Salesforce Commerce Cloud + Algolia = Great Customer Experiences Everywhere

Since recently launching our new solutions page for Algolia with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, we have heard a lot of excitement from customers and received questions on how Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Algolia work together.

Today, Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides robust search capabilities out-of-the-box to enable shoppers to find exactly what they want. In addition, Commerce Cloud also provides integrations with third-party solutions like Algolia to give its customers plenty of options to customize Commerce Cloud to best suit their business needs.

Let’s take a closer look.

It Starts with Salesforce Commerce Cloud Native Search.

First, it’s important to understand Commerce Cloud’s native search capabilities. Powered by artificial intelligence and deep machine learning, Commerce Cloud search includes: 

• Einstein Search Recommendations: offers type-ahead suggestions personalized to every shopper in real time.
• Einstein Search Dictionaries: resolves missing search terms with automatically generated synonym lists.
• Einstein Predictive Sort: automatically tailors category pages and search results to each shopper.
• Einstein Visual Search: enables shoppers to “snap and search” for products using images, not text.

In addition to machine learning-based search, Commerce Cloud offers merchandisers:

• A broad selection of searchandising capabilities and flexibility to optimize shopper journeys for browse, sorting, filtering, and faceted search
• Autocomplete suggestions including spell corrections for products, categories, brands & content 
• Incremental indexing for near real-time updates and granular search index management to control searchable data
• Search reporting on queries, terms, conversion rates etc. and A/B testing to monitor and optimize shopper search behavior
• Multilingual support including its query analyzer supporting 35+ languages
• Search tuning and sophisticated customization capabilities leveraging Open Commerce APIs and fast caching for optimal performance and quick page load times 

In short, Commerce Cloud provides an intuitive, effective e-commerce search engine that provides relevant results for online shoppers. 

With the above robust, native search capabilities, most Commerce Cloud customers have all their requirements met to help consumers find the product they are looking for on their website and mobile sites — and ultimately convert.

Extending e-Commerce Search: The Power of Salesforce Commerce Cloud + Algolia. 

Since each customer has its own unique set of requirements, Commerce Cloud also offers integrations to solutions like Algolia to ensure customers are able to extend Commerce Cloud to their needs and liking. 

Think of Algolia as a complementary, API-based solution that makes it easy for developers and online merchants to further extend and tailor the search and discovery experience for their Commerce Cloud-powered site. The partnership with Commerce Cloud is why we’re so excited to welcome Salesforce Ventures as an investor in Algolia in our most recent funding round. 

“Our customers demand an intuitive, stellar experience that Lacoste is known for worldwide. The combination of Algolia and Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a critical part of delivering this digital experience across Lacoste platforms globally and has helped double our global sales.”

Jérémie Szpiro, Global Digital Director, Lacoste

So let’s explore some of these additional experiences for which the combination of Commerce Cloud and Algolia serves the specialized needs of businesses of all sizes:

 

1. Presenting Multiple Result Types For Engaging Search & Discovery. 

Algolia’s API with Commerce Cloud can provide a unified search experience across multiple disparate data sources. For example, a merchant wants to allow users to discover relevant products, as well as relevant content from its editorial site within the product search results delivered within Commerce Cloud. This inspires consumers to discover more about a particular style or trend. Algolia’s federated search capabilities can pull in relevant articles and media alongside product search results on the Commerce Cloud-powered site. 

2. Delivering Seamless Post-Purchase Search Experiences. 

In addition to product search, a retailer may want to enable its consumers to use the search bar to look-up order and shipping information following a recent online purchase, as well as customer support questions. Algolia’s APIs enable the retailer to tie into a merchant’s order management and support systems to surface this information. The consumer can find order update information through the main search bar on Commerce Cloud, as Algolia can infer that the user isn’t looking to search for another product, but is rather looking for an update on her order. 

3. Making Commerce Conversational. 

A retailer wants to create a mobile shopping site using Commerce Cloud that supports voice search for their on-the-go consumer. With Algolia’s voice-enabled Search API, the retailer can easily incorporate voice-enabled search for conversational commerce on a retail mobile site powered by Commerce Cloud.

4. Helping Developers Easily Implement.

Finally, Algolia provides developers pre-packaged, front-end UI libraries to easily extend existing search and discovery experiences on Salesforce Commerce Cloud across mobile, PWA (progressive web apps), kiosks, and voice-first, conversational UIs.

 

Stay tuned for more great examples of customers implementing Algolia together with Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

For more information, go to www.algolia.com/solutions/salesforce-commercecloud/.