6 Ways to Build Great Ecommerce Experiences (With Examples)

Convenient. Personalized. Intuitive. Simple. That’s what customers expect out of ecommerce experiences. When shoppers land on your site, they want to find what they’re looking for quickly (or enjoy the browsing experience if they aren’t searching for something specific). They want personalized, relevant recommendations and offers, and a payment process that feels effortless. That’s a tall order for the teams in charge of building and optimizing your ecommerce site — but the right strategies can help.

Here’s how to build great ecommerce experiences that will increase conversions and revenue.

1. Personalize your pages

The best ecommerce experiences are personalized. Each page on your site should be dynamic: The content, offers, and products your shoppers see should depend on who they are and what they like. When you tailor pages to meet specific needs of different audience segments, you can increase engagement, conversions, and loyalty.

Create precise customer segments, predict their needs, tailor ecommerce content, surface recommendations and promotions, and so much more. Your customers get a more enjoyable experience; you get more loyalty and an increase in average order value. 

🛒 How to do it with Commerce Cloud:

Commerce Cloud makes it easy to personalize content experiences, promotions, products, and more by using data streams. A data stream is any and every bit of information that’s funneled into Salesforce from around your business. This includes behavioral events like every click, search, add-to-cart, and more. Commerce Cloud’s intuitive consoles make it easy to see all of these data points and attributes, and use them to create customer segments. Once you make a segment, you can use drag-and-drop tools to build personalized experiences (like the hero banner below). Now, you can ensure that every interaction is contextually relevant and engaging. 

2. Provide relevant product recommendations

You wouldn’t suggest candy bars and ultra-processed snacks to a shopper that only buys health food. But even health food shoppers have nuanced tastes and preferences. The more granular and specific you can get with your product recommendations, the better. This makes customers feel like you understand their needs and habits, and helps build trust and loyalty. And, of course, it increases average order value, conversions, and revenue. Cha-ching! 

AI-powered product recommendations make every shopping experience better. That’s because AI can analyze large amounts of customer data — including browsing history, purchase patterns, and product affinities. It knows what your customers love, and delivers personalized and relevant recommendations at the right time.

🛒 How to do it with Commerce Cloud:

Commerce Cloud comes with out-of-the-box AI tools that are intuitive and easy to use. For example, you can simply turn on Einstein AI to aggregate and analyze browsing behavior and purchase history across all of your customers — at both the individual and store level. This allows your merchandisers and marketers to quickly uncover buying patterns and trends. Then, merchants can use drag-and-drop front-end tools to create recommendations that feature specific product parameters, like “top-selling”, “personalized for shopper”, and “recently viewed”.

Einstein AI also continuously learns and adapts to changing customer behaviors and preferences, so you can rely on it to provide fresh and fitting product recommendations. This real-time optimization maximizes the potential for cross-selling and upselling, turning casual browsers into engaged shoppers and driving revenue.

3. Optimize product discovery

Shopping online is all about one thing: Narrowing down your options until you find what you want. Seems simple, right? Ecommerce experiences that feel intuitive and make product discovery easy are actually powered by an intricate, complex set of filters, sorting rules, recommendation engines, and other processes that make the entire production seem effortless.

Sorts, filters, and boost and bury are essential tools in ecommerce merchandising. This is how businesses create and optimize product listings, and how customers find exactly what they’re looking for. 

• Sorts organize products based on specific criteria, such as price, popularity, newness, or customer ratings. 
• Filters empower customers to refine product listings in multiple ways, like by category, brand, size, color, or price range.
• Boost and bury is a technique that can influence product visibility. Merchandisers can boost high-margin, trending, or overstocked items, or “bury” low-margin, slow-moving, or out-of-stock items depending on business needs.

🛒 How to do it with Commerce Cloud:

Commerce Cloud gives merchants rich tools to curate their product merchandising mix and manage your site’s search index. With Commerce Cloud, your search index will update automatically and continually rerun itself. This ensures that your shoppers’ queries always return results that are up-to-date and accurate. Want to add more fields to a product search? At any time, you can add any value from product records to your search index. This allows customers to find your products as quickly and easily as possible. 

4. Offer product bundles and sets

Most shoppers want two things: convenience and discounts. With product bundles, you can give them both simultaneously. Product bundles group associated, relevant items together, often at a discounted price. With this approach, you can provide value to customers by simplifying the shopping journey and helping them save. Even better? Product bundles help you increase conversions and average order value.

🛒 How to do it with Commerce Cloud:

Commerce Cloud makes it easy to create bundles and sets — in just a few clicks — that increase average order value and customer satisfaction. Simply select a product to serve as your bundle “parent”. Then, choose features from your parent product’s related list.

5. Simplify checkout

Checkout is a critical part of the ecommerce experience. It’s the moment you turn a casual browser into a paying customer — and if you do it well, it’s also an opportunity to build trust and loyalty. Successful checkout is a simple checkout: Customers can pay with the method they’re most comfortable with, the steps aren’t arduous or intensive, and the entire process feels safe and secure. If you get these aspects right, customers will keep coming back. 

🛒 How to do it with Commerce Cloud:

Your ecommerce platform should support a wide range of payment gateways and options, so you can offer customers their preferred methods — from credit cards and digital wallets to buy-now-pay-later services. Setting up checkout with Commerce Cloud is easy thanks to its intuitive platform and features — all designed to streamline the ecommerce experience. You can configure a seamless checkout process in a few clicks that minimizes friction and boosts conversions. You can easily enable fast checkout options with elements like saved payment methods and one-click purchasing to reduce the time it takes for customers to complete their transactions.

6. Streamline order management

The ecommerce experience doesn’t end at the Buy button. After your customer makes a purchase, they still have expectations from your brand. Shoppers want to know when to expect delivery, be able to track their orders, and if they want to return a product, they want that to be easy, too. Effective order management is how you ensure a seamless and efficient experience from checkout to delivery. Simplifying elements like routing and inventory help businesses gain value fast and gain a competitive edge.

🛒 How to do it with Commerce Cloud:

With Commerce Cloud, Intelligent order routing directs each order to the best fulfillment location based on factors like inventory levels, proximity to the customer, and shipping costs. Real-time inventory tracking and synchronization across channels prevents stockouts and overselling.