Selling Subscription Products with Salesforce B2B Commerce

By RafterOne
selling-subscription-products-with-salesforce-b2b-commerce

A smooth and easy eCommerce experience is the most important factor for conversions and enhanced sales. Until recently, only most B2C businesses had really great interfaces and navigation – something that was lacking in the B2B space. Here’s where Salesforce B2B Commerce stepped in.  

Salesforce B2B Commerce is a cloud-based software platform that offers buyers a seamless, self-service experience of online shopping with all the B2B functionality they need, enabling B2B eCommerce companies to create ecommerce storefronts specifically designed for large-volumes while offering ease of navigation. 

Why have separate products for B2B and B2C commerce?  

Except for the similarity of the eCommerce experience, the expectations of B2B buyers are vastly different from those of B2C buyers. 

Business buyers often need to make larger and more complex purchases. They also need easy online access to suppliers so they can easily find and place orders for products that help them run their businesses. 

Salesforce acquired CloudCraze, a powerful B2B eCommerce tool to spread its wings in the commerce cloud landscape. Salesforce B2B Commerce is developed on the Salesforce CRM platform – existing customers, their distributors, and eventually their buyers can combine commerce and CRM data seamlessly to have a complete view of the customer or account. 

To give an example of B2B eCommerce, a refrigerator manufacturer may have several business transactions such as buying compressors, getting coating material, buying internal inverters, etc. The final transaction, a finished product sold to the consumer, is a single B2C transaction. 

According to Forrester Research, the B2B commerce industry is expected to grow multifold by the end of this year. Many leading names in consumer goods and manufacturing, like Adidas, Land O’ Lakes, Univar, and Ecolab, empower their B2B commerce businesses with the help of Salesforce Commerce Cloud solutions. 

Benefits of Salesforce B2B Commerce:

  • Speed to market 

Salesforce B2B Commerce offers a quick launch of your ecommerce business and helps you to start accepting digital orders. It is also flexible, so you don’t have to rebuild your commerce infrastructure to cater to changing market scenarios. 

Salesforce B2B commerce empowers digital ordering by deploying ecommerce on the world’s leading trusted cloud platform, enabling you to cut costs and sell more.

  • Affordable scalability 

Salesforce B2B commerce allows you to pay for what you use rather than paying for the entire infrastructure. This frees your resources from handling infrastructure or license capacity. 

B2B ecommerce growth can be greatly focused as it allows you to scale your business quickly on the cloud. 

  • Powerful Ecommerce Features 

Features like product and category searches make it easy for the customer to navigate vital information. The B2B Commerce software also supports localization features with 30+ languages and currencies. 

  • Seamless Product Updates 

Salesforce B2B Commerce, with the help of Salesforce App Cloud, allows its clients to have a quick upgrade. With new features released every one to two months, customers can take advantage of new functionality and features with an agile and ever-evolving release calendar update. 

  • Lower Maintenance Cost 

With Salesforce B2B Commerce alone, your team can launch new products and expand the business. The necessity of maintaining your ecommerce infrastructure is omitted, so it becomes more cost-efficient. 

Salesforce B2B Commerce Subscription Storefront

Salesforce B2B Commerce Subscription Storefront is a native Salesforce B2B eCommerce storefront exclusively designed for organizations with subscription products with four different subscription models. 

This Salesforce B2B Subscription storefront is built to extend exclusive support for software organizations offering SaaS subscription-based pricing and promotions. It opens up the possibility of a seamless customer experience for business buyers with specific payment methods, pricing models, and billing cycles. 

Here’s what you can offer your buyers with the Salesforce B2B Commerce Subscription Storefront:

  1. Create a personalized experience with a custom storefront theme for a unique look and feel. 
  2. Browse and compare products, as the shopping cart can accommodate thousands of SKUs per order. 
  3. Custom product catalog for exclusive items or a selected subset of products. 
  4. Better management of subscriptions through multiple payment options like credit cards, purchase orders, and ACH. 
  5. Convert trial to buy. 
  6. Simple reordering with 2-click reorder. 
  7. Complex shipping functionality by allowing multiple delivery dates and locations. 
  8. Tax calculations are seamless.

Not only is the buyer’s journey made easy, it also collects and syncs key information needed by the buyer and rapidly converts leads into closed deals. 

Connectors

The Salesforce B2B Commerce Subscription Storefront comes with pre-built Connectors – frameworks that accelerate cross-cloud integration with an API to work with Salesforce objects. These connectors like the following facilitate the buyer to perform daily tasks seamlessly. 

  • Payment Gateway 

Salesforce Billing backs up various payment interfaces to process credit cards and ACH transactions. To accomplish this, it uses API integration to interface with a payment gateway. 

  • Tax Engine 

Salesforce Billing is embedded with tax integration. Salesforce Billing’s Standard Tax Engine provides a basic tax calculation engine for calculating simple tax use cases. 

  • Marketing Analytics 

The Salesforce connector helps buyers build marketing strategies around the entire customer journey. As it includes embedded Salesforce Einstein AI, Salesforce B2B Commerce improves decision-making with extensive reporting capabilities. 

  • Address Validations

Salesforce B2B Commerce ensures address validation by verifying at the entry point, providing for easy checkout, and giving you an extraordinary customer experience. 

  • Billing 

Salesforce B2B Commerce Billing picks up order records for invoicing, payment, and revenue recognition, making the entire billing cycle a very efficient one. 

  • ERP 

This connector allows you to send extensive customer data to your ERP for general ledger logging and financial reporting. 

Subscription Capabilities

Salesforce B2B Commerce software covers the needs of big companies and is best suited for middle and small-scale companies. 

There are some key considerations for ecommerce platforms like pricing, scalability, speed, ease of use, customization, and marketing tools. Here’s how Salesforce B2B eCommerce manages the full subscription lifecycle: 

  • Manages the entire subscription process and offers options for new/existing subscriptions.
  • Offers a trial subscription option for new users with a timed cancellation option.
  • Enables users to upgrade to higher plans or avail add-on items helping you in upsell and cross-sell conversions.
  • Renewal feature for easy renewal of subscriptions.
  • Proration capability handles an increase or decrease in subscription price when price changes during any period of a subscription.
  • Co-terming feature allows you to adjust subscriptions so that they are ready for renewal at the same time.
  • CSR flow allows service reps to log into the storefront as the user and see product and pricing entitlements.
  • With these footsteps and connectivity with the Salesforce.com platform, buyers can easily track day-to-day activities.

Key Features of Salesforce B2B Commerce Subscription Storefront

Salesforce B2B Commerce Subscription Storefront is a one-stop, end-to-end solution that caters to all needs required to flourish any B2B business that offers subscriptions. It is a feature-rich ecommerce platform that boosts customer experience across all channels like mobile, web, social, and store. 

  • Content Management 

Ability to adjust products, pricing, stock information, and other content to match supply and current situations. 

  • Intangible Products 

Offers functions specific to selling intangible products such as subscriptions, trials, perpetual licensing, downloads, etc. 

  • Easy Checkout Process 

Optimizes the user checkout experience by providing single click checkout, order summaries, and shopping cart features. Also, the shipping options allow users to select shipping based on price and delivery time. 

  • Digital Payment Processing 

Enables digital payment processing that includes various methods like credit cards, debit cards, wallets, PayPal, ACH, etc. All digital payments are secured by high-end data security protocols that offer protection against fraud and malicious attacks.

  • Multi-Channel Support 

Provides backing to B2B ecommerce growth via multi-channel support through mobile, social, web, point of sale, and catalog. It also allows customer service teams to interact with customers through phone and chat features. 

  • Third-Party Store Integration 

Salesforce tracks third-party store integration efficiently. It syncs your product catalog to major online retailers such as Amazon, eBay, etc., ensuring your footprint on the B2B ecommerce marketplace. 

  • Tailor-made B2B Commerce 

Salesforce B2B Commerce makes purchasing recommendations tailored to each customer in real-time. In the B2B space, trust and loyalty play a vital role and the guided buying experience ensures repetitive business and eventually, growth. 

  • Merchandising & Promotions

Salesforce B2B Commerce offers standard templates with an easy-to-use experience. The software displays product photos with a 3D view along with videos. Administrators can set up promotional activities on site, and offer time-based discounts and coupon codes. 

  • Cloud-First Approach 

Salesforce B2B Commerce Subscription Storefront embodies the cloud-first approach that leads the market in comparison to other B2B commerce products that are now reconsidering their solutions. 

Conclusion 

Embrace the power of cloud technology and grow your ecommerce business by selling subscription products – Our subscription experts at RafterOne can help you get the most of your Salesforce B2B commerce investment with seamless subscription capabilities. Get in touch with us to know more!