New York City, NY. – Salesforce announced Monday that it is adding new tools to its Commerce Cloud platform to help companies create personalized “shopping experiences.”
The new tools will include artificial intelligence, visual search and inventory availability services that Salesforce stated in a press release will “empower brands to go beyond ecommerce sites and modernize every shopping experience, across apps, social networks, personal assistants and more.”
“Digital commerce no longer starts with just a shopping cart,” said Mike Micucci, CEO of commerce cloud at Salesforce in the release. “[Commerce Cloud will] meet customers wherever they are and deliver commerce everywhere through a platform full of AI-powered commerce services, APIs and a robust partner ecosystem.”
The new commerce cloud feature consists of APIs, services and developer tools that Salesforce claims will help create those experiences.
Salesforce’s Einstein AI will now allow for ‘visual search.’ This means that shoppers can snap a photo or screenshot of an item they might find online and then upload it to a company or brand’s platform to search for the specific or a similar item.
It displayed this new feature in a session at NRF on Sunday showing how a company like women’s clothing retailer Madewell can use the feature to help shoppers find items they might not know the name of.
Einstein is also getting recommendation APIs that Salesforce customers can integrate to their ecommerce site and will offer ‘intelligent’ recommendations for shoppers through mobile apps, online and other related channels.
Salesforce also announced a new inventory service platform that it says will allow companies “to activate in-store and fulfillment centre inventory across digital channels at massive scale and in real time.”
The developer tools include sandboxes, which are testing environments that can isolate untested code changes from the rest of a platform. According to the release, its “developer sandboxes can be spun up in minutes, improving productivity and giving developers more consistency within their test and deployment process.”
Its also offering a commerce API explorer to allow developers to design and test new experiences more efficiently and a new online learning resource for developers to learn about Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud platform.
Meagan Simpson’s travel and lodgings to cover NRF 2019 were paid for by Salesforce. Salesforce did not have an opportunity to review this content before publication.