MACH my words: Salesforce knows no bounds.
Even as composable architectures become more of a fixture across enterprise stacks, Mark Benioff's monolith is promoting a seemingly decoupled offering.
Salesforce is the latest mega platform to embrace MACH mania, announcing its new Composable Storefront – a fully-customizable, headless digital storefront that lets online retailers make site changes with the speed and flexibility needed to increase sales, conversions, and basket size while helping to drive down costs.
With the announcement, Salesforce also introduced pre-built packages made specifically for headless implementations and offered several use cases with commerce partners. This includes best-in-class integrations, pricing, and implementation accelerators from across the Salesforce ecosystem, all anchored by the Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
More than ever, retailers need adaptable and flexible commerce sites that can keep up with rapidly evolving customer preferences. Salesforce knows this. We all do.
Headless commerce has been a key gamechanger for making omnichannel a reality for retailers. It effectively separates the front end and back end of an e-commerce solution, enabling brands to quickly and affordably customize digital storefronts without disrupting the shopping experience.
According to the latest Salesforce State of Commerce Report, retailers are investing in headless commerce in a big way to drive growth. 77% of commerce-focused organizations that have implemented headless architectures say that it gives them increased agility by allowing them to make changes to their storefront quickly, and 80% of businesses that don’t currently have headless commerce plan to implement it in the next two years.
“With customers expecting both engaging and seamless e-commerce experiences, headless architecture can help online retailers build and implement site changes with speed and agility,” said Scot Gillespie, GM of Commerce Cloud. “Salesforce’s Composable Storefront is a secure, trusted platform that empowers users to leverage headless while accelerating time to market and reducing costs.”
With Salesforce Composable Storefront, Commerce Cloud customers can implement a headless commerce strategy without exposing themselves to a significant overhead or complex development issues.
According to Salesforce, businesses can "supercharge" storefront performance and engagement with a fast, app-like site experience using its progressive web app (PWA) technology, which decreases page load time and minimizes disruption for online shoppers.
Composable Storefront can also speed time to value and reduce the total cost of ownership for headless commerce architecture with pre-packaged integrations, pricing, and accelerators in partnership with Commerce Cloud’s trusted ecosystem, which includes 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 — helping reduce time spent on sourcing vendors, negotiating prices, and building custom integrations. They can also take control of the brand experience and drive differentiation by seamlessly incorporating functionality like AR, chatbots, and social media features to create rich shopping experiences.
One of the other benefits of Composable Storefront is the ability to ship new features and updates daily with 60-second deployments. This helps eliminate risk, giving developers the freedom to iterate and add new features at any time — even during peak shopping periods.
Composable and headless are certainly all the rage. And for good reason: as more channels enter the mix, consumers are seeking the easiest paths to shop and purchase online – and brands want to be there at every step. Delivering an exceptional digital experience is key to converting interest into sales, and having a robust, integrated, and easy to manage platform to power ContentOps is essential to scaling the needs of a modern digital commerce program.
While composable solutions may be complex to deploy and manage (ask the MACH Alliance), headless is becoming more of requirement for traditional digital experience platforms (DXPs) and agile CMSes. With Salesforce entering the game, it's a signal that some enterprises that are reliant on the platform can help simplify their growth into omnichannel strategies and leverage the capabilities of the Salesforce ecosystem, which includes Algolia, Amplience, builder.io.
Much of the demand for headless is being driven by industry trends and consumer behavior. 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 – all of which rely on multi-channel strategies. '
In its announcement, Salesforce offered these quotes from customers that are leveraging the Composable Storefront solution:
“It’s important to Newell that every one of our brands has the flexibility to tell their story and 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 E-commerce 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.”
Salesforce is the global leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), bringing companies closer to their customers in the digital age. Founded in 1999, Salesforce enables companies of every size and industry to take advantage of powerful technologies—cloud, mobile, social, internet of things, artificial intelligence, voice, and blockchain—to create a 360-degree view of their customers.