Salesforce Integration

Maximize Business Potential while Keeping Costs Down

Want to provide your end-users with a personalized and individualized experience? Try integrating Salesforce with your existing eCommerce platform. It can deliver data into your eCommerce application in real-time. The integration also automates core processes and user interaction by intelligent pushing and pulling data from Salesforce to the platform, and vice versa.

A common challenge with this integration is that internal business users may not have adequate experience with it. They might not be aware of the optimal business logic, what areas to focus on, different user behaviors according to the industry, etc. So, they will not be able to optimize the user experience effectively. Once you have established and got to a point where you understand the requirements of your business, you can ensure the integrations are intelligent, scalable, and adaptive. Therefore, it is vital to determine the core business logic of your business and the entities and fields it may need to function correctly.

Achieve a Unique Implementation through Smart Rules and Logic

To determine what makes sense for your business and end-users, you must complete a detailed analysis. You must conduct this discovery process during both the sales review and during the initial project kickoff.

During this discovery, you will conduct comprehensive mapping and planning around the business and the kind of experience it must deliver to the end-users. It is a significant step in helping companies make the right choices and prioritize the right integrations. So, then the only thing left for the business is to focus on those critical areas for end users.

Once you have established all of that, the next step is making sure the platform can cater to the business logic even within the integration tasks. You must be able to modify the workflow on a task level, so the scheduling and data transformations occur in line with the overall business logic.

For this, it is essential to know how to access the full extent of Salesforce and an external eCommerce- from core entities and fields to custom ones. Therefore, we recommend working with a partner who has extensive experience working with the Salesforce API and existing platform’s web API framework. For Salesforce, you have the Salesforce lightning platform API, rest APIs, and bulk APIs. So, there are a few different options such as APIs for real-time data transfer for things like streaming. These are some of the things we recommend ensuring best practices when integrating an existing eCommerce and Salesforce.

Off The Shelf Integrations

With Salesforce, you get base level or off the shelf integrations. These typically include:

Customers and accounts
Categories and products
Product attributes, related products and associations, and kits
Sales, orders, invoices, and quotes
Shipments and shipment status
Payments and transaction
Refunds or replacements
Users and location data
Omnichannel data
Custom entities and fields

Within each of these entities, for example, customers and accounts, there can be unidirectional or bi-directional sync between Salesforce and eCommerce platforms. It depends on the needs of your business and what makes sense. Therefore, when you are looking for an integration platform, you need to see if it offers this along with the ability to customize off the shelf capabilities.

Bi-Directional Sync for the Purchasing Process

The Clarity Connect platform, for example, will push order data from Salesforce into your eCommerce platform. It can even process payment even if the order did not originate inside of the platform itself. Now when a user does order something within your platform, the integration will direct data back into Salesforce. This data typically includes:

Sales order invoice
Line item detail
Tax code classes, and taxes for the overall order
Any shipping and fee data, customs and duties, discounts
Payment transaction data
Split payments or split shipping information
Any replacements or refunds information

Ultimately, this makes it easier to manage and update shipment and status information once the data gets pushed from an eCommerce solution into Salesforce. Now, the Salesforce will have updates on fulfillment, status, shipment status, any payment processing holds or approvals, etc. In case of a request for replacement or refund, there may be updates/notes you may want to send back to the existing platform as part of the customer service.

Catalog System

It is also common to have a catalog system where Salesforce serves as a source of record. For here, the information is pushed into the external platform. A product catalog system generally includes categories, products, attributes, associations, product relationships, meta information, descriptions, variants, any customer fields, etc.

However, you may need to extend or enhance all the product data that is coming from Salesforce. So, the end-user is presented with detailed and enriched data. It will also make it easier for them to find what they are looking for when they browse through your eCommerce platform. Therefore, preserving the additional data in an external system is vital. So whenever there are any updates, only the new information is pulled in dynamically and no overwriting occurs.

User Records

You may also want to sync user records between Salesforce and the existing eCommerce solution. So, whenever a new user enters the website, they can register or can be linked with an existing account in Salesforce. Existing users would then be able to access certain products only available to that particular account, reorder, order replacement parts for a specific product, etc.

SalesForce to external eCommerce Integration Specialists

Ultimately, setting up robust core integrations between an existing eCommerce solution and Salesforce will allow you to scale over time as your business grows. So, you can continue to improve your offering to end-users, reduce costs, and increase your profitability as a business.

If you have any more questions related to this topic, we encourage you to reach out to our experienced team. The Clarity team has an amiable and knowledgeable sales and business development staff. They can provide a complimentary analysis. We certainly look forward to answering your questions and talking with you about your upcoming Salesforce integration project.

We also encourage you to go through the resources below. They have helpful information that covers other topics related to Salesforces integration, some of which can be helpful for your project. If there are topics that you do not see below, you are welcome to click on the ask the expert link. Our team will be happy to provide a technical response to any questions that you may have regarding those topics.