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In an age where virtually anyone can set up an ecommerce site, the customer experience (both pre- and post-sale) is what separates the winners from the runners up. In fact, 73% of customers say they expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. But, delivering a premium experience tailored to the preferences and needs of the shopper can be challenging.

But here’s the good news — Salesforce has you covered.

This week at Connections, we’re introducing new features for Commerce Cloud that help brands build and deliver personalized, scalable, and integrated customer experiences faster and more efficiently than ever before. These tools help any company — regardless of size — deliver premium customer experiences to their customers faster, and at any touchpoint.

 

What’s new?

As a May report from Deloitte Insights noted, “The consumer is changing in reaction to the proliferation of competitive options in the market. This change has been made possible by technology, coupled with reduced barriers to entry, and the emergence of smaller players who are creating niche markets with more targeted offerings.”

We’re helping brands serve this ever-evolving marketplace, to deliver uniquely branded experiences with a platform of AI-powered tools from clicks to code, and APIs that extend commerce into any channel, at scale, with speed and intelligence. Here’s what’s new:

Business users can now more quickly create and manage ecommerce site experiences

Our new Commerce Page Designer makes it simple to quickly design rich, engaging ecommerce experiences with clicks — not code (no HTML or coding experience required). Now, merchandisers and marketers can publish and maintain content with limited involvement from IT. Page Designer empowers business users to design, schedule and publish pages, preview these changes across all touchpoints including by device type, customer persona, schedule and locale, and much more. Commerce Page Designer is in open beta now — turn it on and start using it today!

Integrate customer touchpoints and systems faster

The new MuleSoft Accelerator for Salesforce Commerce Cloud enables customers to go faster by providing integration best practices and pre-built API templates to deliver connected customer experiences more quickly.

Integration has become a strategic differentiator in driving today’s commerce experience. On average, retailers use 39 disparate systems to manage customer engagement. Customers need an easy way to extend commerce interactions to where their shoppers are — like social, mobile apps, service interactions, and more. And they need to connect those experiences with orders, inventory, financials and other commerce data and backend systems. The MuleSoft Accelerator for Salesforce Commerce Cloud will help customers jumpstart the creation of new commerce experiences such as product configurators, social marketplaces, and chatbots.

A new way to build apps lightning fast for mobile, storefront and in-store

Heroku is Salesforce’s cloud platform for building, deploying, monitoring and scaling world-class business applications. Now, for the first time, we are making three new solution kits available for using Heroku and Commerce Cloud. These solution kits jumpstart developers on how to empower IT teams and developers to take B2C commerce beyond the storefront and build premium, bespoke commerce apps, including mobile apps, storefront apps and in-store apps using Heroku and the Commerce Cloud platform. You can get the Heroku Solution Kits today.

AI-powered commerce platform to drive growth

The foundation of smart ecommerce is AI-driven intelligence. Many Salesforce customers are already familiar with Commerce Cloud’s Einstein Product Recommendations, Predictive Sort, Search Dictionaries, and Einstein Commerce Insights, which personalize shopping and automate merchandising. Now, we’re taking the power of AI beyond the ecommerce site. The new Einstein Commerce API allows brands to extend product recommendations into any customer touchpoint, like a mobile app, clienteling device or across marketing and customer service channels. The Einstein Commerce API personalizes commerce experiences no matter how or where shoppers interact with your brand.

Customer success showcased in the Commerce Cloud keynote

We’re thrilled that three of our trailblazing customers, Party City, Land O’Lakes/Purina, and Spalding, will be with us at Connections to share their incredible growth and innovation stories with attendees. Party City will describe how its use of Einstein visual search, and MuleSoft integration technologies has empowered it to deliver premium experiences to its shoppers. Land O’Lakes will showcase their use of B2B Commerce, built on the power of Salesforce for a single view of the customer, while Spalding will share how it’s leveraged Page Designer, Heroku and other Salesforce technologies to grow its business quickly and at scale, despite its small team.

We believe that every amazing shopping experience starts with the customer and that it’s critical to deliver customer-centric experiences. But as we’ll share with our Ohana this week at Connections, we’re working day and night to ensure brands can do just that. If you can’t be there in person, be sure to tune in to the live stream on Salesforce Live.