Explore Tools and Features that Engage Shoppers

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain how the D2C Commerce templates improve site development and shorten time to value.
Explain how the new D2C components impact the user experience.
List the search components that differentiate the Commerce app Search feature from competitors.
Describe how merchandisers manage products in the Commerce app.
Explain the relationship between buyers, buyer groups, entitlements, and price books.
List the promotion types that merchandisers can set up in the Commerce app.

D2C Commerce Merchandising Tools

You’ve learned that Salesforce D2C Commerce comes equipped with state-of-the-art tools that streamline the online store setup process. But the cutting-edge tools and features don’t stop there. Once you set up your basic store framework, your next focus is developing a merchandising strategy that presents the right products to the right shoppers at the right time and at the right price.

Salesforce D2C Commerce is packed with easy-to-use merchandising tools that help online store merchandisers configure and deploy an online D2C store–a store that can quickly adapt to swiftly moving and ever-changing revenue streams.

The greatest challenges for online store merchandisers are:

User experience design
Brand building
Product curation
Search and recommendations
Customer retention
Logistics and fulfillment
Customer service

Let’s see how D2C Commerce merchandising tools help merchandisers succeed in these areas of ecommerce.

User Experience

To craft an easy-to-use and engaging online experience, merchandisers need to consider several elements. The customer experience includes everything from site branding to how customers place orders, select shipping, and make payments.

The D2C Commerce page templates and site branding tool can help.

Page Templates

Commerce app page templates include:

Commerce Page Templates
Home	Order Confirmation
Cart	Order Lookup
Category	Order Summary Details
Checkout	Order Summary List
Login	Payment Processing
My List	Product Search
My Profile	Split Shipment

Each template is intelligently designed and responsive. The templates are built on best practices and contain only the best user experience approaches. Each template comes with a set of standard components and customizable layouts. The page templates offer modern web designs, are responsive, easy to customize, and make page creation a breeze.

Site Branding

With the D2C Commerce site branding tool you can automatically customize each page template with your brand. You provide the URL to your business website, and D2C Commerce designs the store template pages to match your brand.

A screenshot of the Commerce app site branding feature.

Commerce Components

D2C Commerce components are the building blocks of commerce stores. They help you drive user engagement and improve sales and sales transaction efficiency.

Components are custom HTML elements built for the Salesforce Lightning Platform, following modern web standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The Commerce components’ lightweight framework provides efficiency and enhanced performance.

Here’s the newest set of components.

Component	Description
Carousel component	Use the Carousel component to visually showcase content on your D2C stores. Choose between two visual styles: the slider style, ideal for displaying single page-width items like banners, and the reel style, perfect for showcasing multiple repeated items such as product recommendations.
Social Links component	Integrate links to popular social media platforms into your store with the Social Links component. This versatile component automatically recognizes and displays the logos of many social media sites (such as X, Facebook, Instagram, and more), making it simple to connect with your audience across various platforms while establishing and maintaining a strong brand presence. Social media connections are essential when creating online brand communities, where people with shared interests can share ideas, discuss your brand, and build emotional connections to your brand.
Order History component	Help your customers track their purchases with the Order History component that features product images. Customers can view their order history and filter results for a selected time frame.
Checkout Summary component	Display the cart summary, promotions, and cart items in a dynamic component that expands and collapses on mobile. Available for D2C stores only.

Commerce Cart and Checkout Services

Shoppers today expect an easy checkout experience. An easy checkout experience minimizes the number of abandoned carts and increases revenue.

Commerce cart and checkout services let merchandisers quickly configure checkout services for their site and offer customers a streamlined checkout experience that includes precise pricing, a cart summary, and shipping details.

The Commerce app cart summary.

Here’s a summary of the cart and checkout service features for D2C Commerce stores.

Service	Description
Add-To-Cart Message	Keep shopping flowing and your customers engaged with a simple add-to-cart message. The message lets customers know they’ve successfully added an item to their cart so they can continue shopping.
Cart Summary	Show the precise price breakdown in carts so shoppers know exactly what they’re paying for.
Guided Flow	Make it easier for shoppers to complete their purchases with a guided flow and a dynamic cart summary displayed at checkout.
Estimated Delivery Dates	Keep customers informed by offering shipping options with estimated delivery dates at checkout.
Coupons at Checkout	Offer shoppers the ability to enter coupons during checkout for more options and incentives to complete their purchases.
Automated Shipping Setup with Salesforce Checkout	Simplify shipping for your customers with Salesforce Checkout for new D2C stores. It uses the Salesforce native shipping service, which includes a default shipping profile. The shipping profile uses a shipping zone based on your store’s default ship-to country, a free shipping rate, and shipping processing time.

Here are some other great checkout features.

Customers can log in to your store without losing their cart.
You can create split orders that support shipments to multiple locations or fulfill an order from multiple locations.
Customers can place large orders.
Your store can enforce coupon redemption limits.

Search and Recommendations

The primary goal of your store’s search function is to make it easy for buyers and shoppers to find the products they want and the products they didn’t know they want by returning intelligent and relevant search results. A search and recommendations feature that meets that criteria is not a nice to have–it’s a must have.

D2C Commerce search is more than just simple keyword matching. It incorporates advanced search capabilities that enable your customers to filter and refine their search results based on their criteria. What makes Commerce search so effective? It’s configurable and it uses Einstein.

Configurable Search

D2C Commerce Configurable Search allows you to customize and optimize the search functionality on your storefront. This ensures that shoppers can find the most relevant products quickly and efficiently. Commerce supports these configurable search entities.

Searchable fields: Product fields that are set as searchable.
Search results filters: Searchable product fields that are used to refine and narrow search results.
Sort rules: Rules that determine how search results are listed.
Search criteria: Criteria you can fine-tune to control how search results are ranked.
Search results display: Options that you set to control the number of search results to show on a page.

Use these configurable search features to create a more intuitive and effective search experience–and drive better engagement and higher conversion rates.

Einstein Search Settings

With Einstein search suggestions, customers see relevant search terms before they finish entering their own. Relevance is based on a customer’s recent search history and the popular search terms that similar customers have used. Customers see search suggestions when they click the Search field and as they type in a search term.

Einstein Product Recommendations

Enhance customer engagement and drive sales with personalized product suggestions powered by Einstein generative AI. Einstein tracks customer shopping behavior to offer tailored product recommendations, drawing insights from both individual shopping patterns and data collected from a network of participating merchants.

Einstein Generative AI and Data Cloud Segments

Together, AI-driven content generation and precise customer segmentation let you deliver a more engaging and relevant shopping experience, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Einstein Generative AI

Commerce Einstein generative AI enhances merchandising tools that personalize the customer shopping experience by automating product discovery on your storefront. When you enable Commerce Einstein, it gathers client- and server-side customer activity on your storefront. Commerce Einstein uses these metrics as real-time input for personalizing the shopper experience.

Data Cloud Segments

Personalize your customers’ shopping experience by combining the power of Data Cloud segments and Commerce shoppers. Create shopper profiles using a wide range of customer data available in Data Cloud, and deliver personalized shopping experiences to your customers. Using data segments, you can target content and tailored promotions for shoppers.

In summary, Commerce Einstein generative AI and Commerce Data Cloud Segments are a powerful combination. Together, they enable businesses to deliver personalized, ethical, and effective customer experiences, driving growth and success in the competitive ecommerce landscape.

Promotions

Promotions are a great way to drive cart conversions and customer retention. They also help provide a steady stream of revenue for your business. From discounts to loyalty programs and bundled offers, D2C Commerce has click-based tools to set up and deploy promotions that engage customers and drive sales. The Commerce app enables marketers and merchandisers to manage campaigns, promotions, product catalogs, inventory, and pricing all in one place, at one time, across all your sites.

Here are the latest promotion tools available in D2C Commerce.

Promotion Tool	Description
Smart Promotions	Use natural language processing and Einstein generative AI technology to quickly create promotions.
Promotion Template	Use predesigned templates to jump-start your promotions.
Shipping Promotions	Offer shipping promotions in your store to encourage customers to complete their purchase.
Flexible Promotion Segments	Associate a promotion segment with either a store or a buyer group. Plus, exercise the flexibility to update the Active, Commerce Promotion, and Automatic Promotion fields when the promotion is associated with a segment.
Promotional Pricing Highlights	Help customers find promotional pricing on the Product Card component. Adjust the color of the text for extra flair.

Next Steps

In this unit, you learned how page templates, commerce components, Einstein generative AI search recommendations, and promotions help you engage with customers. Next, learn even more about Einstein generative AI tools.

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