Top takeaways from the Commerce keynote and actions you can take

 

Our top takeaways from the Commerce Cloud keynote and actions you can take 

By Shivani Majewski, Senior Director and Mike King, Director and author of the “Salesforce B2C Solution Architect's Handbook: Design scalable and cohesive business-to-consumer experiences with Salesforce Customer 360 that can be found here

 

It’s a refrain we’ve heard for years: more consumers than ever are shopping online and they expect increasingly personalized experiences. What does that mean for businesses? If you don’t have a savvy ecommerce presence, you won’t be competitive. And that presence needs to be driven by a customer-centric platform with AI-powered insights in order to be successful.  

 

In other words, you need a platform like Salesforce Commerce Cloud.  

 

Commerce Cloud helps businesses grow revenue and customer relationships with a completely connected digital customer journey—and Salesforce never stops innovating. In fact, Salesforce recently announced several new features of Commerce Cloud at Dreamforce 21. Here are the highlights of the Commerce Cloud keynote along with our thoughts on what you can do next.   

 

#1: CDP for Commerce will power targeted experiences 

 

The new Salesforce CDP connector for Commerce Cloud helps unify all data to create a single source of truth for each customer—even unknown customers. Actionable, AI-powered insights based on the customer profile drive highly targeted campaigns.  

 

Actions you can take:

 

CDP can support revenue growth while helping you build trusted customer relationships. Start by taking an inventory of all the customer data within your organization—loyalty data, fulfillment data, etc. Then map all your data sets to CDP capabilities, identify gaps, and drive engagement.  

 

#2: Speed time to market with headless commerce 

 

Headless commerce is an ecommerce architecture where the front-end is decoupled from the back-end commerce functionality and it can be updated or edited without interfering with the front-end, similar to a headless content management system.  

 

Actions you can take: 

 

The best place to start is to learn more about headless commerce. Consider the pros and cons of headless commerce and evaluate if it’s right for your organization. Headless commerce can provide significant flexibility for your organization. But it does require a meaningful commitment prior to starting on the journey.

 

#3: Slack is now integrated with Commerce Cloud 

 

Slack is faster, better organized, and more secure than email. Salesforce has built Commerce notifications into Slack, allowing teams overseeing your commerce operations to use Slack as a hub for all their communications.  

 

Actions you can take: 

 

If your organization already uses Slack, consider enabling Commerce alerts to streamline your communications.  

 

#4: Leverage the Salesforce Fulfillment Network 

 

Salesforce has partnered with FedEx to provide end-to-end commerce fulfillment capabilities driven by Commerce Cloud and Order Management. Leverage FedEx and Shoprunner to provide a superior shopping experience by streamlining the allocation, assignment, picking, packing, and shipment of order items direct from OMS.  

 

Actions you can take:

 

Before you go straight to market, evaluate the Salesforce Fulfillment Network for pre-built integration options and explore how your company can take advantage of it.  

 

#5: More core functionality is coming  

 

Salesforce continues to innovate with Commerce functionality on the core platform, including Order Management for B2B Commerce, Direct to Consumer support for existing B2B Merchants, and Omnichannel Order History. With a continued investment in B2C Commerce, there are more options than ever to power commerce experiences with Salesforce.  

 

Actions you can take: 

 

If you’re currently selling B2B on Commerce Cloud, evaluate the pros and cons of implementing Direct to Consumer. Review the latest Salesforce capabilities to expand or enhance your commerce offerings.  

 

Surprise and delight your customers 

 

The new Commerce Cloud features will help you be faster and more efficient in delivering the personalized, superior shopping experiences your customers crave.  

 

Commerce Cloud isn’t the only Salesforce product with new features. Salesforce announced updates across its portfolio at Dreamforce 21.

 

Click here for our takeaways on other announcements. 

 

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