By 2025, eCommerce will become a $7+ trillion industry. By 2027, the number of online shoppers will reach 289 million, and eCommerce will account for nearly one-quarter of global retail sales. Considering the fast development of the eCommerce market and interest in online shopping, more and more retailers use the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform to run their business processes for their online and physical stores together.

In turn, among the prevalent eCommerce trends for 2025 are:

• Generative AI
• Social commerce in conjunction with conversational commerce
• Focus on sustainability
• Headless commerce and PWAs
• Personalized advertising

With Commerce Cloud, you can follow them all, increase sales, and drive customer satisfaction. This innovative Salesforce eCommerce solution enables you to scale your business, expand geographical boundaries, and present your brand globally.

This article will teach you how Salesforce Commerce Cloud can help eCommerce businesses grow and flourish. Buckle up, and let's explore what is Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

Let's start with the backstory.

In 2016, Salesforce acquired Demandware, an eCommerce cloud-based provider for both large and small businesses. Combining Demandware with the Salesforce platform was a major step in transforming how eCommerce companies connect with their customers.

Salesforce created a new Salesforce Commerce Cloud using Demandware technology and added it to its Customer Success Platform.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based ecommerce platform with various out-of-the-box features, useful tools, and commerce portals for growing your online business. It allows you to streamline the purchasing process, connect B2C and B2B, personalize your buying experience, and create a mobile-friendly shopping experience.

Considering that 32% of customers state that they will abandon a brand after one poor experience, the need to deliver a consistent, connected, and data-driven e-commerce experience is at an all-time high.

Let's take a closer look at the cloud-based commerce platform's main components and commerce functionality in Salesforce Digital 360:

Salesforce Commerce Cloud Main Features

Let's explore the main features of the platform and see how you can benefit from its use.

Unified Commerce Platform

In 2024, Salesforce introduced the next generation of Commerce Cloud - a platform that unifies every element of commerce, such as B2C, DTC, B2B Commerce, Order Management, Payments, and more. This unification is possible thanks to the APIs and modular microservices Salesforce relies on; they enable real-time synchronization between the front-end and back-end systems.

Research shows that adopting unified commerce data strategies presents a $1.5 trillion opportunity for business customers globally.

Michael Affronti, SVP and General Manager of Commerce Cloud, states that

"Commerce Cloud embodies unified commerce — giving businesses a single, integrated platform that brings every part of the commerce journey together with Agentforce agents to unlock new revenue opportunities and AI-powered efficiency, delivering consistent, personalized experiences across every channel."

Autonomous AI Agents: Agentforce

Salesforce also introduced three new Agents for Commerce - Merchant, Buyer, and Personal Shopper. These agents are designed to autonomously manage a range of tasks, including product recommendations and order lookup, without the need for direct human supervision.

Agentforce Agents use CRM data, external data, and metadata to autonomously manage tasks while maintaining the highest security and privacy guidelines.

Agents for Commerce include:

• Agentforce Merchant. This agent works autonomously with ecommerce merchandisers to help them build and manage their commerce sites. It has an easy, conversational setup and goal setting. Merchants can handle tasks like generating personalized promotions or writing product descriptions, streamlining everyday actions within the workflow to improve efficiency and outcomes.
• Agentforce Personal Shopper. This agent uses generative artificial intelligence to provide personalized assistance on ecommerce sites, chat, and messaging apps. It uses the retailer's catalog and product data to learn from shoppers' behavior and preferences.
• Agentforce Buyer. This agent is designed to streamline the purchasing experience by providing proactive support and recommendations tailored to buyers' specific needs. It autonomously assists with tasks such as tracking orders, managing returns, and suggesting complementary products based on purchase history. Leveraging AI insights ensures buyers receive a seamless and highly personalized customer experience.

Salesforce Checkout

Salesforce Checkout offers a unified, one-click checkout experience connected to customer data on the Einstein 1 Platform. It includes built-in merchant services for payments, tax, and shipping, aiming to increase buyer conversion by providing a consistent experience across all customer touchpoints.

A partnership with Stripe and a new native integration with Adyen allows merchants to connect and use their existing payment provider through a  Bring Your Own Gateway (BYOG) model. Moreover, merchants can now offer more payment methods: PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, and Link.

Headless Commerce Capabilities for B2B

Headless commerce is B2B architecture where the front-end (the customer interface) is separated from the back-end (product data, online sales, orders, and payments). As a result, businesses can make front-end updates independently.

Moreover, headless architectures are easily scalable, as updates to the front end can be made independently of the back end, allowing businesses to adapt quickly to changing market demands or increasing customer engagement needs.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud supports headless commerce through robust APIs, composable architecture, and AI-powered tools. These include:

• Commerce APIs: Enable integration with external platforms and facilitate real-time communication between the front-end and back-end.
• Agentforce Autonomous Agents: Assist with automating tasks like product recommendations and personalized assistance, providing tailored experiences to B2B buyers. Agentforce Personal Shopper uses product metadata to train AI models.
• Einstein GPT: Delivers AI-driven insights and content personalization for a more engaging and intelligent shopping experience. Moreover, Einstein GPT’s predictive analytics help reduce cart abandonment rates.
• Scalable Infrastructure: Salesforce’s cloud-based system ensures reliability and high performance, even for large-scale B2B operations.

Composable Commerce Enhancements for B2C

Salesforce continues to refine its composable commerce features, allowing businesses to build and deploy personalized B2C commerce experiences faster. With new APIs and advanced personalization options, developers can assemble tailored solutions that align with their unique customer requirements. This approach provides flexibility and scalability, making it easier to adapt to evolving consumer behaviors.

In-Store Inventory Planning

Leveraging Salesforce Data Cloud, the platform now offers real-time insights into inventory levels across multiple locations.

This feature provides accurate stock availability data for both online and in-store customers, using real-time customer data to help businesses optimize inventory management and meet consumer expectations. The real-time aspect ensures businesses can respond promptly to changes in demand, reducing lost sales due to out-of-stock items.

Enhanced Composable Storefront Architecture

Salesforce Commerce Cloud's Enhanced Composable Storefront Architecture provides a powerful, flexible solution for businesses looking to adopt headless commerce. A composable storefront acts as an all-in-one platform, enabling companies to create Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) that offer the speed and user engagement of native apps combined with the broad reach of the web.

This architecture supports auto-scaling, built-in security, and modern web technologies, ensuring 99.99% uptime, robust protection, and effortless scalability. With its modular design, businesses can implement changes in high-impact areas of their sites while maintaining existing storefront templates for other sections, reducing costs and risk.

Slack Integration

Salesforce Commerce Cloud integrates with Slack to streamline collaboration across commerce teams. This feature allows team members to share real-time updates on order statuses, inventory levels, and customer insights directly within Slack channels. Businesses can resolve issues faster, respond to customer needs more effectively, and ensure smooth operations during peak sales periods.

Einstein GPT Integration

Einstein GPT for Commerce combines Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with generative AI technology and real-time data from Salesforce Data Cloud to transform customer experiences.

The tool leverages unified customer data to automate and personalize key aspects of the shopping journey. For example, generating tailored product recommendations, creating unique product descriptions, and designing custom promotional offers.

Paired with the new drag-and-drop Page Designer for Composable Storefronts, businesses can create dynamic landing pages and headless commerce to create personalized shopping experiences without relying on third-party content management systems.

Integration into Salesforce Digital 360

In September 2020, Salesforce launched Digital 360, a comprehensive solution for marketing, commerce, and digital leaders. It allows business owners to adapt their businesses to today's all-digital reality by digitizing their brand-customer relationships and providing personalized customer experiences.

Digital 360 unifies key components of Marketing Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Commerce Cloud and brings innovations to the Salesforce Customer 360 platform.

As an integrated part of Digital 360, Commerce Cloud enables businesses to simplify the payment process and make checkout experience more secure. Thanks to the partnership with Stripe, you can use Commerce Cloud Payments to add payment functionality to your website with clicks, not code.

Your customers will be able to pay with credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, mobile phones, and wallets, or they can choose non-card ways with integrated fraud protection.

Benefits of Using Commerce Cloud

Predictive Analytics

Salesforce Commerce Cloud leverages Einstein AI to empower businesses with predictive analytics that turn data into actionable insights. By analyzing customer behavior, purchase history, and preferences, businesses can forecast future trends, anticipate customer needs, and make informed decisions. For example, it can predict what a customer might purchase next or the type of product quality they expect.

Personalization

With Salesforce Commerce Cloud, personalization becomes a key driver of customer engagement and brand loyalty. The platform allows businesses to transform routine shopping interactions into meaningful experiences by tailoring content, recommendations and offers to individual preferences. Personalized experiences increase customer retention, improve satisfaction, and drive higher sales.

Multitenant Cloud Platform

Salesforce Commerce Cloud operates on a multitenant architecture, allowing businesses to share a unified software infrastructure while maintaining their unique environments. This setup ensures consistent access to the latest updates, seamless scalability, and reduced service disruptions. Businesses avoid the hassle of manual installations, with upgrades occurring three times a year automatically.

Easy Website Creation

This framework provides businesses with pre-designed wireframes, customizable templates, and commerce APIs to build commerce sites with ease. Developers and marketers alike can leverage these tools to craft dynamic and responsive sites that meet modern commerce demands. Businesses can launch professional-grade websites faster, saving time and reducing development costs while ensuring a seamless user experience.

Scalability

With Commerce Cloud, you can successfully cope with today's business challenges, such as high traffic, deep data storage, vast amounts of goods, and high transaction volumes. The platform allows you to implement new technologies and automatic scalability and seamlessly handle traffic spikes and other unforeseen events.

Unified Commerce

You can benefit from connecting the customer's entire shopping experience via digital channels, from marketing to successful purchase and retention campaigns.

Having information about each customer's interactions with your brand and shopping activities, you can personalize their journey and offer relevant product recommendations.

Mobile Optimisation

A mobile-optimized eCommerce store or a branded mobile app with a user-friendly interface is a must-have to attract customers and make their shopping experience pleasant and friction-free.

What's more, Google primarily checks the mobile version of the content to index and rank your website in organic search results. The tool is focused on cutting-edge technologies and takes a mobile-first approach.

What Types of Companies Are Recommended to Use Commerce Cloud?

Cloud Commerce meets B2C and B2B companies' needs. It offers two commerce products – B2C Commerce and B2B Commerce for consumer brands and retailers.

Both B2C business buyers and B2B businesses want to deliver an excellent eCommerce experience to their customers via eCommerce websites, so they need to utilize different practical tools.

B2C Commerce is used to manage eCommerce sites with a large number of guest shoppers and enhance the customer shopping experience. In turn, Salesforce B2B Commerce is aimed at satisfying the needs of B2B buyers who make large or frequent purchases and providing them with premium experiences.

Commerce Cloud is mostly used by companies with 50-200 employees and $1M-10M in revenue.

Great Implementations of Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Many commerce brands have already taken advantage of Salesforce Commerce Cloud and got perfect results. So far, 6315 currently live eСommerce websites use Commerce Cloud.

L’Oréal

L’Oréal, the global beauty giant, leveraged the platform to revolutionize its digital commerce strategy and deliver highly personalized shopping experiences at scale.

L'Oréal created tailored consumer journeys for its 35 brands, using real-time and historical data to recommend products and promotions across multiple channels, like email, social media, and eCommerce platforms.

For instance, Lancôme's mobile site offers a skin diagnosis tool that generates personalized product regimens and follows up with abandoned cart emails to re-engage shoppers.

Through AI-powered tools such as Einstein Product Recommendations, L'Oréal increased average order values by up to 12% on its D2C websites.

Puma

Puma, one of the world's leading sports brands, decided to re-architect its mobile websites in 25 markets worldwide and improve customer experience.

Using Commerce Cloud's Storefront Reference Architecture, they relaunched PUMA's mobile sites, added more convenient options, refined the top navigation and internal search, and much more.

Now, they see improvements in load speed, with sites rendering 35% faster and full pages loading 69% faster.

Johnny's Selected Seeds

Using innovations and Commerce Cloud commerce solutions, Johnny's Selected Seeds, a purveyor of produce and flower seeds, tools, and supplies, launched its eCommerce shop and raised its gross merchandise value by 16%. They also observed that customers spend 33% longer on the site and look at 29% more pages.

Fisher & Paykel

Fisher & Paykel, a premium appliance brand, used Salesforce Commerce Cloud to revolutionize its customer experience and streamline operations.

They integrated the platform with Sales, Service, and Data Cloud. As a result, the company unified its data to create a single customer view, enhancing personalization and efficiency.

Through a new Partner Relationship Management solution and a trade portal built on Experience Cloud, partners like builders and retailers can now check inventory, generate quotes, and track orders online, saving 3,300 hours monthly through automation and self-service.

With all of the tools, Fisher & Paykel achieved a six-month ROI on Commerce Cloud Order Management, significantly improved customer satisfaction, and elevated its global service standards.

Why Implement Commerce Cloud With Partners?

Have you decided that it's time to implement Commerce Cloud, but you're not sure how to do it? Implementing it on your own seems too challenging, but how do you find a trusted partner to help you?

Without the right expertise, businesses risk delays, inefficiencies, and even project failure due to misaligned strategies, insufficient technical knowledge, or integration issues. In other words, it's better to have an experienced and trusted partner by your side.

Partners bring expertise in customization, integration, and ongoing support, enabling businesses to unlock the full potential of Commerce Cloud while focusing on core operations.

If you have been looking for a partner, MagicFuse is here to help. As a certified Salesforce Crest partner with more than a decade of experience, we specialize in tailored Commerce Cloud implementations that deliver measurable results.

Let us guide you every step of the way - contact us today to start your journey!

FAQ

1. What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and how does it benefit eCommerce businesses?

   Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a powerful eCommerce platform that helps businesses create personalized, seamless shopping experiences across all channels. It boosts sales, improves customer engagement, and streamlines operations with AI-driven insights and automation.

2. Who can help me with Commerce Cloud implementation?

   Experienced Salesforce partners like MagicFuse can make your Commerce Cloud implementation smooth and successful. We can help you with Salesforce eCommerce integration of any kind, tailoring our approach to your unique needs and requirements.

3. What are the key features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

   Key features include AI-driven product recommendations, multi-channel integration, order management, advanced analytics, mobile-first capabilities, and powerful marketing tools to drive engagement and sales.

4. Can Salesforce Commerce Cloud improve mobile shopping experiences?

   Yes, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is designed with mobile-first capabilities, offering responsive design, faster load times, and seamless navigation to ensure an exceptional shopping experience on any device.