peaks
• Minimal in-house IT knowledge 
• An aggressive growth strategy
• A need for global expansion (e.g. in Asia or Europe)

LESS FOCUS ON IT – MORE FOCUS ON BUSINESS

The characteristics above give a rough overview of when Commerce Cloud could be relevant to consider.

With Commerce Cloud, you are taking care of. Commerce Cloud is native cloud - Software as a Service, which means that operations, hosting, and upgrades are things that Salesforce takes care of – the software is upgraded, patched, and scaled automatically without you noticing it as a retailer. This means that all Commerce Cloud customers get the same feature set at the same time and there is therefore no need to use resources on upgrading the platform. This way, your business stays ahead of the innovation curve automatically. It is a huge helping hand in an industry where customers’ expectations and behavior are changing constantly and rapidly. Salesforce ensures that your webshop is future-proof and is continually equipped with the newest features and security patches.

This, of course, gives more focus, more time, and more money to drive the business forward. Use the energy on innovative campaigns and on optimizing your omnichannel solutions instead. Operation and stability, which normally can steal time from other projects, are taken care of by Salesforce.

With Salesforce Commerce Cloud you also get an integrated AI out-of-the-box. Therefore, there is no need for third-party solutions or to have an army of machine learning experts. The integrated Einstein technology delivers intelligent insights and user-friendly tools, leading the way towards tailored and personalized buying experiences.

If you are having plans on expanding your business to new markets, Salesforce can help you too. With their Success Cloud they have experts from all over the world at their disposal. They offer commercial, strategic, and technically advisory on deployments to specific countries and regions. For instance, what is the most important payment method when launching in Singapore?

CREATE BETTER SYNERGY BETWEEN ONLINE AND OFFLINE DATA

In 2020, an e-commerce business can’t run without full integration to data from other parts of the business. In order to be competitive, it is necessary to create strong synergies between offline and online activities and to collect and use data in an intelligent way. To create a coherence between marketing, brick-and-mortar stores, IT, B2C and B2B – in other ways, breaking down silos in the organization, has never been more important.

Because the Salesforce platform makes the implementation project more efficient and drives innovation, Alpha Solutions experience – after more than 13 projects on Commerce Cloud – is that customers on the platform can exploit the synergies between systems much faster. Simply because the baseline delivery project of the e-commerce platform itself is completed in a shorter amount of time. This enhances the focus on binding systems together, make them more intelligent, and thereby improving the customer experience for the consumer.

It is, however, important to note, that the platform itself (of course) is not the solution to all your problems. But in our experience customers on Commerce Cloud are able to move at a much quicker pace with high growth in their digital transformation.