The retail industry has witnessed considerable changes in the past few decades, with the most phenomenal ones happening in the last one. The pandemic presented its own share of challenges and opportunities to the retail industry, presenting to them a chance for a long-overdue great retail reset that may help move many retailers into a more stable and profitable position. But to reach there, retailers will require balancing near-term challenges with long-term commitments and transformational thinking.
Since 2020, e-commerce players have been witnessing accelerated growth much faster than the retail industry expected. And it appears that the pandemic shone a light on the importance of e-commerce for retailers and the convenience it offers for consumers. The e-commerce retail industry is revolutionizing the way customers shop. As days pass, especially with pandemic prolonging, people have become more inclined to brands that sell online or have a digital presence. After the pandemic hit, people wanted to buy from e-commerce sites rather than visit physical stores and run the risk of being infected.
The increased preference for online shopping is putting pressure on brick-and-mortar retailers who are compelled to develop to compete with the new digital retail business in the post-pandemic as well. They feel overwhelmed with handling customer queries, collecting buyer’s data, and building strategies to outrun their competitors.
But with increased online shopping- for both brick and mortar stores who are slowly going digital as well as those who already have a strong digital online store, the need for a personalized shopping experience is increasing as well. Successfully running an online retail business is challenging, but you must realize that getting digital is the future of shopping and that you cannot escape it.
A CRM can be the solution to tackling these challenges and more, for the road ahead as it can help retailers deal with their digital transformation needs and empower themselves. Salesforce Commerce Cloud is the ideal pick for online businesses since it offers solutions that are tailored specifically for them.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud
An ideal e-commerce solution by Salesforce, it enables retailers to gain much-needed agility and helps to streamline the entire sales process with rich customer-centric features. Commerce Cloud helps to offer a seamless buying experience for customers, across multiple channels like mobile, web, social, etc. A great tool to counter competition, it has tailored solutions for both B2B and B2C and helps in diverse functions from managing order lifecycles to creating customized marketing campaigns.
Why Commerce Cloud for Online Retail Businesses?
- Unique Marketing Tools
Commerce Cloud offers retailers a unified platform way to share product information across diverse categories, catalogs, and websites, which can be especially beneficial if the business has a presence across various regions or countries, offering a solution to easily scale. It also allows the testing and streamlining of marketing campaigns, promotions, and more. Online retailers through Commerce Cloud can boost the visibility of their services and product by adjusting them according to customer search intent.
- Powerful mobile experience
The number of customers using smartphones to shop had been growing and the pandemic only pushed up the figures tremendously. According to research, almost 81% of smartphone users have made an online purchase in the last nine months. Retailers who are still not selling on mobile are losing a lot of their potential customers. Commerce Cloud helps to enrich the mobile experience of customers through mobile-responsive capabilities that result in a seamless shopping experience for customers and additional brownie points for online sellers.
- Personalization with Predictive Analysis
More than 80% of customers are drawn to brands that offer them a personalized experience. In fact, customers today want hyper-personalization! To get ahead of their competitors, brands have to understand customers’ needs and suggest products that match their requirements and not their profits, in a proactive manner, thus creating in them a need, which they may not even have considered. Commerce Cloud employs next-generation Einstein technology, that enables online retailers to easily understand customer buying trends and recommend products that best suit the customer’s requirements. Salesforce Einstein Analytics that uses AI and predictive analytics saves a lot of time and effort to manually analyze data sheets with more accuracy, improving conversion rates and building loyal customers.
- Omnichannel
The buyers of the digital age are hard to impress, thanks to the countless options they have in the market, at the tip of their fingers. They do a lot of research, make recommendations, read reviews before making a purchase. When online retailers have an omnichannel presence, they need to focus on establishing an integrated, seamless experience for customers across all touchpoints.
Online shopping or e-commerce has already become the future of shopping; with people becoming digitally advanced, there is no way we are going back to traditional retail shopping. With the right tools in hand, retailers can easily get ahead of their competitors. Salesforce Commerce Cloud is an all-in-one solution for retailers to set up their e-commerce store and untapped access customers, especially in the post-pandemic. The platform helps minimize manual tasks and automate the functioning of a business.
Hence, it is imperative for businesses to find a Salesforce partner that can offer them the right solutions like Intelion. We help you design a seamless buying journey for your customers across an array of channels. Make every customer interaction count with Intelion’s Salesforce Commerce Cloud services.
