Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) has been gaining prominence over the last few years as businesses around the world are setting up eCommerce ventures. The Salesforce offering allows organisations to establish and manage online storefronts to provide consistent buying experiences to their customers. SFCC is designed to provide advanced and automated eCommerce solutions to businesses operating at all scales and in all major industries.

To thrive in a highly competitive market in the age of digitization, it is important to stay in tune with the latest tech trends that have been defining our times. We live in times where new technologies and trends keep emerging at lightning speed. To sustain your business and make the most of your eCommerce platform, it is important to keep your business strategies updated.

Salesforce, along with SFCC, has initiated a range of different trends that help users optimise their business processes and attain their objectives in the best way possible. When deciding on your business strategies, it is advisable to stay in sync with these trends.

Here are some of the most important SFCC trends that will shape your business strategies going forward:

The rise of contactless payments

While digital payments were on the rise for quite a few years, the pandemic made us all realise how important contactless payments are. Over the last two years, digital payments and the platforms facilitating them have seen a significant rise in adoption.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud allows you to integrate with payment solutions like WorldPay, Adyen, Cybersource, and more. Such integrations allow your customers to make secure digital payments as they purchase your products. Moreover, SFCC ensures that all transactions are encrypted to keep the details secure and private. This allows you to receive and make payments in a faster and easier way.

Along with facilitating digital payments for online purchases, SFCC also facilitates setting up digital payments for on-premise stores. If you are willing to connect your online and offline storefronts, the eCommerce platform ensures consistency in the mode of payment across multiple channels. This makes it easier for you to track your payments and assess them to make important business decisions.

Turning stores into fulfilment centres

As online stores have been thriving over the last few years, digital shopping has become a 24/7 activity. This has led to brick-and-mortar stores closing down and losing relevance. If you already have a conventional store and have set up an eCommerce venture with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, you can connect the two by turning your physical store into a fulfilment centre.

SFCC allows you to add new features and attributes to your online store that provide your customers with an option to collect their products from these new fulfilment centres for faster procurement. Ideal for catering to local customers, you can manage all your data regarding the orders fulfilled across multiple channels from a centralised platform with Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Exploring new channels for online selling

The website or application of your online store is not the only platform your customers can make purchases from. You must have seen products listed in YouTube videos with prices, descriptions, and links for direct purchase. Also, Google displays products from different online stores in its search results when specific searches are made.

A boom in digitization has opened up several new avenues and channels for businesses to sell their products online. Salesforce Commerce Cloud allows you to explore these channels and optimise them to reach out to your prospects across the board. Moreover, the eCommerce solution helps you keep track of the purchases made via different channels for obtaining valuable insights and making the right business decisions.

Visual merchandising

In essence, visual merchandising has been in practise for several decades. It is the activity of optimising the display and presentation of your products to attract your prospects and customers. A variety of retailers use visual merchandising, from supermarkets to department stores and shopping malls.

When it comes to online stores, visual merchandising has become even more important. The internet is a sea of different competitors. It doesn’t take more than a few clicks for a prospect to leave your store and visit another one online. Businesses around the world have been finding innovative ways to showcase their products online.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud helps you get on the bandwagon of modern visual merchandising by providing you with advanced tools and features for the same. It helps you manage the way your products look in your online store and how they can be optimised to persuade visitors to make a purchase. SFCC helps you with online visual merchandising by facilitating two major activities: visual sorting and managing variation groups.

For visual sorting, SFCC provides users with drag-and-drop positioning tools for your products. This allows you to manage product assortments in different categories throughout your online stores. Just like a physical store employee would place specific products based on different categories in the store, SFCC allows you to sort and place your products in a strategic manner for seamless navigation.

Managing variation groups allows you to form different groups of your stock-keeping units (SKUs) under a master product based on specific attributes. This allows you to display your products to your customers based on colours, editions, upgrades, and more.

Visual merchandising allows you to get creative with placing your products within your online storefronts. With the help of business intelligence tools offered by SFCC, you can also personalise the products displayed to different customers based on their preferences and history of purchases.