CASE ✦ TWISTELLAR PROJECTS
Salesforce Commerce Cloud Implementation for a B2C Marketplace to Streamline Order Processing
• Date: November 2023 •
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
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CLIENT
Multi-vendor Marketplace
A B2C marketplace that enables the sales process for multiple vendors across several regions.
Improved Flows
- Customer Experience
- Marketing
- Sales
- Order Management
Services
- Salesforce Implementation
- Consulting
- Data Migration
- Salesforce Development
- Customization
Challenges
The organization aimed to establish a convenient B2C-based industry-specific marketplace with streamlined e-shop onboarding and sales processes for partner vendors across a few regions.
However, this straightforward goal presented four major tech challenges:
- accommodating the unique and ever-changing pricing and purchase conditions of each company, often for items listed in the same product category
- processing all payments and order placements through the marketplace main website
- optimizing and reinforcing the system for future growth and scaling
- triggering automatic confirmation and order status emails and notifications for the customers
Solution
Salesforce Commerce Cloud capabilities fit the bill, but only with further customization. To ensure a seamless user experience and facilitate order processing for B2C sellers, our engineering team started with the initial B2C Commerce Cloud Edition implementation.
- The first priority was ensuring the sellers could access up-to-date pricing and stock level information. To achieve this, we automated the retrieval of pricing, availability, and inventory data from different systems for each shop.
- The marketplace management system and individual stores started receiving separate store-specific data for sold products thanks to the automated and seamless order data streams from multiple systems. The next step was payment methods integration, allowing for convenient in-house payment accepting and processing.
- To cover the end customer side of things, such as email notifications and order status tracking, we took a step further and integrated the Marketing Cloud platform. Its capabilities extended the Commerce Cloud offering, using the extracted order data for automatic email dispatch. The system now tracks user behavior and automatically sends out order confirmations, order status emails, and other event-triggered notifications, such as registration confirmations.
- Finally, a smooth Amazon-like experience is unimaginable today without delivery updates. We automated the tracking of product deliveries by integrating data from the transportation provider. As a result, customers could easily track their orders by simply checking the order history.
Scope and Process
While Commerce Cloud offers most features required for a functioning multi-vendor marketplace, it's impossible to settle for an out-of-box solution. For a complex instance such as a marketplace, there are multiple points of view to consider: marketplace admins, B2C store admins, and end buyers. For each of them, the priorities are different at each stage of the purchasing process.
For this project, we dived deeper into the marketplace's internal day-to-day operations to understand which aspects are crucial to storefront and marketplace admins. Our primary focus was on automating mundane actions and data transfer where there was room for improvement.
And there always was–using our findings, we ensured the best possible alignment of the existing business processes with the new system, but optimized for speed and automated for efficiency.
The solution underwent iterative testing and continuous improvement by the team to address emerging requirements.
- Antony SalanovichSalesforce Developer at TwistellarOur team successfully developed a robust system that effectively supports the complex processes of accommodating diverse pricing and purchase conditions, processing payments and order placements, and automating confirmation emails and order status notifications. We implemented several integrations to ensure seamless data transfer and functionality across multiple systems. Our team remains dedicated to maintaining the system's performance and addressing any future needs since the system's stability and customer satisfaction are our main priority.
Results
The implementation of Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud resulted in significant workflow improvements for the organization and partner shops. By leveraging Salesforce's B2C storefront capabilities, the company successfully transformed into a full-fledged multi-vendor marketplace, allowing partner companies to grow their business a complete picture of their sales.
Here are the features that elevated the marketplace experience for sellers and customers:
1. Automated order data management and export from and to various sellers' systems that enhance data visibility across the platform.
2. Self-service email notifications to track key order and shipping milestones, providing customers with real-time updates.
3. Integrated payment processing that allows seamless transactions through the marketplace main website.
4. Delivery Tracking Automation and swift updates provide customers with easy access to order tracking information.
Other tangible results of adopting Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud included time and resource savings for sellers thanks to automation and expanded product and partner range. The new multi-vendor functionality supported and easy access to data helps shift focus from manual tasks to core business activities crucial for profitability and customer satisfaction.