Are you a Salesforce Commerce Cloud user struggling with slow loading times that frustrate your customers and hurt your conversion rates? Perhaps you’re finding it difficult and expensive to customize your storefront to create a unique brand experience. These are just a few signs that your current e-commerce platform might be holding your business back.
It may be that your business has outgrown Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s monolithic architecture. While it offers many great features, its complexity and limitations can hinder growth and innovation. Headless commerce solutions, on the other hand, can overcome these limitations and create a faster, more flexible, and customer-centric e-commerce experience. We explore this concept in more detail in other SFCC specific articles.
But for now, let’s delve into the specific challenges you might be facing with Salesforce Commerce Cloud:
1. Platform Complexity and Inflexibility
Managing Salesforce Commerce Cloud can be daunting due to its inherent complexity. The platform’s tightly coupled front and back-end systems make customization and scalability challenging. For example, making even minor modifications often requires extensive development expertise and can lead to increased complexity over time. This complexity impedes agility and innovation, limiting your ability to adapt to changing market demands and differentiate your brand.
As you business expands and evolves, the rigidity of your platform will become more apparent. It will struggle to keep up with modern consumer needs, leading to bottlenecks in development and agility. This complexity not only affects the front-end user experience but also extends to backend processes, making it challenging to integrate new features or scale operations efficiently. For instance, updating your platform to accommodate new payment gateways or marketing tools will require extensive modifications to the entire system, resulting in prolonged development cycles and increased costs.
5 reasons to improve your e-commerce platform
1. Platform complexity and inflexibility
2. Difficulty and cost of customization
3. Slow performance is impacting conversions
4. Inability to keep up with evolving customer expectations
5. Overwhelmed engineering teams due to bloated systems
Headless commerce offers a decoupled approach, separating the front-end presentation layer from the back-end commerce engine. This allows for greater flexibility and faster development cycles, making it easier to create a unique and engaging shopping experience for your customers.
2. Difficulty and Cost of Customization
Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s limited customization options can curb your ability to create a unique and tailored online shopping experience for your customers. Customizations often require modifications to both database code and front-end platforms, resulting in resource-intensive and costly processes. As a result, you may struggle to implement new features or respond quickly to evolving customer preferences, leading to a competitive disadvantage in the market.
Headless commerce leverages modern development tools and frameworks to build a customized storefront that reflects your unique brand identity. This not only reduces development costs but also allows you to iterate and innovate more quickly.
3. Slow Performance is Impacting Conversions
There’s a clear link between page load times and users leaving the site. Slow website speed significantly impacts user experience and conversion rates in e-commerce. Research shows that a one-second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% decrease in conversion rates. This not only cuts into potential profit but can also damage the brand’s reputation, especially among mobile users who expect fast and smooth experiences. Issues like server overload, bad coding, and large files can make these problems worse.
Headless commerce can help you achieve faster loading times and a more responsive user experience. By decoupling the front-end from the back-end, you can optimize your storefront for performance and ensure a seamless shopping experience for your customers.
Up next: Discover The Hidden Costs of a Monolithic Storefront
4. Inability to Keep Up with Evolving Customer Expectations
Evolving customer expectations pose a significant challenge for businesses using monolothic solutions like Salesforce Commerce Cloud. As consumer behavior and preferences evolve, businesses must stay ahead of the curve to remain competitive. Consumers today expect seamless and personalized shopping experiences across all channels, from fast and free shipping to frictionless checkout processes. However, outdated platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud may struggle to meet these expectations, resulting in dissatisfied customers and lost sales.
Headless commerce solutions are designed to be adaptable and future-proof. They allow you to integrate with best-of-breed marketing, personalization, and payment tools to create a truly omnichannel shopping experience that exceeds customer expectations.
5. Overwhelmed Engineering Teams Due to Bloated Systems
Handling issues in big, complex systems is about fixing problems that slow down work, stress out teams, and limit growth. The high dependency and single point of failure inherent in these systems leave them vulnerable to disruptions, increasing the risk of performance & stability issues. Transitioning to modern e-commerce platforms with composable architectures streamlines operations, increases flexibility, encourages innovation, and promotes steady growth.
A Call to Action
If you’re experiencing any of the signs mentioned above, it may be time to reconsider your e-commerce platform strategy. Slow loading times, limited customization options, and the inability to meet evolving customer expectations are just a few of the challenges businesses face when sticking with monolithic systems.
However, there is a better way forward. Transitioning to a more flexible and agile solution, such as a headless or composable commerce platform, can empower your business to overcome the limitations of Salesforce Commerce Cloud and unlock new opportunities for growth and innovation. What’s more, you can transition to headless commerce without switching to a different backend. Sales Commerce Cloud is headless capable.
In our next article, we will explore actionable strategies for transitioning to a future-proof e-commerce solution and discuss the benefits it can bring to your business. Stay tuned for insights on how to realise the full potential of your online store and stay ahead of the competition.
In the meantime, learn more about headless commerce here.