What’s Great About Salesforce Commerce Cloud: Sorting Orders

Today’s feature to explore of Salesforce Commerce Cloud that helps it stand apart from the competitors is the Sorting Order.

The sorting order is a minor feature you usually don’t think about. When products are listed on an ecommerce site, they’re listed in an order. Usually, ecommerce systems have a dropdown that lets the user select what order they want it in, always with a default. The most common options are “Best Match” (usually the default, so you get the most likely on-point items first), “Price Ascending” and “Price Descending”.

Sounds like a pedestrian, even boring, feature, right? Salesforce Commerce Cloud, of course, takes this to the next level. Here is what it does to make this version of the feature separate from all the others.

First, they have 8 options to choose from. They are:

• Best Match. Self-explanatory and standard.
• Brand. So users can see the brands in order to find the ones they want.
• Customer Favorites. Which tells you the ones that have been hearted or liked the most by customers.
• Most Popular. This category “Sorts by combination of product views, sales velocity, look to book, and availability”.
• Prices high to low. Self-explanatory and standard.
• Prices low to high. Self-explanatory and standard.
• Product name ascending. By product, in alphabetical order.
• Product name descending. By product, in reverse alphabetical order. (Hey, sometimes the product you’re looking for will begin with a ‘Z’ and you’ll forget the name!)
• Top Sellers. These “Sort by combination of revenue, units, look to book, and availability”.

But wait, there’s more! From these 8 options:

• You can choose which ones you want to appear, or not, on the web site. If you don’t want anyone to sort by “Most Popular” — so be it!
• You can choose some of these options to only appear as part of an A/B test — so you can have a sorting option appear only as part of a test.
• Display name change; you don’t want to call it “Price Descending” nor “Price High to Low” but instead “See The Most Expensive Items” — you can!
• You aren’t even limited by these pre-set options. You can very easily define your own other sort options that combine variables, like sales, views, and availability, to have your own options.

Each of these four options doesn’t exist on the other major ecommerce platforms, without tremendous amounts of custom work — if that. But Salesforce Commerce Cloud does all, by default.

In case you’re wondering what these look like, in practice, here are two relevant screens. Here is where you can see all the various sorting rules, and define more:

And here is where you can define which ones you will use, in what order, what you will call them, and if they’ll appear only in tests:

Conclusion: “the devil is in the details”. We love Salesforce Commerce Cloud here at United Virtualities. But it’s not in a very general way, as in, “they’re cool” (Confession: Shopify probably has more hipster-cool points than Salesforce Commerce Cloud does), but because of the minor details like these that bring it to the next level of ecommerce.

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