Provide Unlimited Purchasing Possibilities With Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s Endless Aisle

In days past when we were free to roam the outdoors, you’d likely step into a store and search for that specific thing you’ve wanted for a while. Let’s say that thing is a fresh pair of sneakers. So you head to your favorite brand’s store. You gaze across the colorful options when your eyes fix upon those white and blue sneakers. You slip them on but they don’t quite fit. You want the next size up, so you call back the store associate…

Scenario one: with no technological aid the store associate can only offer you alternative sizes and alternative styles, armed only with the best guesswork of the employee.

Scenario two: aided with rich and relevant data, the store associate can find preferences of the customer, and make recommendations based on full access to available inventory across all channels. So if your ideal shoes are not in that particular store, the associate can help you to order them online.

The strength of scenario two involves Endless Aisle, an app within Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud that connects data across a wide landscape — from customers and products to your inventory — that arms your in-store associates with key information to recover and convert a potentially lost sale into a purchase. They will be able to find comprehensive data on product styles and sizes, as well as make recommendations that are based on the preferences of the customer.

 But that’s not all, because the Endless Aisle also equips store associates with the ability to perform price and shipping overrides, and to gain access to customer’s wish lists.

Endless Aisle exceeds customer expectations with unlimited purchase possibilities, helping to eliminate potential lost sales such as in scenario one mentioned above — those issues like out-of-stock or unavailable products.

The SFCC app is user friendly and easily customizable, so that you can create your own digital store innovations, along with APIs and Salesforce’s ecosystem of tech partners.

For those outside the ecommerce ecosystem, there is the perception that stores are in decline; dying a slow and painful death as ecommerce takes up the mantle as prime commerce provider. Yet for those of use within the rapidly changing industry, we know that stores remain at the core of the retail landscape, albeit in new and imaginative ways.

It’s true that youthful digital commerce is outpacing the older retail commerce when it comes to overall growth, and so leading brands have had to embrace the winds of change, evolve their approach towards commerce, and blur the lines between in-store and online customer experiences. And Endless Aisle is a fabulous blurer.

One particular success story of Salesforce’s Endless Aisle is with shoe retailer ECCO. The 3,300-shop enterprise decided to pilot the Endless Aisle in one of its stores in Massachusetts. They aided their store associates with iPads armed with the app in order to help find and purchase products for shoppers — both in store and online. But first the company trained them to feel comfortable using the app — as well as the reassurance that the app is their work aid rather than their work replacement.

“You can’t just put a tablet in the store and expect it to be successful,” said Dana Schwartz, Director of Marketing and eCommerce for ECCO’s US operations, to Salesforce in an interview. “There is a sea change in the role of the store associate and an opportunity to meet the consumer’s needs through Endless Aisle.”

ECCO realised that a lot of their ensuing in-store digital sales actually came from customers not being able to find their desired shoe size in that specific store. So they rolled out Endless Aisle to all of its 26 stores in the US. and they’ve never looked back.

Endless Aisle enables your company to strengthen your customer-first approach by arming store associates with rich data to always offer customers what they want — or to get as close as possible to it!

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware) development & strategy teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.