Unreliable connections, the first Web Chats and Matrix on the big screen: that is how many people remember 1999. For me, however, it was the year of Salesforce.
Founded on the vision of former Oracle executives Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez, the Californian software company soon became a leader in the field of Marketing Automation.
One of the pioneers of SaaS CRM, the company entered the e-commerce market with its Salesforce Commerce Cloud offering, a few years later than its competitors.
Salesforce e-commerceA brief history of SFCC
Salesforce's first e-commerce development platform, Sitegenesis, was acquired from Demandware as a “ready to use” solution to establish an immediate market presence.
However, subsequent requirements for system modularity and extensibility lead the company to revise its approach.
The main features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Salesforce Front-End Reference Architecture (SFRA) was launched in 2018 to overcome the limitations of the previous solution. Since then, SFRA has been the main platform in use, marking a step forward in the evolution of Salesforce's e-commerce strategy.
With a data-driven design, it provides a solid technical foundation and advanced features to improve the customer experience.
Salesforce technology for e-commerce
SFRA works as a core module to which the required features and services are added. Salesforce is agnostic when it comes to choosing which external systems to connect, although it clearly favours its own Marketing and Order Management solutions.
SFRA stands out for its Mobile First approach and highly modular architecture, and is designed to operate in Javascript on both the back end and front end. The platform is cloud-based and supports the creation of multisite and/or multilingual stores.
SFCC allows us to integrate headless solutions written in Node and React, making front-end development more agile.
Local development is carried out using the widely known VS Code and Node. However, rather than working on a local server, the code is sent to a sandbox, a development environment that forms part of the remote instance and hosts all the e-commerce environments (production, staging, testing and developer sandboxes).
Einstein isn't dead; he's on Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s innovation is also reflected in its use of Einstein, an advanced artificial intelligence system integrated directly into its architecture.
This solution, which is often underestimated, offers a range of advanced features that go well beyond the capabilities of a traditional e-commerce system.
Einstein enables greater personalisation of the customer experience. In addition, real-time data analysis makes it possible to identify purchasing patterns, allowing companies to anticipate market trends and adapt their sales strategies.
The advantages of Salesforce Commerce Cloud
There are several reasons to choose Salesforce Commerce Cloud:
- an omnichannel approach allows us to provide a unified shopping experience across different channels, including websites, mobile devices, social media and physical stores;
- it offers a high degree of customisation, demonstrating that it can be readily adapted to companies’ specific requirements.
- it can be easily integrated with other platforms, such as CRM or payment systems, ensuring an efficient flow of data between them;
- provides advanced analytics tools that allow us to monitor sales performance, analyse buyer behaviour and gain useful insights to inform strategic decisions.
SFCC also has its drawbacks
When working hands-on with different development software, it is impossible not to notice its limitations, whether they are inherent or arise from differences with the developer’s way of working. Here are SFRA’s limitations.
- It is not for everyone
The full version of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, with all the CRM tools a small business needs, has an average cost per user that is often too high for an SME.
- “Unlimited” but with limits
For companies that handle a high volume of emails every day, Salesforce may seem like the ideal solution for tracking information. However, the ‘unlimited’ version of SFCC has a maximum limit of 1,000 emails per day.
Is becoming an SFCC developer a challenge?
Definitely...
…mainly due to the uneven availability of training resources. In addition, the lack of a development environment in which to experiment with code can make the learning process more difficult.
For those taking their first steps with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the HRM Talent Lab offers a training programme. Led by highly experienced professionals, it aims to address the challenges of learning SFRA, providing opportunities to apply the knowledge gained through practical exercises and real-world projects.
