Everyone shops online nowadays. So much that online sales have accounted for over 17% of retail sales, worldwide. Now, as a small or medium-sized business (SMB) owner — you are making that happen for every single customer out there by being available online.
SMBs are building amazing online stores where they showcase the best products in the most visually appealing way, selling brands, and reaching more people. According to our latest Connected Shoppers Report:
- 75% of retailers say AI agents will be essential by 2026.
- 53% of shoppers discover products on social platforms — up from 46% in 2023.
- 88% of retailers say unified commerce will significantly impact their goals.
All online, and it all starts with storefronts. It might sound tedious, right? Running a very tech-heavy, and expensive ecommerce store? Not anymore. You can build your online storefront without breaking the bank, hiring experts, or spending hours learning how to code in days or hours. Let’s see how.
What we’ll cover:
- What’s an online storefront?
- Traditional store vs online store
- Why do you need an online store?
- Set up your online store with Salesforce in 3 steps
- Use AI to sell faster on your digital store
- Your online store success awaits
What’s an online storefront?
An online storefront is your digital shop where you can showcase and sell your products or services over the internet. It’s like a virtual shop window that allows your customers to browse, compare, and purchase items from anywhere in the world, at any time.
Unlike physical shops, having an online shop gives you an edge to make your products gain more popularity and reach via the internet. Here are the different types of stores.
What are Digital Storefronts?
Salesforce Digital Storefronts is a commerce solution that enables businesses to create and manage their online stores. It provides a suite of tools and features designed to help companies build, customize, and optimize their ecommerce experiences.
And now, small businesses can use storefronts to handle everything from product catalogs to checkout processes, in one integrated platform. This allows for a seamless and efficient ecommerce operation, leveraging the power of a customer relationship management system (CRM) to boost customer engagement and fuel sales.
Traditional store vs online store: what’s the difference?
Running an online storefront and a physical store have several key differences that impact how businesses operate, interact with customers, and manage costs.
Start with SMB Basics
Why do you need an online store?
Having an online storefront offers multiple benefits for you to reach more customers, reduce costs, and increase sales.
Customers can shop from anywhere anytime, increasing customer engagement. And, by giving recommendations and personalized offers, you win their trust and loyalty.
- Save costs with integration: Avoid the expenses of maintaining a traditional shop like rent, utilities, and maintenance costs. Integrate your storefront with a customer relationship management (CRM) and bring all your operations at once, from order processing, customer support, or connecting with third-party apps.
- Market your products globally: Marketing tools help you market your online store to everyone everywhere, and it knows no time bounds. Automate your email marketing campaigns or ads across multiple channels, and increase traffic to your storefront through search engine optimization (SEO) and social media.
- Better analytics: Digital storefronts provide you with analytics tools to track customer behavior, sales performance, and campaign effectiveness. Use this data to create better marketing content, modify product offers, create growth plans or other decisions.
- Multichannel experience: Build a unified brand presence. Give your customers a flawless shopping experience across online, mobile, social media, and in-store channels, ensuring consistent customer interaction.
- Address customer issues faster: Solve customer queries online, without making your customers walk to the store every time they face a problem.
PRO TIP: Artificial intelligence (AI) can boost this process via AI agents. Agents can make the process smoother by answering common questions like, “What’s the status of my order [#123]”
Kickstart your SMB with Starter Suite
Get started with CRM and see results from day one with Starter Suite — the all-in-one suite with the marketing, sales, service, and commerce tools you need to succeed.
Set up your online store with Salesforce in 3 steps
Setting up an online store can look overwhelming at first. But with Salesforce, the journey is as smooth as butter. Here are three steps on how you can use Salesforce to set up your online store:
1. Set up your online storefront with a built-in assistant
Setting up an online store is pretty straightforward. The process involves personalizing your pages — home page, product pages, order page, and check out page — with your unique branding.
Add new products: Adding products is a breeze. Just drag and drop your product details like images, descriptions, pricing, and inventory levels using intuitive interfaces. You can also use prebuilt templates to structure product pages quickly, with a professional look. Quickly design a branded storefront without coding using customizable templates, ensuring your storefront looks great on all devices.
Configure payment options: Set up secure payment methods (credit cards, digital wallets, etc.) with simple steps. Enable multiple currencies to cater to international customers.
Set up taxes and shipping: Use AI-powered tools to calculate taxes based on customer location and product type. Define shipping zones, rates, and methods for flexible delivery options.
2. Manage and optimize your commerce efforts
After setting up your products and payments, let’s see how can you make it more accessible for your customers. Starter Suite for Commerce facilitates creating promotions from scratch and utilizing the digital storefront templates.
If you aren’t a Salesforce customer, here’s how you can optimize it:
- Create promotions: Use AI-powered data insights to create targeted promotions that resonate with your audience. Design discounts, coupons, or seasonal offers from scratch to attract customers.
- Improve search experience: Show products based on customer behavior and browsing history. Help customers find products with AI-powered search that understands keywords, filters, and preferences.
- Get data driven insights: Track revenue, customer behavior, and product performance in real-time. Use AI insights to adjust pricing, promotions, or inventory for better sales outcomes.
3. Connect your sales, service, and marketing
Now when you have a platform to showcase your products, go beyond and bring all your teams together. Integrate your tools for sales, service, and marketing across your CRM. And if you want advanced features, like AI powered automation, go for Pro Suite.
Let’s say one of your customers opens a service case, a new team member can easily see what was ordered, share a knowledge article with the customer, and resolve the case in a matter of minutes — without having to reach out to anyone else on the team. This unified CRM experience is designed to simplify online merchandising and selling, optimize revenue with AI-powered insights, and enhance the overall customer experience.
Use AI to sell faster on your site
The numbers are in, 75% of SMBs are investing in AI, and that number is only going to climb. AI simplifies every step of your business journey, and here’s how.
Source: The Small and Medium Business Trends Report by Salesforce
- AI storefront builder: Create a website in minutes without requiring coding skills. That’s not all, you can also customize colors, layouts, images and give it the feel you want.
- Content creation: Improve the platform’s interface based on customer profiles, by using AI to analyze customer behavior and create content that will get their attention.
- Product recommendations: Analyze customer behavior and purchasing history, AI can suggest your customers they might like, increasing your conversions.
- Proactive support: Chatbots can provide proactive customer support. Similarly, AI service agents can also help you automate responding to common inquiries.
- Fraud detection: Identify suspicious activities and prevents fraudulent transactions and wins customer trust.
Your online store success awaits
We can’t wait to see what you do with your online shop. The sky is your limit. Scale at your pace, the way you want and build your team as per your needs. But with more sales, comes more responsibilities. So, if you’re looking to boost your online presence as well as sales, start your journey with a free trial of Starter Suiter today.
Looking for more customization? Explore Pro Suite. Already a Salesforce customer? Activate Foundations to try Agentforce today.
AI supported the writers and editors who created this article.
