If a B2B or B2C company is not natively digital, expanding its presence online will play a key role in the evolution of its business. Ecommerce provides an excellent opportunity to expand product and service availability, with the potential to become a lucrative revenue channel or the fastest way to diversify growth or new business strategies.
The Global Payments Report revealed a strong 14% year-over-year worldwide growth in ecommerce in 2021, exceeding $5.3 trillion in transaction value. According to the same study, by 2025, the industry is expected to account for 12% of global consumer spending.
There are two approaches you can take to structure your ecommerce strategy, which can be deployed for either B2B or B2C organizations:
- Virtual store: An online sales channel for your products and services unlocks the digital possibilities to develop new experiences for your customers.
- Marketplace: This platform enables various sellers to reach potential customers from one place, functioning as a digital mall.
What Influences Ecommerce Strategy Decisions?
Regardless of the choice of business model and its possible variations, the decisions of where to start and how to build and evolve your ecommerce must be aligned with different factors that will directly impact the strategy, operation and experience of the digital channel:
- Implementation agility and time-to-market
- Personalization and customization
- Integration between systems and information
- Technological scalability
- Payment solutions
- Channel management tools
- Customer service
- Stability
- Processing capacity
All these factors and others are required to build an exceptional experience for your client. Wherever your digital sales strategy is — “there isn’t one yet,” “we know what we want, and we are going to start developing it,” or “we already have ecommerce, and we want to go further in the experience” — it’s important to be aware of these factors so you can choose the best possible path. The choices you make can help scale the business or create barriers to the development and growth of your commerce.
Because it is founded on the customer experience, based on CRM concepts for marketing, sales and services, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is capable of meeting any level of requirements, from most essential for beginners to the more advanced for those who need to offer a more sophisticated experience.
Leverage Agility to Create Engaging Experiences and Not Fall Behind
Enter the Digital Market with Agility and Reduce Entry Costs
With out-of-the-box ecommerce solutions that feature mobile versions and personalization and customization capabilities, you can quickly adapt your business to your customers’ needs. A virtual store or marketplace could be implemented in weeks (not years), and new features and updates can be easily made. You’ll be able to enhance your reach and bring your brand closer to expanding into international markets.
Integrate Your CRM to Customize the Customer Experience
Integrating Commerce Cloud with other CRM solutions, particularly from Salesforce, allows you to connect data and processes to create truly unique experiences across all aspects of your commerce. A connected system enables you to personalize your engagement with customers and make relevant recommendations to them while shopping.
Use Native Solutions to Facilitate Order Conversion and Logistics
Commerce Cloud can automate processes for accurate delivery and payment processing, transparency and assistance with order processing. You can also easily extend solutions on this flexible, cloud-based platform.
Offer Industry-Specific Features
To accelerate your time to market and lower costs, Commerce Cloud features industry-specific solutions that can be customized to ensure you deliver the exceptional experience your customers expect.
Build a Flexible Ecommerce Structure to Meet All Your Customers Need
A True Unified Shopping Experience
Delivering a seamless customer experience requires system integrations and access to all your points of sale. Commerce Cloud can connect all your channels — whether physical or digital — to create a cohesive customer journey. The platform can also serve as a tool for your team to nurture sales opportunities as well as share and update information and performance reports immediately. This is made possible by integrating and optimizing multiple systems and processes, such as sales, order and inventory management, campaigns and conversions on a single platform with a Customer 360 solution. You’ll operate with flexibility and omnichannel functionality for your business.
Choosing a Platform That Will Integrate With Your Business and Scale
Your commerce system needs to be able to handle sudden spikes, high traffic, transaction volumes and inventory control. As your business expands, Commerce Cloud scales your technology infrastructure to meet your demands. And because it’s a cloud-based platform, your entire company can share and access the same infrastructure with the same benefits, updates and services from anywhere at any time.
Providing an Accessible, Stable Shopping Experience
A delay or bug in your online store page loads can result in lost sales. The stability and power of Commerce Cloud offer practical, fast and flexible online shopping experiences to easily help customers find what they’re looking for whenever they want it.
Elevate Your Shopping Experience to a Unique Experience
Manage the Entire Customer Relationship
With the capability to integrate with other marketing, services and sales solutions, Commerce Cloud allows you to build a complete relationship structure with your customers. From personalized content and promotions to after-sales service management, you can create experiences throughout the customer journey that will bring customers back.
Give B2B Customers Self-Service, With all the Functionality They Need
Especially for B2B opportunities, Commerce Cloud allows you to bring all the benefits of the online shopping experience to the requirements of business-to-business operations: personalized catalogs and negotiations, support for large orders, ease of repeat orders, account hierarchy, a variety of payments, and management of shipments to various locations on different dates. And by integrating with marketing, sales and service systems, the ecosystem will provide a unified view and easy management of each client.
Mobile First or Mobile Optimized — Put Shopping in the Hands of Your Customers
The global mobile commerce market reached $833.9 billion in 2021, according to Research and Markets, and it’s expected to hit $4.712 trillion by 2027. No matter what industry you are in, commerce solutions need to meet customers’ mobility needs. Salesforce Commerce Cloud has solutions optimized for mobile versions of online stores to facilitate and enable companies to better connect with the public and multiply sales opportunities.
Artificial Intelligence Enhancing Your Customers’ Experiences and Results
By adding Salesforce Einstein artificial intelligence (AI), you can transform sales strategies to personalize and recommend products or services that are most relevant to customers based on their browsing and shopping behaviors. You’ll also be able to generate insights to improve the experience and drive revenue.
Starting Out or Looking for a More Powerful Experience in Your Ecommerce?
No matter where you are, no company can afford to ignore an ecommerce strategy if they want to grow. This is where OSF can help you understand how these and other features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud can enable your ecommerce strategies, whether you already have a Salesforce solution or not. Our team of experts can help you get started or push you forward on your digital transformation journey.
