Shop on Social Media with Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Let me just check my phone real quick…. No messages…. Oh that’s a nice photo. I like that flowery shirt with the Mao collar. Ah, I can buy it from here. Let me ask if they have other flower patterns. Nice! They do. That one. Let me pay. Here’s my info. “Click.”

Sorry about that. But did you know that you can shop on social media without having to leave the platform? There’s no need to jump from Instagram to the brand site back to Facebook and a final hop onto the site to make payment.

And to tighten up the distance between consumer exploration and final payment, Salesforce expanded their digital powers of Salesforce Order Management and Salesforce Commerce Cloud to include the ability for brands and retailers to allow consumers to go through the whole ecommerce shopping cycle without leaving social media channels.

There are multiple strengths to selling stuff directly on social media channels. 

1. There was a 25% boost to social commerce last year when compared to 2019, up from the previous year’s increase of 20.1%.
2. There will be 3.8 billion social media users by the end of 2021.
3. Seven in ten consumers look for products they want on Facebook and Instagram.
4. Social media referral traffic to physical stores has increased by more than 100% in the past two years.
5. Social media provides rich opportunities for brands to demonstrate social proof of products. Give your customers an avenue to publicly leave feedback and show the strength – and generally to provide transparency surrounding your products by allowing consumers to give their opinions – of your brand.
6. By nudging into social media platforms, brands and retailers forge spaces to nurture an online presence and community, with customers sharing product info, likes and dislikes.

As a recent Salesforce press release detailed: “This means that customers can shop, check out, track orders, connect with service agents and bots, and easily initiate cancellations, returns and exchanges without ever having to leave the channel they’re shopping from.

“Like previous Quick Start Commerce Solutions, managed services are included to help brands get up and running quickly without complex integrations.” Also included in these services are specific solutions to combating the restrictions placed on consumers by the pandemic, such as enabling curbside pickup, or buy online pick up in store – or to the side of it… in the car park… whiling socially distancing.

Other exciting items in the updated basket of goodies include features that can ease international transactions, for example, reinforcing the capabilities to create multiple sites in multiple languages, multiple currencies, as well as the ability to show VAT charges.

“When an order comes in, Salesforce Order Management accurately tracks and reflects currencies,” added the release, “addresses, payment types, tax formats and more, localized to the region from where the order is received. 

“Additionally, when customer service representatives or operations teams use Order Management, their user interface reflects their local time zone, date and number formats, and can be translated into any of the 35 languages, including right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew.”

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware) consultancies. Contact us to see how we can work together.