SF Commerce Cloud FAQ: What Are The Essential Features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

What Are The Essential Features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

Answer

The ecommerce platform contains a rich supply of features that range from order management and customization to predictive intelligence. But Salesforce Commerce Cloud has five essential features, which are:

Management of products and payments: this comprehensively covers all core aspects of ecommerce functionalities. It includes being able to upload products, images and information, and their prices. And also making it possible for your customers to purchase products — via baskets and carts, and then going through a payment and shipping process. This gives you control over which payment methods you accept (perhaps even cryptocurrency!) and how much you want delivery costs to be.

Extensions and add-ons: the best way to easily expand functionality is to add extensions, or as Salesforce Commerce Cloud calls them, cartridges. An ecommerce site can only provide a certain amount of function, or else it would balloon into a slow-moving giant. That’s why ecommerce platforms allow other companies to build the features that are missing, or that specific websites want to add.

Some good examples of cartridges include Ordergroove. Because SFCC’s focus is one-off purchases, there is no option for subscriptions. So there are a few cartridges that look to bridge this gap, such as Ordergroove. There are plenty of good reasons why your company may want to use subscriptions. Maybe you sell fresh vegetables and your customers would prefer to set up subscriptions for fruit and veg deliveries once or twice a month.

Out-of-the-box tools: The opposite to extensions (cartridges) are features that were born ready on the platform. These are the out-of-the-box tools that you can take advantage of, without having to integrate them onto SF Commerce Cloud or having to pay heavy sums in order to use.

Some of these features that spring out of the box include homepages, checkouts, product pages. One of the best features baked into the platform is A/B testing, which you won’t find ready to go on many other ecommerce platforms. This enables you to test changes to your site that affect a certain percentage of your visitors. Let’s say you want to see whether a different product page leads to higher conversions, you can roll out those changes for 50% of visitors, or 5% — it’s really up to you!

Reporting: an essential feature for every ecommerce platform is the ability to crunch the data and analyze the facts on the ground — well, on the cloud! On the surface, websites are packed full of random behavior: visitors stay there for an hour and purchase nothing, others fill up their cart and suddenly leave. Reporting lets you look at all your data and analyze it, so as to cultivate ideas to improve performance.

Essential data you have access to includes what customers have bought, as well as your top products. You can view the search log of what users have been looking for by product and their spelling of it. And importantly, data on the customers themselves, such as whether they’re new customers, registered to your site, and whether they’re first-time buyers. 

Scalability: the projection of growth is baked into many ecommerce companies, which if realized also means the expansion of their websites — their number of products, catalogs, pages, site visitors, etc. So to have an ecommerce platform that can handle this is a necessity. Like it’s name not-so-subtly suggests, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is hosted on the cloud, which is great for website growth because it means that you could potentially get millions of visitors come to your site and it won’t noticeably slow down.

SFCC also allows you to seamlessly add or remove elements that it provides, so that you’re not stuck with a small-scale site when you’re ready to burst. Or in contrast, SFCC doesn’t provide you a website with an overwhelming supply of features that, for you, are either unnecessary or over your head. Scalability squashes cost and technical difficulty, and minimizes risk.

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud dev teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.