Salesforce has announced a series of new updates to its Commerce Cloud platform which aims to encourage organisations to ‘go beyond eCommerce sites and modernise every shopping experience.’
The move includes adding artificial intelligence and visual search capability into APIs and developer services with the goal of giving an insightful experience across various customer touchpoints.
The company quoted research from Deloitte which argued that retailers use almost 40 disparate systems on average to manage customer engagement. This naturally includes the usual suspects of call centre, mobile, email and social. Yet the need to catch a potential sale on one channel may mean it all goes pear-shaped on another.
This is nothing new of course; indeed, three and a half years ago this publication was discussing the concept of ‘revenue moments’ – any potential opportunity a business loses out on a payment – with digital commerce platform provider Avangate.
Yet times have changed since then. In terms of specific features, Commerce Cloud is now getting a bit of Einstein-powered goodness – much in the same way Service Cloud did almost two years ago – through a Recommendations API and Visual Search. The former is a pretty basic concept but promises merchants to ‘power personalised and consistent experiences no matter how or where shoppers interact with the brand’, while the latter focuses on enabling shoppers to search based on photos or mobile screenshots.
Other updates on the developer side include on-demand sandboxes, an API explorer and a free online Trailhead resource.
“Digital commerce no longer starts with just a shopping cart,” said Mike Micucci, CEO of Commerce Cloud at Salesforce in a statement. “With Salesforce Commerce Cloud, companies have a trusted partner who can help them meet their customers wherever they are and deliver commerce everywhere through a platform full of AI-powered commerce services, APIs and a robust partner ecosystem.”
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