As a trusted Salesforce Gold Consulting Partner, and Salesforce.org Registered Partner, AFDigital helps their clients modernise by delivering Salesforce® multi-cloud projects and managed services across Sales, Service, Community and Marketing Cloud. They build smarter customer journeys through agile transformation, scalable managed operations, and technology services.

Problems:

AFDigital were looking to streamline how they sell consulting services to their customers, simplifying what can be an involved process. The goal was an online store that allows a customer to choose exactly what they need and pay for it online.

AFDigital had several requirements when researching the ideal eCommerce platform. It needed to:

1. 100% integration with their Salesforce CRM.
2. Allow AFDigital to sell their services to customers.
3. Receive direct, or credit card installments and subscription payments.

Cost effective and easy to install

Another key factor in moving forward with storeConnect® was the price comparison. The cost of the annual storeConnect subscription was less than the expected integration and maintenance costs with a platform like Shopify.

Robin Leonard, CEO & Co-Founder says, ‘I have personally done our storeConnect installation myself with no technical support. I’m not a developer and have minimal website building experience. In just a day I was able to go live with a fully functioning eCommerce website by editing content and uploading media myself, all within Salesforce CRM.’

‘My advice would be to explore a solution like storeConnect that isn’t expensive, doesn’t require integration solutions with Salesforce, and where the learning curve is negligible for a Salesforce user.’

Choosing the right eCommerce solution

AFDigital started their eCommerce journey by setting up a prototype in Shopify. This served as a proof of concept for internal alignment and to gain board agreement. It took a day to set up the store and show it to various stakeholders. However, the downsides were evident from the start. The Shopify site required several plugins in order to tailor the store to AFDigital’s needs.

And they soon found out the effort required to keep Salesforce + Shopify + plugins in sync was daunting.

Benefits of storeConnect eCommerce:

After finding storeConnect eCommerce, Robin found it to be the perfect solution for AFDigital’s business needs, with the added bonus of it being easy to implement and maintain.

storeConnect offers a powerful, fully customised, fully integrated, affordable Salesforce eCommerce solution built on the Salesforce Heroku platform. It allows companies to build, deliver, monitor and scale an affordable eCommerce solution that is fully managed within Salesforce (i.e. no separate interface to learn or manage) and instantly synchronises all information to a Salesforce org.

“With storeConnect I didn’t need to consider any integration costs, nor did we need to install 3rd party plugins to meet specific requirements. It was simple to set up, required no development skills and we were able to go live rapidly.

“The only maintenance required is ongoing content optimisation, allowing our business to focus on what matters, not the tech behind it.

“Also a huge amount of time has been saved by not having to duplicate our product catalog from Salesforce Products to our eCommerce system. This would have cost a lot to keep these in sync manually.” , says Robin.

The growth of eCommerce across all sectors

Now, more than ever, companies have to be able to fully engage with their customers online and this is not limited to the retail market.

“Almost all industries and organisations will at some stage need to provide an eCommerce solution to their customers, even if your competitors are not yet providing similar services and it isn’t the norm for your industry. eCommerce is about removing friction from the customer purchase process. They may pay by cheque or bank deposit today, but in the future they will want to pay electronically, and be fully mobile. eCommerce is simply a self-service sales agent that enables a more modern “contactless” transaction.” says Robin.