When Salesforce acquired Demandware in 2016 for $2.8 billion, that’s when Salesforce Commerce Cloud came into action. As more and more industries started getting into e-commerce, Salesforce prepared to expand which is where the idea behind launching Commerce Cloud rolled out. The main aim of the company was to target the major retailers that consisted of Demandware’s customer base. In today’s scenario, more than 680 million unique shoppers joined Commerce Cloud over holidays, says Salesforce. Also, merchandise worth $16 billion sold annually through this platform.
Salesforce is improving Commerce Cloud’s personalization capabilities that are powered by AI with new features and is adding new tools on the platform as well. The major updates on the platform include the latest ‘Einstein Visual Search’ which is a unique image search feature that provides shoppers with the ability to “snap and search” for products with the help of images and not text. There is an Einstein Recommendations API as well that allows retailers to integrate Einstein-driven product recommendations beyond their e-commerce site.
Apart from all this, Salesforce is revamping its inventory availability service, allowing retailers to operate inventory in real-time across distributions centers and stores. This service works as an actual platform service now which can be combined with other services and is aligned adjacently with the remodeled recommendation engine.
For example, a customer’s preference and click path will showcase products that are in stock nearby on location-aware apps, all with the help of recommendations in AI-driven applications. Just with a bit of technical support, retailers using Commerce Cloud can implement these features. “Our customers don’t have an army of data scientists and now they can use services they never had access to before,” says Mike Micucci, CEO, Commerce Cloud. “And they can scale them to thousands of stores.”
There is something for the developers too. Salesforce is offering on-demand sandboxes for developers and a new Commerce Cloud Developer Trailhead and Commerce API Explorer portal as well.
At present, the Commerce Cloud Einstein Visual Search is in the pilot. The feature will be accessible generally in the second half of this year. Whereas, On-demand Developer Sandboxes are in beta and will be available in the first half of this year. There are no details about the availability of Commerce Cloud Einstein Recommendations API (currently in beta).
Source: ZD Net, Martech Today
Pratyush Kumar
