Salesforce Commerce Cloud Implementation

Salesforce is a globally trusted and most popular cloud-based platform that offers a wide range of digital products to businesses to increase their potential, acquire new capabilities and deliver a better experience to their customers. One of the products offered by Salesforce is SFCC or Salesforce Commerce Cloud. There are many companies all around the world that offer Salesforce Commerce Cloud Services.

In this article, we will discuss the features and benefits of Salesforce Commerce Cloud and some of the best practices to follow while implementing SFCC to ensure optimum performance.

What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC)?

Earlier known as Demandware, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a cloud-oriented service to unify customer interaction and multi-channel/multi-device engagement. It empowers businesses to stay connected with their customers during their physical as well as digital interactions to build more personalized, seamless, and consistent customer journeys.

SFCC is equipped with the competent toolsets and purpose-specific features to effectively take care of different business-related tasks including plan, launch, market, and track their online stores. Some of the key features of this solution include customer service management, Content management, orders management, inventory management, and building a personalized purchasing experience among others.

What Does Salesforce Commerce Cloud Do?

With SFCC the enterprises can efficiently communicate and link with their clients during different growth phases of their purchase journey through different touchpoints like social, web, store, and mobile. The enterprises get an uncomplicated and unified interface for diverse commerce-related tasks like launching one or more brands from one location, nurture leads, drive conversions, and inspire loyal brand evangelists.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud has made it quicker and more effective for businesses to connect and communicate with their customers by competently integrating a range of diverse USPs. Cloud-based ecosystem ensures anytime, anywhere connectivity and seamless integration allows for combining different strengths to multiply competency.

B2B Vs. B2C Salesforce Commerce Cloud

To help enterprises serve the interests of their customers more competently the Salesforce commerce cloud is divided into 2 different branches. B2B commerce is specially designed to help business to business companies while B2C commerce is equipped with a diverse range of features for providing a personalized experience to the end clients.

B2B commerce cloud: B2B Commerce provides an extensive range of features to help enterprises sell at scale- immediately and more effectively. It is equipped with the right set of features to tackle huge orders and more nuanced shipping functionality while ensuring streamlined and quick checkouts. By hiring B2B Commerce Cloud Partners, the companies can use its smart features to cater to the demands of their business clients more efficiently to deliver personalized services.

B2C Commerce Cloud: With the help of B2C commerce the enterprises can create multiple websites for their different brands and manage all of them through a single interface. It is also equipped with competent features and tools so that businesses can use more interactive communication mediums like email and social media to interact with their customers at a deeper level. It allows businesses to build a personalized experience on the web as well as mobile channels.

Don't forget to check out: Get to Know About the B2B Commerce Data Model | Salesforce Help Guide

Benefits of Salesforce Commerce Cloud

SFCC offers a wide array of different benefits for businesses as well as end clients. Here are a few key benefits of SFCC:

Advanced Customer Data Integration for Deeper Insights

Customer data integration is one of the major USPs of SFCC. It allows businesses to seamlessly integrate the vital customer data gathered from disparate touchpoints, platforms, and sources. It utilizes the sophisticated capabilities of Einstein to effectively explore deeper consumer insights like preferences, income, profile, buying patterns, and even future behavior forecasting.

Intelligent Forecasting

Einstein AI is a powerful platform that takes predictive capabilities to the next level. This sophisticated platform empowers retailers to extensively improve the buyers’ journey by displaying personalized results, automating different procedures, and a guided course of action. Along with creating a community of loyal customers it also helps in increasing the conversion rate.

Tailored Shopping Experience

SFCC allows businesses to personalize all the key facets of their website to deliver a unique shopping experience to each customer. By providing an optimal buying experience the businesses can keep their customers happy and satisfied. It helps in increasing market traction and customer retention.

Seamless Scalability to Maintain Consistency

One of the major concerns of businesses is to effectively tackle the high-scale digital requirements like traffic surges, massive volumes of inventory, and complex series of multiple transactions. To facilitate this eCommerce needs to adapt accordingly. An outdated eCommerce solution can stunt the capabilities of fast-growing businesses and prevent them from pacing ahead in the competition. Salesforce Commerce cloud comes with purpose-built scalability capabilities to instantly support the fluctuating demands.

Advanced Growth Strategies

SFCC is equipped with purpose-built business growth features and tools to ensure quick digital growth for the businesses while maintaining consistency and a steady grip over the market. With right expansion strategies help the business to gain deeper traction, acquiring new markets and continuously upgrading its potential

Uniform Purchasing Experience for Customers

Commerce cloud smartly unifies the disparate customer touchpoints. It helps businesses to offer a uniform experience to their customers throughout their entire journey across different devices and platforms - both physical and digital. It helps in delivering a cohesive experience to the customers. It also strengthens the tracking and monitoring capabilities by a detailed, all-inclusive picture to the businesses.

Mobile-friendly Architecture

With its sophisticated capabilities to extensively improve the mobile experience the SFCC streamlines and uncomplicates the overall shopping experience. A faster mobile shopping experience allows businesses to effectively reach and impress the massively growing population of mobile shoppers and enjoy a cutting edge in the market.

Key Features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud

SFCC is intelligently developed to integrate a complete array of all the key features required for ensuring a better customer experience throughout different phases of their purchase journey.

Some of the major features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud include:

Advanced capabilities to manage multiple sites with better efficiency
Competent product management features
Responsive design to deliver a better mobile experience
Generating Real-time reports
Intuitive dashboards
Readymade Integrations
Competent Catalog management
Purpose-built features and tools to manage different phases of Campaigns
In-store extensions
All-inclusive development platform with a full range of features
Tailored pricing based on Customer/segment
Native targeting
A/B testing
Advanced Marketing tools
Unique merchandising features
Focused promo management and intelligent customer segmentation

Take advantage of these features by hiring a Salesforce Commerce Cloud Partner.

Best Practices to Implement Salesforce Commerce Cloud

To gain optimum benefits out of SFCC you need to follow some best SFCC implementation practices. It will help you to optimize the performance and exactly meet your business objectives.

Some of the best practices to unlock maximum SFCC potential include:

Enhancing Front-end Performance

A user-friendly front-end experience is extremely important to satisfy your targeted audiences and build memorable shopping journeys. By efficiently managing the key aspects like page loading, stability, and consistency, you can have greater control over defining the end-user experience. It allows you to optimize the browsing journey and win customer loyalty.

Here are a few ways to enhance the front end performance:

CSS Sprites: Sprite refers to unifying different images into one image to reduce the size and improve speed. After that, the single image is called at a particular location/time through CSS. It saves bandwidth by cutting down the HTTP server calls while rendering the pages.
Minification: One of the frequent reasons to begin slow loading eCommerce sites is the excessive use of redundant characters and spaces. Minification can help in overcoming this issue. This practice involves minification of CSS and JavaScript code to shrink the web page size and allow browsers to render it more quickly.

Check out another amazing blog by Cyntexa here: Salesforce Customization vs Configuration: What's the Difference?

Optimized Memory Management

For delivering a personalized customer experience the businesses need a massive volume of data for every individual client. The objective is to gain maximum insights in real-time. However, it significantly inflates the data volume and massive size can make things challenging at times.

You need to constantly optimize your site architecture to work seamlessly and uninterrupted with this massive amount of data that is constantly increasing. For that you need to follow best memory management practices as below:

Prevent memory consumption from being influenced by result set size by designing a loop logic
Only the current objects should be kept in the memory without retaining their references. Also, avoid collecting or sorting objects in the memory/can go a long way in economizing memory consumption.
Instead of building large memory structures opt for regular data streaming to the files.

Enhancing the Performance of Top Content

Along with the homepage, it is equally if not more important to optimize the view of the pages that directly help in business transactions and sales like category and product description pages.

It is equally important to focus your attention on promotion-oriented and traffic-building pages like email campaigns.
Identify the key pages of your site and constantly improve their loading speed so that audiences can instantly access those pages.
Use minimum graphics and JavaScript on the initial pages of your site to reduce the loading time.
For any eCommerce site the product description, homepage, category details, and search results pages are the most visited pages. Constantly analyze the performance of such top visited pages and incorporate speed/performance-enhancing features like caching to avoid latency issues.
Avoid live calls on the top-visited pages of your site as they can cause delays. It stops the B2C commerce application from catering to another request before the external system responds. It can result in piled-up requests, choppy performance, and a slower page response rate.

Wisely utilizing the Jobs and Schedulers

SFCC Jobs can automate tedious jobs and compresses complicated processes like data replication, data importing/exploring, and search index creation. By optimizing the configuration of jobs and related schedulers you can easily get things done within minutes instead of hours.

Avoid customizations and prefer standard imports to simplify and uncomplicate processes. After feed creation in an external system download or import the handshake through a simple feed integration component.
The total number of seconds in one day/total number of seconds of job execution time on an instance (Staging or Production). The result represents the job load factor and it should be less than 0.20.
Opt for a smart job designing that supports automatic recovery during abrupt behavior, an unexpected outcome, or other technical challenges like failure/restarting of the application server. The job should be designed to automatically recognize the missing files that are yet to be imported while repeating the execution attempt.
You can create the jobs using scripts and pipelines only and not with the controllers.

Using External Assistance

There are many in-built business management tools for performance auditing of your site. Along with identifying the exact issues they also help in exploring the most effective solutions to overcome those issues.

With a Pipeline profiler, you can tune scripts. Pipelines performance at the time of developing and testing. For that, you need to go to the storefront and trigger the pipeline. Ideally, the pipeline should execute the job in a maximum of 3 seconds with non-cached components. When working with cached components the ideal time limit for job execution is further reduced to 250 milliseconds. If it is exceeding the ideal time limits with a significant margin, try identifying the factors that are creating the bottlenecks using pipeline profile on production. The ideal length of this process shouldn’t exceed 15 minutes.
You can get detailed insights into the run-time performance with the help to a code profile.
With the help of the technical reports feature you can gain comprehensive insights about the server-side operations of your website that includes controllers and pipelines as well.

Conclusion

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a powerful cloud-based service for businesses that is loaded with all the right features and capabilities to provide a personalized and consistent customer experience. To tap the maximum potential of SFCC, the businesses need to follow the ideal implementation practices and localize the overall service deliverability to exactly match their enterprise needs. Cyntexa is a certified Salesforce Commerce Cloud Implementation Partner in the USA that helps you with the best solutions in improving business agility and generating higher revenue. We have a team of experts that understands your complex business requirements and suggests the best B2B or B2C Cloud Solution.