B2B Commerce Cloud in Salesforce

23 Mar B2B Commerce Cloud in Salesforce

Before everything moved online, businesses mostly sold their goods and services to other companies through face-to-face interactions. However, with significant advancements, modern business buyers now expect seamless and digital shopping experiences similar to what they enjoy in their personal lives.

The B2B Commerce Cloud speeds up digital transformations for businesses, helping them step into the online world, reach more customers, and grow in the fiercely competitive B2B market. Salesforce B2B Commerce helps companies build e-commerce shops tailored for businesses engaging in substantial volume purchases from other businesses online. It ensures that B2B customers can easily access suppliers online, facilitating their purchase of products essential for their business operations. Because B2B deals usually happen gradually with long-term customers, gathering commerce data becomes really crucial.

Hence, B2B Commerce is naturally integrated into the Salesforce Lightning Platform. It easily combines with Salesforce CRM data from Service Cloud, Sales Cloud and Experience Cloud.

Types of B2B Commerce 

B2B business models vary widely, with numerous types of companies serving different industries, each with specific needs and distinct challenges.

• B2B2C

It stands for Business-to-Business-to-Consumer.

B2B2C Commerce means businesses sell to other businesses, who then sell to consumers. This model often involves partnerships among manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers ensuring a smooth journey from the original producer to the end consumer.

• WholeSale

Wholesale commerce centres on selling products in bulk to retailers, businesses or even individual consumers needing larger quantities. These businesses usually give discounts based on volume or account-based pricing, playing a vital role in B2B Commerce.

As large, intricate orders are prevalent in wholesale, B2B sellers require efficient systems to handle inventory, pricing, and shipping.

It’s crucial for wholesale e-commerce teams to have a clear view of accounts, sales, and service details. Customer-facing teams need to provide excellent support to meet these demands.

• Distributors

Distributor businesses serve as a middleman between manufacturers or wholesalers and retailers. They play a key role in ensuring smooth product distribution, handling inventory and managing logistics to deliver products to the right places.

B2B Commerce platforms provide these features from a single database to help reduce shipping mistakes and prevent expensive supply-chain issues commonly faced by these businesses.

• Manufactures

Manufacturers frequently use B2B Commerce to sell their products directly to other businesses like wholesalers, retailers or even other manufacturers needing specific components. 

This direct selling allows manufacturers to skip middlemen and build stronger connections with customers.

The ideal B2B Commerce platform for manufacturers simplifies orders, incorporates account-based pricing and manages split shipments—all within a single system.

Features of B2B Commerce Cloud

• Experience Management

In B2B Commerce, prioritizing personalization is crucial, and Experience Management plays a major role in this. It tweaks everything on the website, like making it easy to order fast, all designed especially for different accounts or groups.

This tool gives both business and tech folks the power to change how the store looks, make new pages, and adjust how things like finding products and special offers work at each step when people buy stuff. Experience Management decides how buyers see their journey and how sellers talk to them.

• Commerce Engine

A great commerce experience relies on having the right data for personalization.

The Commerce Engine does the heavy lifting, sorting out products, prices and deals for different accounts and groups. People in charge of products and prices set up offers, adjust prices for different groups, and set contract prices using the Commerce Engine.

They also create product bundles and links to shape the whole experience.

With the Commerce Engine, it’s easy to switch product details, prices, and deals to match different currencies quickly.

• Account and Order Management

Order management rules the checkout process, dictating how buying and everything after happens. In B2B Commerce, it adapts the checkout based on who you are—making it simpler or more detailed.

How does it handle orders? Well, B2B Commerce lets buyers create big orders, even with hundreds of items, to get the best volume deals and promos.

Account Management in B2B Commerce is more than what we usually see for regular shoppers. It lets users check past orders, track their orders, and get info on them. Plus, it even lets B2B Commerce users face those scary invoices head-on by viewing and paying them!

• Dashboards and Reports

In B2B Commerce, you get a special all-in-one view of your customer, like a complete picture, in one spot: a dashboard and report covering sales, service, marketing and how they engage with your store. 

Since B2B Commerce is part of your Salesforce Org, you can analyze commerce stuff happening right now, mixed with leads, opportunities, and cases—everything in real-time.

All of this together gives you a smart 360-degree view of your customer. It’s like having a blueprint for customer success, happiness, growth, and even how well your business is doing financially.

Functionalities offered by B2B Commerce Cloud

The B2B Commerce offers a range of functionalities to streamline the buying experience:

• Customized storefront themes to give each account a unique appearance.
• Specific product catalogues tailored for selected product subsets by account.
• Negotiated pricing based on account or customer segment, ensuring personalized rates.
• Authenticated sites with logins for each visitor, maintaining secure access.
• Shopping carts capable of handling hundreds or thousands of items per order.
• Rapid reordering functionality, simplifying large and frequent orders in a few clicks.
• Transforming the online catalogue into a user-friendly tool for new sales representatives which facilitates a better understanding of your products.
• Order history is accessible for every authenticated visitor.
• Search functionality for easy navigation.

Benefits of B2B Commerce Cloud

• B2B ecommerce enables customers to independently manage orders from start to delivery, thereby freeing up representatives’ time to build stronger customer relationships instead of managing manual purchase order tasks.
• Features like quick reorders, account hierarchies, contract pricing and custom catalogues, simplify online purchasing, enhancing the experience for all involved parties.
• Providing self-service tools and guided experiences via B2B Commerce reduces service costs, enabling businesses to redirect resources strategically to seize new opportunities or address vital business challenges.
• B2B Commerce Cloud offers analytics and reporting tools that enable businesses to track performance metrics, make data-driven decisions, uncover marketing trends, enhance customer experiences, and drive sales growth.

FAQs

What is B2B Commerce Cloud?

Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud helps sell products between businesses online. Digitizing sales with self-service ordering for business buyers expands reach, cuts service costs, shortens sales cycles and lets reps focus on other strategic tasks.

What is the difference between Salesforce B2B and B2C Commerce Cloud?

B2B Commerce revolves around businesses using online platforms to manage their products and services. B2C Commerce empowers retailers to manage and unify shoppers’ online experiences and transactions across various digital channels and devices, commonly occurring on the web or mobile platforms.

Conclusion

Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud transforms B2B shopping by providing a complete set of tools that help businesses create outstanding online buying journeys for their customers. Its emphasis on customization, effectiveness, and connection with Salesforce makes it a key tool for businesses looking to succeed in B2B. Using B2B Commerce Cloud boosts businesses’ online visibility, improves customer happiness, and fuels growth in a highly competitive digital market.

Looking for a reliable Salesforce partner to implement Salesforce for your organization?

Creatique Technologies excels in delivering outstanding Salesforce Solutions for B2B Commerce Cloud, helping clients optimise their processes and providing a seamless experience to their clients by extracting maximum value from their Salesforce investments.

Schedule your call now with Creatique Technologies or send us an email at info@creatiquetech.com. 

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