What is Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud?

Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based e-commerce platform specifically designed for business-to-business (B2B) organizations. Built natively on Salesforce’s CRM architecture, it offers seamless integration with the CRM, allowing B2B businesses to gain a comprehensive and unified view of their customers. 

This integration enables companies to provide their customers with personalized experiences and manage all sales, service, and marketing activities efficiently. The platform empowers businesses to digitize and optimize complex B2B sales processes, including bulk ordering, contract management, and personalized pricing, all while ensuring convenience. 

What Features Does Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud Offer? 

Here are some of the prominent features and functionalities that the platform offers:

Streamlined Order Management

The platform streamlines the entire order lifecycle of B2B businesses from order capture to fulfilment. This includes having real-time order status and updates for both buyers and sellers, having accessibility for multiple shipping locations, and return automation along with support. This ensures accurate and timely order processing, reduces errors, and improves customer satisfaction by providing real-time order status updates.

Catalog Management

This feature of B2B Commerce Cloud allows businesses to easily update and manage product information, ensuring that customers always have access to the latest product details. This includes having unique lists of pricing and products for buyers, managing the multiple SKUs (stock-keeping units), and organizing the products based on the hierarchical category of the product. This improves the shopping experience and helps in maintaining accurate inventory levels.

Bulk Ordering and Quick Reordering

B2B businesses often handle recurring and bulk orders and streamline the shopping experience through Self-Service enablement( the ability for the buyers to build their carts based on their preferences). This enhances customer loyalty by enabling bulk purchases.

Customers can easily upload a CSV file to place orders for multiple items. Additionally, the shopping carts can accommodate hundreds or even thousands of items per order. For quick reordering, the system automatically saves past order information, allowing customers to proceed to checkout with just a few clicks.

Personalized and Digitalized Storefronts

This feature allows B2B users to launch a digital storefront quickly, sell on any channel, and embed commerce in sales, service, and marketing workflows. This digital storefront allows businesses to reach a wider audience and streamline their sales processes.

Pricing and Quoting

The platform automatically adjusts prices in real-time based on market demand, competition, and other external factors. This makes managing complex pricing, including volume discounts and contract pricing, easy. This also enables sales teams to generate accurate quotes with up-to-date product pricing and availability, which eventually helps improve consistent pricing across all channels.

Along with that the platform also supports payment methods like purchase orders (POs), net terms (e.g., net-30, net-60), B2B payment gateways, and automated clearing house (ACH) transactions.

Headless B2B Commerce

This feature allows businesses to have separate e-commerce applications for both frontend (the storefront) and backend (the data) functionality. This architecture setup allows the applications to work independently or even do certain changes without hampering the functionality of any of the applications. Eventually assists businesses in creating consistent user experiences all across.

Multi-Channel Support

Customers can shop and pay for B2B products over any channel, including self-service through multi-channel support. This flexibility provided by Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud allows businesses to meet their customers where they are, providing a hassle-free shopping experience across multiple channels. It enhances customer satisfaction and can lead to increased sales and customer loyalty.

Commerce AI and Automation

B2B Commerce AI, enhanced by Agentforce-powered AI agents, offers personalized experiences, predictive analytics, automated customer service, dynamic pricing, and streamlined operations. Advanced AI agents, such as Buyer and Merchant agents, enhance search capabilities, provide sales insights, optimize supply chains, drive efficiency, negotiate contract pricing through customer segmentation, and facilitate smarter decision-making for businesses in the competitive B2B landscape.

E-commerce Sales and Marketing Strategies 

This functionality of B2B e-commerce sales involves engaging with customers by offering product demonstrations to capture their interest. These detailed demonstrations help build trust and credibility, which can lead to higher conversion rates.

They also allow sales teams to meet specific customer needs and show the value of their products. Meanwhile, effective B2B marketing strategies like SEO, content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing functionalities are also there to assist businesses in attracting and converting qualified leads, building brand awareness, and engaging with their target audience.

Integration with Salesforce CRM

Salesforce B2B Commerce seamlessly integrates with Salesforce CRM, leveraging customer history, purchase preferences, and cart abandonment data. This integration personalizes the buying experience by recommending products tailored to individual behaviors and preferences. As a result, businesses can boost conversion rates and create more effective shopping journeys for their clients.

Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud Pricing Overview 

Salesforce offers two main editions for B2B eCommerce: Commerce Cloud Growth and Commerce Cloud Advanced. Each edition has specific features and pricing based on the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of transactions processed through the platform or in other words, this is the total dollar value of merchandise sold through your storefront.

Model	Commerce Cloud Growth	Commerce Cloud Advanced
Pricing	1% of Gross Merchandise Value (GMV)	2% of Gross Merchandise Value (GMV)
Features	– 6 Storefronts – Order Management Lite (Basic order management capabilities) – Basic Analytics and Segmentation – 20 Inventory Locations – 250K Data Cloud Credits – 60K Einstein Requests – 3 CRM Analytics Users – 3 Knowledge Management Users	– 10 Storefronts – Full Order Management (Comprehensive order management capabilities) – Advanced Analytics, Automation, Segmentation, and Personalization – 20 Inventory Locations – 500K Data Cloud Credits – 120K Einstein Requests

Real-world Businesses Using Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud

Though many businesses are utilizing the capabilities of the platform here are some of the most prominent ones:

• General Electric Renewable Energy is a company that is developing and providing solutions for renewable energy, including wind, solar, and hydropower generation to assist their clients in transforming their energy to cleaner sources. 

Challenge: Their existing storefront couldn’t engage their customers and failed to give them a complete idea regarding what the company was building and working on next. 

Solution: They utilized the capabilities of B2B digital commerce solutions to build a lightweight pilot program to refine the front-end shopping experience without needing to have any back-end implementation.

Result: As a result the company enhanced its B2B eCommerce experience, increasing customer engagement and having a notable increase of 35% in the user base.

• Ovation Medical is a company that designs and manufactures l orthopedic braces and supports. During the covid pandemic, they had to majorly shift their operations online. 

Challenge: They were facing challenges in creating, managing, and tracking orders online and they initially did not have any coherence with the Salesforce platform and products.

Solution: They then consulted Salesforce experts, utilized the capabilities of Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud, and integrated it with Salesforce CRM for uninterrupted fulfillment of the processes.

Result: The company streamlined its operations, enhanced customer engagement, and improved order management efficiency by using the platform. 

End Note

Salesforce B2B Commerce is a robust platform tailored to meet the specific needs of B2B organizations. Its cloud-based architecture provides unique features and supports headless commerce, resulting in scalability, flexibility, and customization for businesses of all sizes. If you want to learn more about the possibilities of implementing Salesforce Commerce Cloud solutions for your business, contact our experts today. 

We can help you hire Salesforce Commerce Cloud developers, allowing you to overcome any limitations and take your business to the next level!