Salesforce Commerce Cloud allows you to manage your e-commerce enterprise in a holistic, integrated manner. But, what does this mean?
We are conducting online business at a critical time in the Internet’s maturity. As business leaders, we have many options available to us to accomplish countless tasks. While the choice opportunity is ideal, it’s often difficult to determine which option is best for our business.
The variety of options is sometimes overwhelming.
When it comes to e-commerce, as the old proverb goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. And, while you may initially consider the numerous e-commerce platforms, I would like to challenge you to think more along the lines of integration.
See, while your e-commerce platform selection is essential, it doesn’t represent all of the software solutions your company demands.
And, this is where the waters begin to get murky.
Integrating Your Business Tools
While each business is unique, there are standard tools we all need for efficiency and success. Among those include a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, inventory management, accounting programs, and much more.
Your e-commerce platform is yet another tool in your toolbox.
However, the more solutions you add to your daily workflow, the more complex the data management becomes. Often, this complicated entanglement leads to lost productivity and profitability due to inherent inefficiencies. When your staff is replicating data entry, they’re doing double work—additionally, the potential for inaccurate information entering your database increases.
Aside from wasted resources, the results of incorrect data can also include dissatisfied customers, lost shipments, poor customer retention, and much more. As you can see, these missteps can often be catastrophic.
Pulling Commerce Together
So, how do you pull your tools together to embrace your e-commerce platform harmoniously?
If you’ve spent time reading our previous articles, you already know we are superfans of the Salesforce set of cloud-based tools. And we’re fans for a good reason. Simply put, they’re terrific—reliable, robust, and integrate very well with best-in-class software developers.
For the sake of this article—and what we believe is the best solution for e-commerce integration—we would like to share with you the perks of Salesforce Commerce Cloud that we love the most.
Real-Time Communication with Slack
If you, like many teams, rely on Slack, you’ll be pleased to hear it integrates smoothly with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. You may not be aware Salesforce joined forces with Slack some time ago, and the platforms remain attached at the hip.
With this integration, customer service before, during, and after the ordering process quickly updates your organization in real time.
Boosting Sales and Marketing Performance with Salesforce CRM
Salesforce CRM is recognized as the #1 CRM for business and is tied intimately to Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Leveraging this power includes pre-sales efforts from your marketing department and closing deals through your sales team.
With integrated platforms sharing insights inter-departmentally, your teams can make intelligent, data-driven decisions at a moment’s notice.
For example, as a lead moves along the sales funnel and, ultimately, through the checkout process on your website, their actions can be monitored while notifying your teams.
This power enables quick sales pivots and inventory updates.
Order Management
When we speak about an “e-commerce platform,” it sounds very singular. However, in today’s online commerce market, adopting an omnichannel model has become commonplace. While you have a feature-rich website of your own, you’re likely making additional sales through channels such as amazon.com and eBay.com, to name a few.
While these additional sales are terrific for the bottom line, the inventory you’re shipping is still coming from the same warehouse and packed by the same staff. Managing orders from various sources efficiently and accurately can be a challenge.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud helps aggregate these orders, giving you a single location to view and act upon new orders. Handling returns, issuing tracking numbers and shipping updates, and offering self-serve order inquiries are also byproducts of this robust system.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) with Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Building on the order management benefits, Salesforce Commerce Cloud seamlessly connects with ERP software, like GoldFinch, to pull more business teams together.
Your staff managing the inventory levels can watch bin counts fluctuate in real time, allowing them to order replenishment shipments in advance of an outage. If you’re involved with discrete manufacturing, the depletion of individual parts is actively monitored, and replacement orders are transmitted to your vendors as sales occur.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud with ERP can help your business stay ahead of high-volume sales demands, so you’re ready to fulfill all orders as they come in.
Provide a Personalized Experience
With the integrations mentioned above and others, Salesforce Commerce Cloud allows you to provide a personalized shopping experience for your customers. Tools tracking user behavior combined with artificial intelligence (AI) allow for predictive sales pivots, presenting your customers with goods and services that more likely matter to them.
As your presence grows, more data is collected and analyzed, which means more accurate predictions. These pivots translate into richer personalization and, ultimately, a deeper connection with your customer base.
While we’ve covered a lot, we are only scratching the surface of Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s power. The key to running an e-commerce business, as with any operation, is efficiency. Integrating solutions that play nice with one another, pulling your teams together, and adding automation to the fulfillment process helps your business fire on all cylinders.
And, as a bonus, you get to develop stronger connections with your customers.
To further understand how Salesforce Commerce Cloud can improve YOUR business, Contact Us today—we’re here to help!
