It’s a scenario that plays out regularly inside retail organizations. 

Merchandisers and marketers need to quickly stand up a new webpage or make tweaks to an existing page in support of a new campaign or other revenue-driving initiative. But they can’t move as fast as the business requires, because they must rely on the development team to make any changes to the site. The result? A delay in implementation, missed opportunities, and loss of revenue.

Why can’t non-technical business users quickly add new pages and make changes to a site? Now, they can.

Salesforce’s new Commerce Page Designer empowers B2C Commerce business users to quickly create and manage ecommerce experiences with clicks, not code (no HTML or coding experience required), enabling them to build scalable commerce experiences faster. Commerce Page Designer expands the Commerce Platform, complementing the robust code and API-based development tools for Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Commerce Page Designer reduces the time it takes to get new and innovative ecommerce experiences up and running and reduces dependencies on development teams. 

Simply put, it’s a game changer.

Why this matters

In today’s hyper-competitive retail environment, speed and innovation are paramount. Any delay in delivering the ecommerce experiences that shoppers demand can result in loss of mindshare and revenue. That’s why the stakeholders on the front lines of customer engagement ⁠— marketers and merchandisers ⁠— need to be able to deliver those experiences themselves. 

How this works

With Commerce Page Designer, business users can:

• Design, schedule, and publish pages 

• Leverage drag and drop content with a powerful visual editor that makes content and layout changes easy 

• Preview these changes across all touchpoints including by device type, customer persona, schedule, and locale

• Build pages with reusable components, so there’s no redesigning from scratch

This framework provides developers with references and guidelines to easily build custom templates and components that business users can reuse over and over, enabling maximum flexibility, scale, and speed. Further, Commerce Page Designer lowers implementation costs for customers new to Commerce Cloud, by creating a set of framework reference pages and components that let retailers stand up websites and pages much more quickly.

Commerce Cloud customers, whether using the new Storefront Reference Architecture or legacy Site Genesis as their site design framework, can use Commerce Page Designer. 

For ecommerce managers, the benefit starts with faster time to market, which ultimately has a broader impact on how a brand is able to strategize, plan, and implement engaging customer experiences that drive the business. 

Developers can use Commerce Page Designer framework components and solution toolkit to translate design and business requirements into reusable components that business users can easily implement. This frees up developers to focus on innovation versus making site changes and standing up new pages.

Finally, web content managers can now deliver engaging custom experiences and make updates, on a daily basis, without having to rely on developers. 

It is all part of our laser focus on helping retailers and brands get to market sooner and grow faster while reducing inefficiencies and empowering stakeholders to have more control. 

In the initial rollout of Commerce Page Designer, happening now, business users can create and manage personalized pages including the home page, campaign landing pages, and category landing pages. In the future, this capability will extend to dynamic pages including the product detail page, search page, and product list pages. 

It’s the ultimate in flexibility, customization, and scale. Ecommerce managers, web content managers, and other business users can quickly pivot, making site changes to support revenue-driving initiatives in near real-time. 

What customers and partners say

A major footwear and accessories brand is using Commerce Page Designer for its home page and a new content and commerce category page. That page highlights key product collections through rich brand storytelling, and is managed by business users based on customized, brand rich templates built by front-end developers.

A robust partner ecosystem will also support Commerce Page Designer, giving brands a choice in page components. Examples include: 

• Cloudinary — Cloudinary offers Commerce Cloud brands dynamic images and videos that enhance the end-user experience. Marketers can also easily automate common operations such as image and video resizing, adding overlays and adapting to mobile devices with Cloudinary’s AI capabilities to perfect the look and feel of the design. 

• Zmags — The Creator by Zmags component enables Commerce Cloud brands to break free from templates and create interactive, shoppable content – outfit builders, quizzes, shop-the-room – without any coding.

How to get started

We estimate it will take about two weeks for developers and business users to collaborate on page types and component types needed, based on an agreed-upon design, and for development teams to build them. Then, business users can use (and reuse) the page types and component types to create new pages without any developer dependency. 

With a short learning curve for Commerce Page Designer, retailers and brands can learn all about it, get up and running, and see real results within weeks.

Check out this and many other cross-channel ways to jumpstart growth in commerce in this comprehensive guide. 

This is the third in a series of blog posts on ecommerce innovation. Check out the first two, onInventory Availability Service, and Visual Search.