Salesforce has announced Composable Storefront, a fully-customisable, headless digital storefront. The development gives online retailers the ability to make site changes with the speed and flexibility needed to increase sales, conversions and basket size. At the same time, helping to drive down costs.
Salesforce also introduced pre-built packages made specifically for headless implementations and use cases with commerce partners. This includes best-in-class integrations, pricing, and implementation accelerators from across the Salesforce ecosystem, all anchored by Commerce Cloud.
According to the latest Salesforce State of Commerce Report, retailers are investing in headless commerce to drive growth.
- 77% of commerce organisations that have implemented headless architecture say it gives them increased agility by allowing them to make changes to their storefront quickly.
- 80% of businesses that don’t currently have headless commerce technology plan to implement it in the next two years.
- According to the Salesforce State of Commerce Report, the top three sectors most likely to adopt headless in the coming years are health and beauty, food and beverage, and communications and media.
According to Scot Gillespie, GM of Commerce Cloud at Salesforce, “With customers expecting both engaging and seamless eCommerce experiences. Headless architecture can help online retailers build and implement site changes with speed and agility.
“Salesforce’s Composable Storefront is a secure, trusted platform that supports users to leverage headless. While accelerating time to market and reducing costs.”
Implementing headless commerce strategy
Salesforce says its Composable Storefront, Commerce Cloud customers can implement a headless commerce strategy without exposing themselves to a significant overhead or complex development issues. Businesses are enabled to:
- Supercharge storefront performance and engagement with a fast, app-like site experience. The Progressive Web App technology decreases page load time and minimizes disruption for online shoppers.
- Speed time to value and reduce total cost of ownership for headless commerce architecture with pre-packaged integrations, pricing, and accelerators. This is managed in partnership with Commerce Cloud’s trusted ecosystem. Partners include Algolia, Amplience, builder.io, contentful, Contentstack, Constructor.io, Coveo, Magnolia, OSF Digital, Publicis Sapient, Tryzens, and 64Labs. Using these packages, merchants can easily build composable and engaging experiences with advanced search and content. This helps reduce time spent on sourcing vendors, negotiating pricing, and building custom integrations.
- Take control of the brand experience and drive differentiation by seamlessly incorporating functionality like AR, chatbots, and social media features. This will enable the creation of rich shopping experiences.
- Ship new features and updates daily with 60-second deployments. This eliminates deployment risk, giving developers the freedom to iterate and add new features at any time. Even during peak shopping periods.
The customer view:
- “As we looked to optimise the checkout experience for our shoppers, site performance was a top priority,” said Yann Milin, Business Solutions Manager of eCommerce and Digital at Stokke, a global children’s furniture brand. “Commerce Cloud’s Composable Storefront enables us to elevate the shopping experience for our customers by giving us the ability to execute site changes with precision, flexibility, and agility.”
- “It’s important to Newell that every one of our brands has the flexibility to tell their story. Furthermore, seamlessly connect with customers without interruption,” said Doug Robinson, Director of Solution Architecture for Newell. “Working with the Composable Storefront allows us to focus on the consumer, providing a best-in-class experience.”
- “Salesforce will help to transform the customer experience as we seek new world-class systems that will be cloud-first,” said Simon Gregg, Senior Vice President of Ecommerce for grocery retailer Asda. “Salesforce’s technology is perfectly aligned to deliver our vision of a true and exciting omnichannel experience that will set us apart in the UK retail sector.”
Enterprise Times: What this means for business.
Analysts in Gartner were the first to coin the term composable commerce. It has since become the increasingly desired architecture for businesses that want to scale and adapt their eCommerce business at their own pace. It is also seen as providing brands and retailers more freedom from vendor lock-in and the forced obsolescence of monolithic platforms. Retailers want and need adaptable and flexible commerce sites that can keep up with evolving customer preferences. New customer experience touchpoints are emerging and shopper expectations are evolving.
ECommerce is the last place any retailer or brand can afford to lose flexibility and agility. To continuously improve existing touchpoints, adopt emerging ones, and provide a unified brand experience across their channels. Enterprises are separating the customer-facing front-end experience from the back-end with a customer-centric, headless commerce approach. This enables brands to quickly and affordably customise digital storefronts without disrupting the shopping experience. Against this tide, Salesforce had no option but to develop its own composable commerce architecture. This was required to combat the rising tide of MACH technology. It will be interesting to see if Salesforce opens-up other core eCommerce components to become composable. Furthermore, enabling integration with other third-party vendors.
