This is the next major evolution for many companies in their digital transformation. For decades, many brands run their applications on-premises, with all the maintenance and security issues that are entailed. The development of cloud computing changed that, opening up opportunities to reimagine the way they use applications through what’s become known as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

Today, most major retailers and brands probably have many SaaS applications in place. This includes software that powers departments such as HR, finance, marketing, and sales.

What is a SaaS integration platform?

SaaS has brought a host of benefits to organizations, from more predictable costs to faster updates and reduced workloads for IT departments. To maximize the potential of SaaS, however, applications need to be able to connect and share data easily and seamlessly.

SaaS integration platforms were designed to address this issue and mitigate the risk that applications will function as a new form of business silo.

Imagine if your sales and marketing teams were never able to discuss their work with each other, for example. It would probably lead to duplication of effort, errors, and failure to meet the brand’s overall business objectives. SaaS applications need to “speak” to each other in much the same way.

While some organizations may look to deploy and manage SaaS integration platforms on their own, working with a SaaS integration partner can allow you to tap into the expertise of a trusted third party to unify applications faster and with greater reliability.

Here are some examples of popular SaaS tools that benefit from integration with other applications:

Salesforce

The concept of a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) system was pioneered by Salesforce, and it has continued to innovate with tools such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Integrating Salesforce with other platforms ensures you have a holistic view of your customer experience and can better identify your most valuable customers while cutting back on repetitive tasks.

Shopify

Countless merchants depend on Shopify to provide the foundation for their eCommerce business. However, connecting Shopify to other applications allows for greater order processing and inventory management. Integrating Shopify with a CRM, ERP or other platforms can also reduce the manual re-entry of data from one system to another.

Magento

Sometimes known as Adobe Commerce, Magento allows you to build multi-channel experiences for both consumers and B2B customers. Integrating Magento with the rest of your SaaS tools will keep team members in other lines of business on the same page as you’re developing your growth strategy.

5 things to look for in a SaaS integration partner

When you’re sourcing the right company to assist with integrating your SaaS applications, make sure to consider:

How to develop an effective SaaS integration partnership

You might have different goals for each of the SaaS tools you’ve deployed – some might have been intended to extend your reach within your target market, for instance, while others were about driving more business within your existing base. The objectives for integrating these tools will be a little different, but will still tie to bottom-line benefits such as:

Accurate and updated inventories

Customers are shopping with you in “real-time,” and the information about the stock you have on hand should be real-time too. That’s only possible by integrating omnichannel SaaS inventory systems and ERP systems. This allows you to synchronize multiple sources of inventory data across digital marketing channels and marketplaces and give customers confidence when they’re browsing for potential purchases.

Flexible views of business data

You need to show compelling content about your product catalog to consumers via digital marketing channels on the front end. On the back end, you need to be able to drill down into data about pricing and inventory to make strategic business decisions about products you’re selling via online marketplaces. You get that kind of dynamic capability by integrating myriad SaaS product information management (PIM) solutions.

Enhanced efficiency across your ecosystem

The complexity involved in quickly integrating retail content with eCommerce websites can eat up valuable time your IT department could be spending in other areas of the business. Better to ask your integration partner to take the lead on synchronizing your PIMs and eCommerce solutions based on the business rules that align with your brand’s unique strategy.

SaaS integration is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be a chore. Contact Suvae.org to learn how we help leading fashion brands bring their applications together for greater success.

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It begins when the customer is drawn to the brand through its marketing efforts — storytelling that convinces someone they’d look good in a cashmere sweater or a pair of designer shoes.

Once they’ve reached the point of completing their order, the conversation takes a different form. This is where the brand is expected to anticipate the customer’s expectations on getting the right product and having it delivered promptly.

For many online retailers, platforms such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud have become a powerful way to ensure a seamless shopping journey across their website, mobile and social channels. To truly grow their business and enhance customer experiences, however, they sometimes need more.

The Case For Adding Marketing Automation And Analytics to Commerce

According to a recent survey from market research firm Gartner, for example, 86% of marketing leaders believe digital commerce is becoming their most important sales channel. However, an even larger proportion (89%) said they need to evolve current digital business capabilities to produce more tangible results.

This includes marketing automation that can help them manage everything from digital ads to sending promotions via e-mail. The addition of predictive analytics capabilities opens up even greater opportunities to personalize e-commerce and get ahead of customer needs.

Salesforce offers solutions in both of these areas with Marketing Cloud and Einstein. With Marketing Cloud, Salesforce has developed capabilities to allow brands to segment and target their most valuable customers, manage content and build more cohesive journeys.

Einstein builds upon Marketing Cloud by using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning. This allows brands to pair customer profiles with algorithms that ensure they’re seeing the content that is most relevant based on their interests.

Recent research suggests brands who have already been using Salesforce Commerce Cloud to grow their e-commerce presence will soon be looking at how to layer Marketing Cloud and Einstein into their tech stack. A study from AllCloud, for example, found that 93% of organizations across all industries said they will adopt additional Salesforce products within the next year.

Technical Barriers (And How To Overcome Them)

Brands who take this route need to ensure they do so without introducing unnecessary complexity into their operations. This can be particularly difficult for brands that may lack the internal IT resources or expertise necessary to achieve their business goals with Salesforce technology.

While e-commerce represents a global opportunity for many luxury retailers, for instance, that means they need to provide rich catalog data to serve audiences across multiple countries.
This data is the basis for what brands will serve through marketing channels, but the feed formats required for use with Marketing Cloud and Einstein are highly complicated.

Highstreet’s feedless integration for Salesforce Commerce Cloud has already helped fashion companies and other online retailers simplify the way they manage catalog data, while also supporting business rules that respond to changes in customer demand.

The same integration can help companies as they add Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Einstein by re-aggregating standard feeds into multi-market feeds. This creates a single, horizontal feed that brings greater efficiency than a more vertical approach.

Overcoming the technical barriers to connecting Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Einstein will bring brands a step closer to fully scalable, frictionless eCommerce. That means the conversation between brands and customers will become richer and more dynamic than ever before.

Learn about how retailers like Browns are accelerating growth with HighStreet’s Salesforce Commerce Cloud integration.

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Even as economies gradually reopen and COVID-19 is contained, the pandemic forced a shift to digital channels — and consumer shopping habits — that is here to stay.

In their 2021 Evolution of Stores report, for example, market researcher Retail Economics and legal firm Eversheds Sutherland found online sales of clothing rocketed by £2.7 billion over the past year in Europe alone. While e-commerce was originally forecast to overtake in-store purchases by 2025, the research suggested it could happen as early as next year.

The explosion in e-commerce activity is not confined to local customers, either. In a study of cross-border shopping activity based on a survey of 22,000 consumers in 11 countries 68% of consumers made e-commerce purchases outside of their home country in 2020. Total cross-border eCommerce is up 74% year-on-year from data reported in the first four months of 2021, which suggests buying behaviors that began amid the pandemic will continue.

Increased demand should be cause for optimism, but many fashion retailers are struggling to meet it and are pulling back instead. When consulting firm McKinsey and The Business of Fashion asked how brands are predicting what they’ll need to stock, 61% said they are planning to reduce the number of SKUs.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud Platform To Accelerate B2C Online Retail

A more viable strategy to expand sales worldwide is readily available through Salesforce Commerce Cloud — as long as brands have the plan to address the integration of their sales and marketing channels.

Much like its other products, Salesforce runs Commerce Cloud on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis, using technology it gained through the acquisition of Demandware in 2016.

With marquee brands such as Marks & Spencer and L’Oréal and Coca-Cola, Salesforce Commerce Cloud has a proven track record in helping unify buying experiences across websites, social channels, and mobile apps. Continuous updates also make Salesforce Commerce Cloud a way for retailers to stay on top of improvements they’ll need to add to their e-commerce capabilities.

That said, deploying Salesforce Commerce Cloud is not without its challenges, particularly for larger or more complex brands with international ambitions.

A major fashion retailer might need to be able to offer products in 25 different markets. That means taking the time and effort necessary to export rich product data sets to the appropriate channels. The information involved could range from:

• Images
• Descriptions
• Categories
• Pricing

Some products may also have very different taxonomies to map onto various channels, all of which have to be gathered from disparate sources and then merged to create a product record. All of this can take substantial time away from other activities that could help enhance operations or grow revenue.

Creating product records for Salesforce Commerce Cloud can also mean tailoring them based on business rules. Some products might be subject to frequent inventory refreshes (if they’re popular items, for example), while other catalog data might remain consistent for longer periods.

Product records will also be affected by sales and marketing tactics aimed at bringing value to the business, such as promotions or special sales. Any failure to keep this kind of data accurate could have a devastating effect on the customer experience and as a result the bottom line.

Salesforce has provided REST APIs for B2C Commerce services for many years through its Open Commerce API (OCAPI). However, the significant GET operations that would be involved could jeopardize the performance of the platform.

Traditional And Dynamic Ways To Approach Salesforce Commerce Cloud Integration

This is where many brands look to trusted partners to provide Salesforce Commerce Cloud integration services.

The most traditional approach would involve developing a Salesforce Commerce Cloud cartridge to programmatically compute objects. These could include master catalogs, storefronts, price books, inventory, promotions, and more. These would be streamed out as an XML, CSV, or JSON feed. The trade-off with this strategy is the potential lack of flexibility in content formats and exported content, as well as the need to create new fields to extend the cartridge software as business needs change. It can also be a CPU-intensive process.

A more dynamic web services-based approach would involve using OCAPI or other custom-developed and product-oriented APIs to have client applications retrieve individual product data. This would only work for delta operations such as infrequent OCAPI calls. Commerce Cloud also lacks the notifications that would allow for delta feeds. Full feed exports, meanwhile, are generally discouraged based on the computational strain they could cause.

A More Efficient Way To Successfully Integrate With Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Fortunately, there’s a third option to integrate sales and marketing channels with Salesforce Commerce Cloud that will strike the right balance between a brand’s business needs and reconciling any legacy IT challenges. Rather than installing cartridges, for example, Highstreet has been able to offer a feed-less integration with Commerce Cloud by sharing only selected raw catalog data through FTP, SFT, or FTPS. This can be done by configuring an Export File Job on SFCC towards an SFCC internal folder or a Suvae.org configured FTP/STP/FTPS folder.

Once parsed, the master catalog object provides the flexibility that brands using Salesforce Commerce Cloud need. This includes supporting business rules around which products are being disabled and which are live based on customer demand. Any changes — such as inventory updates, new products, or product removals —will be automatically synchronized.

Some of the other benefits of this more efficient approach include:

• Providing an association between products on the website vs master catalog objects
• Carrying price lists for each supported country in which a brand operates via e-commerce.
• Offering full visibility into inventory, either based on a specific warehouse or at a country level. This meant not having to cut back on SKUs based on fears of overstocking.
• Fostering true omnichannel e-commerce by exporting SEO-oriented URLs directly from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to wherever a brand’s customers are.

Conclusion

In theory, e-commerce should allow a brand to sell to anything in the world. In practice, it’s easy for small details to get in the way of ensuring customers can buy in the most seamless manner possible. The efficient approach to Salesforce Commerce Cloud integration recognizes that even if you’re selling in multiple countries where people speak the same language, for example, the currencies may be entirely different. That means being able to refresh price books as often as business demands will not only meet customer expectations but give the brand greater agility during critical buying seasons like Black Friday.

Frequent inventory updates, meanwhile, make the efficient approach ideal to integrate Salesforce Commerce Cloud with marketplaces that could propel a brand to the next level of growth by an order of magnitude.
Speed and agility will ultimately be the defining traits of brands that sustain a competitive advantage in an increasingly digital economy.

Having worked with more than 50 companies across Canada to integrate their sales and marketing channels with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, we’re excited to help even more organizations capitalize on the growth opportunity ahead of them. Reach out to our team and get started

The post How Salesforce Commerce Cloud Integration Transforms Online Sales appeared first on Suvae.org.

Our platform allows retailers, brands, and agencies to update, optimize and connect product data from Salesforce to popular platforms like Google Shopping, Facebook Dynamic Ads, Instagram Shoppable Posts, Affiliate Marketing Channels, Retargeting Services, and Comparison Shopping Feeds with Suvae.org.

Keep reading to discover the benefits of Salesforce Commerce Cloud Integration and how Suvae.org can help you skyrocket sales by bringing your product’s information to the next level.

Benefits of Salesforce Commerce Cloud Integration for Product Advertising

Retailers using Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) benefit from Suvae.org’s ability to pull the most accurate product data from the platform and synchronize it quickly and effectively to use in online product marketing campaigns.

SFCC processing power is not affected

There are many ways to extract product data from SFCC to use for product advertising. Some integration partners use CPU-intensive processes that require massive calls to Salesforce internal APIs. Suvae.org’s unique integration approach will not affect your processing power. All complex processing and data manipulations occur within the Suvae.org platform.

Keep your campaign product inventory and pricing synchronized frequently

Our integration supports the delivery of product properties that change constantly such as inventory and prices. Our continual product synchronization with SFCC is an effective solution for retailers with highly volatile inventory or ongoing price change requirements (Black Friday or frequent sales).

Easily expand your shopping channels and markets globally

Rely on Suvae.org’s integration approach that supports multi-market product feeds for Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Predictive Marketing. Leverage our platform’s pre-packaged configurations that connect directly to the product data for each of your markets.

What can a well-configured Salesforce integration do for retailers?

With Suvae.org‘s Salesforce cartridge, retailers can seamlessly connect product feeds from their eCommerce platform to their Salesforce marketing automation solution and marketing channels. Suvae.org’s full-service product feed management and marketplace synchronization platform help clients maximize product visibility by streamlining the syndication of product data to digital marketing channels and online marketplaces. Find out more about how we can help integrate your Salesforce Commerce Cloud with effective shopping channels:

Reach out to our feed management and marketplace integration experts at info@Suvae.org.

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