Salesforce launches its Commerce Cloud

In June, Salesforce announced it was buying ecommerce platform Demandware and creating a Commerce Cloud.

Today, the marketing/sales tech giant launched the new cloud, which already has 1,800 commerce sites spread out over more than four dozen countries, including Adidas, Lands’ End and Pandora.

Interestingly, the platform is built for physical stores, as well as for online, which gives Salesforce a firm position straddling the two worlds. The creation of integrated experiences that span retailers’ online and real-world selves is one of the major competitive fronts for marketing and sales vendors. As Salesforce noted in its announcement, about 90 percent of all purchases are still made in brick-and-mortar stores.

Shelley Bransten, SVP of retail at Salesforce, told me that Commerce Cloud can be white-labeled and fully branded by a retailer.

As an example of a retailer that is integrated with Salesforce’s other clouds, Bransten cited Amsterdam-based Suitsupply, a men’s fashion brand. Customers can buy a suit through a social channel or conduct a video chat session with a stylist via Service Cloud, and the commerce platform is utilized in the retailer’s physical and online stores.

The new cloud offers support for Apple Pay on mobile devices and provides several capabilities through the company’s new Einstein layer of artificial intelligence, which is embedded throughout Salesforce’s platform.

These capabilities include personalized Product Recommendations for shoppers, Predictive Sort for arranging a user’s search results based on the products that will most appeal to his or her profile, and Commerce Insights to inform physical and online store planning.