Today shoppers are demanding more than the odd bargain or 2-for-1 sale, with consumers demanding personalisation and instant gratification with every purchase and transaction. This is why more and more organisations are prioritising the customer journey and looking at how to stay competitive in the connected world across a variety of channels. Answering this demand, Salesforce has ramped up its Commerce Cloud Einstein to deliver AI-powered shopping experiences.
Selling the new capabilities as ‘innovations that empower every company to become a retail Trailblazer, Salesforce has introduced functionality that answers shoppers’ demand for predictive and personalized commerce experiences.
“The connected consumer is rapidly disrupting retail, creating a new imperative for brands to deliver smarter, more personal shopping experiences everywhere,” said Jeff Barnett, CEO, Commerce Cloud, Salesforce. “Commerce Cloud Einstein accelerates this transformation by lowering the barriers of AI for every retailer, empowering them to build consumer loyalty with every interaction and increase conversion across every channel.”
One impressive new function added by Salesforce to its Commerce Cloud is the new Einstein Predictive Sort capability, which uses machine learning to personalise the order in which products appear in search and category pages on ecommerce sites.
Using order history and web behavior, a predictive model is created for each individual shopper. Now, the most relevant products for a shopper are shown first in search results, decreasing the time a customer spends looking for what they want and thus increasing conversion. No coding or data scientists are needed to get Predictive Sort up and running, with brands able to quickly embed the capability into their sites with just a few clicks.
The CRM giant has also added Order Management to Commerce Cloud, empowering retailers with intelligent algorithms that seamlessly connect customer demand with inventory supply in the most cost-effective way possible. By managing and collecting all key order and inventory data across stores, warehouses and dropship vendors, retailers can now support “buy anywhere, fulfill anywhere” scenarios such as buy online/pickup in-store and ship from store.
The Commerce Cloud enhancements also include Android Pay integration and new Mobile Site Reference Architecture. Commerce Cloud customers see a majority of traffic from mobile devices, and the Mobile Site Reference Architecture provides retailers with clear guidance based on best practices in mobile site design, merchandising and technical architecture, enabling them to create state-of-the-art mobile shopping experiences faster than ever before.
As for the integration with Android Pay, Pali Bhat, Global VP of Payment Products at Google, said: “We’re excited to deliver Android Pay seamlessly inside of Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
“Android Pay makes mobile checkout easy. Shoppers no longer need to enter their card details, they can just choose Android Pay and authenticate with their device to speed through checkout.”
Although Salesforce already powers billions of consumer interactions across more than 2,000 retail sites in 53 countries, the tech giant is looking to further profit in the commerce space as retailers’ shift to unified platforms. In fact, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF), 86% of retailers plan to implement a unified commerce platform over the next ten years to more effectively sell to connected consumers.
