• by Ray Schultz , January 13, 2022

Salesforce has announced several new features and partnerships to help brands deal with changing consumer behavior patterns, including use of new channels. Among them are a new connector to drive B2B sales and an integration with Alibaba to fuel ecommerce in China. 

“With 25% of shopping expected to happen beyond a retailer or brand’s website, app or physical store by next year, companies must quickly adapt and embrace emerging channels to provide their customers with more purchasing options and greater flexibility,” says Lidiane Jones, executive vice president and general manager, digital experiences clouds at Salesforce. 

The new offerings include integrations within the firm’s Datorama and Tableau platforms that could help email marketers.

"People expect emails from their favorite brands to be personal, helpful, and relevant," says Bobby Jania, Vice President, product marketing at Salesforce. "With our new innovations, marketing and commerce teams can together leverage first-party Ecommerce data in order to optimize email marketing campaigns and improve their performance."

Salesforce says the new tools provide these benefits:

• Datorama Connector for Salesforce Order Management System (OMS)--This helps ecommerce teams balance the relationship between marketing campaigns and sales.
• Datorama Connectors for Amazon Seller Central and Amazon Vendor Central Inventory — Two new connectors to drive marketing performance in orders conducted in Amazon.
• Datorama’s Ecommerce Data Model — A new model that organizes ecommerce data from any platform. preparing it for analysis, while enabling Datorama’s Einstein Marketing Insights to unlock AI-driven intelligence.
• Tableau Connector for Commerce Cloud — A connector enables merchants to import third-party data sources.

Salesforce is also offering these new ecommerce integrations:

• PayPal at Checkout for Salesforce Payments — This adds a click-based configuration to help brands using Salesforce Payments reduce checkout friction. 
• Salesforce Commerce for B2B Wholesale Retail — This is a digital portal for wholesale apparel and fashion marketers, build on Commerce Cloud by ISV partner XCentium. It supports  preseason ordering, in-season re-supply, and automated interactions across self-service and sales teams.
• Salesforce Social Commerce for China with Alibaba — This platform, first announced last September, is now generally available. It supports e-commerce across China-specific channels that include social networks and .CN websites. 

 One client using Salesforce tools is Claire’s. The launch of its new order management system and the same-day Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store, and Click & Collect offerings powered by Salesforce, says Jan Steck, senior vice president of global ecommerce and digital marketing at Claire’s, provide "streamlined omnichannel customer experiences" to meet shoppers' expectations.

“With Datorama, we’re able to gain actionable insights across all our marketing activities and effectively connect them to customer purchases in Commerce Cloud,” Ed Poppe, vice president of CRM and performance marketing at Build-A-Bear, another Salesforce client.

Note: Additional material was later added to this story.