Get to Know D2C Commerce
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the two primary applications of D2C Commerce.
- Explain how D2C Commerce can help you reach your commerce objectives.
- List the operational advantages that D2C Commerce offers your D2C business.
- List the strategic advantages built into D2C Commerce.
- Describe the benefits of building on the Salesforce Platform.
The ABCs of D2C Commerce
Direct-to-consumer selling (D2C) is any shopping experience that connects directly with end consumers. Today, D2C businesses connect with customers through multiple channels. These channels include online stores, brick-and-mortar retail stores, social media sites, and email marketing campaigns. Even the fruit stand at your local farmers market is a direct-to-consumer business. A D2C business derives revenue from orders, reorders, and subscriptions made directly by consumers.
What Is Salesforce D2C Commerce?
Salesforce D2C Commerce is a full-featured app for developing, operating, and managing online D2C stores. With D2C Commerce, you can build state-of-the-art online retail stores that sell products and services directly to customers.
The D2C Solution
In today’s online marketplace, shoppers are demanding a personalized retail shopping experience with 24/7 access to products and services. Online shoppers have grown to expect personalized VIP treatment. They expect fast, easy-to-use, personalized experiences with meaningful product recommendations and multiple payment, shipping, and return options.
D2C Commerce gives you an easy way to offer customers a personalized experience, direct communication, exclusive products, multiple payment and shipping options, and a faster feedback loop. The full set of best-in-class ecommerce tools also gives you brand control, global reach, enhanced analytics, and brand community building. With D2C Commerce–and your business strategy–you can offer personalized shopping experiences so your customers can chart their perfect purchase path.
D2C Operational Advantages
When your online D2C shopping experience is powered by Salesforce D2C Commerce, you get the following operational advantages.
Advantage | Description |
|---|---|
Convenience | Shoppers can browse and purchase products from anywhere, at any time, without the need to visit a physical store. |
Efficiency with Agentforce | Agentforce Merchant Agent helps you analyze your webstore performance data and develop strategies that maximize product performance, and increase cart conversion. Agentforce Personal Shopper Agent engages shoppers and helps them find products and make purchases faster by guiding search queries and personalizing product recommendations. |
Personalized experience | D2C brands can use customer data to provide personalized recommendations, offers, and a more tailored shopping experience. |
Direct communication | Customers can interact directly with the brand for inquiries, support, and feedback, leading to better customer service and satisfaction. |
Exclusive products | Brands can offer exclusive or limited-edition products directly to their customers, enhancing the sense of exclusivity and loyalty. |
Faster feedback loop | Direct feedback from customers enables you to quickly make product merchandising and service improvements. |
Brand control | Companies maintain full control over their brand image, packaging, and overall customer experience, ensuring consistency and quality. |
Global reach | Online DTC models can reach customers worldwide, expanding the potential market far beyond local or regional boundaries. |
Enhanced analytics | Direct sales provide valuable data on customer behavior, preferences, and trends, which you can use to optimize marketing strategies and product offerings. |
Community building | Brands can build a community around their products through social media, email marketing, and other direct channels, fostering a sense of belonging among customers. |
Strategic Advantage
Of course, as a business, you want tools that help you gain a strategic advantage in the marketplace. Let’s see how the Commerce app on the Salesforce Platform helps you do that.
Business Value | Strategic Advantage |
|---|---|
Deploy Einstein generative AI. | Enhance your D2C store development, and business management with Einstein generative AI tools. These powerful tools help you make new customer connections, personalize customer experiences, drive sales, increase customer satisfaction, and discover new sources of revenue. |
Modernize sales channels. | New Einstein AI technologies support shopper contact through modern sales channels. |
Unify commerce operations. | Grow your business with a single global platform and a unified data model for D2C, order management, and your partner ecosystem. With the Commerce app built on the Salesforce Platform, you get a single view of shoppers throughout the order lifecycle. |
Connect the customer’s journey from marketing to sales to service. | Take the fastest path toward a complete digital transformation with a CRM-powered, connected customer journey. The Commerce app integrates with Salesforce Marketing, Sales, Service, and Data Clouds—a complete commerce ecosystem. |
Quickly launch full-featured stores with D2C Commerce. | Get commerce sites up and running quickly with low-code setup and customization, simplified data import, and shared workflows across Salesforce clouds. Take advantage of the store templates and quickly create and customize a customer-friendly D2C store. Use standard Lightning components to set up checkout and payment and configure store settings. Define customer experiences, including search, carts, and checkouts. Import commerce data for accounts, products, price books, and entitlements using CSV file import. |
Create personalized shopping experiences with Einstein generative AI. | Use Commerce Einstein Recommendations, powered by Einstein generative AI, and Search to guide shoppers to the products they want and to discover additional products to purchase. |
Merge customer data. | Connect and manage customer data across your entire organization while you deliver personalized experiences powered by Einstein AI. |
Simplify order payment and shipping. | Integrate the Commerce app with Salesforce Payments, tax, and shipping services. Also explore a rich ecosystem of AppExchange payment, tax, and shipping integrations from system integrator partners. |
Build on the Salesforce Ecosystem
D2C Commerce is a perfect fit for the Salesforce ecosystem. Every store includes the same performance, security, and scalability as all the standard Salesforce Platform technologies.
The Salesforce Commerce platform is open and extensible. Its minimal configuration requirements and declarative programming layer means that your admins and merchandisers can quickly complete set up and store development tasks. With streamlined setup and configuration, your dev team can focus their efforts on enabling integrations and extending platform capabilities.
Complete API Set
Additionally, the platform offers a comprehensive set of APIs and development tools that streamline the process of building and deploying applications. Though D2C Commerce offers fully functional page templates, developers can use these tools to create custom interfaces, workflows, and integrations that enhance the overall customer experience and drive business growth.
Developers love that the Commerce app is built on modern experiences and the latest web standards.
- Enhanced productivity with web standards: Use the modern language of the web: ES5+, custom elements, classes, modules, and imports.
- Open, transparent, and portable: Use modular building blocks to code the experiences you want with your preferred tools on the same platform.
- Built for enterprise-scale: Adopt the architecture Salesforce has used to scale Lightning, Communities, and Mobile for years.
Every JavaScript developer can build a Lightning component: The standards-based programming model makes developer resources easy to find and ramp. Salesforce Commerce is engineered for performance; the browser executes more code instead of JavaScript abstractions for a blazing-fast experience.
Next Steps
This unit gave you a broad overview of Salesforce D2C Commerce and its operational and strategic advantages. Next, learn about the Salesforce Commerce data model and how it can support your D2C business.