Introduction

There are numerous eCommerce platforms on the market today, many are great choices for a multitude of use cases. It’s a big decision, and choosing the right one for your business will have impact for years down the road. Salesforce Commerce Cloud is definitely worth considering and likely a great fit for your business. There are 3 main factors to consider when evaluating a B2C Commerce platform, we’ll dive into all those here:

1. Platform

How much are you willing to invest in an infrastructure and the supporting cast necessary to keep it up and running for the long term? The move from on-premise hardware to the cloud is a no brainer for most businesses. Solutions like AWS and Azure offload so much of the risk and overhead that used to be commonplace in a physical datacenter. Hosting your platform in the cloud helps - but it’s not enough. You still need IT expertise for security, availability and scalability. Without it, problems that won’t surface on day one will absolutely bite you hard in the future.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that takes care of the heavy technical lifting for you. The platform is patched and updated, secure and scalable without extra work by your team and is constantly being improved and invested in by Salesforce. Don’t make hardware and IT support services your business with your eCommerce site (ulness your business is selling hardware and IT support services, of course).

2. Feature Set

Investing heavily in custom built ecommerce functionality is only really valuable to an ecommerce platform or the consultants you’re paying to do it. Purchasing online is extremely common and a largely standardized experience for consumers from one site to another. The core features will be delivered by any platform on the market. Features allowing you to optimize the experience, quickly roll out marketing campaigns and functionality and being able target your specific consumer will make the difference by volume.

Salesforce’s commitment to expanding out of the box features is apparent with SFRA - the reference architecture. Providing this site as a starting point for new sites on the platform greatly reduces time to market and provides a best practice framework to help ensure a robust maintainable build.

Arguably the most compelling feature of Commerce Cloud is Salesforce Einstein. The artificial intelligence powered by Einstein allows for personalization across the platform. This includes common features like product recommendations, predictive search and tailored sorting. This is taken to the next level by handling time consuming tasks like grouping products and maintaining customer segments as well as product content improvements.

3. Resources

A platform you want to invest in should have a strong community of professionals, passionate about the product and the problems they are trying to solve. You should anticipate replacing whoever’s initially building your site. Great resources you trust are not ones you ever want to lose but anything can (and will) happen. Maybe your architect leaves your vendor for a new job or your developers decide to break out on their own and start freelancing. Whatever the case, it’s important to have a solution that new developers can pick up without months of archaeology. Those developers also have to be available without conducting an exhaustive nationwide search.

Salesforce B2C Commerce started out as Demandware in 2004 before being acquired by Salesforce in 2016. There’s a large and diverse pool of professionals that have experience on the platform, qualified to maintain and enhance your solution. Salesforce has also invested heavily in training resources and documentation as well as SFRA for best practices. This is incredibly important for maximizing build efficiency and quality and helping to minimize technical debt.

4. Bonus: Salesforce Ecosystem

Last but not least - investing in Salesforce Commerce comes with integration to the world’s leading CRM and marketing services platform. The true power of an integrated sales ecosystem is its ability to leverage data across channels to provide customers what they want, when they want it, leading to increased sales.