After the corona wave, the explosive growth of the mobile commerce industry is doubled. Global players of the eCommerce industry realized that mobile commerce, which is popularly named as mCommerce, is a way to success in the coming future. The concept of an omnipotent shopping experience planted the spotlight over mobile commerce. How online sellers approach customers, reap loyalty, and sell their products or services–all the rules are amended by the revolution in the eCommerce domain.
Intro to mCommerce
The way the businesses are operated is the main difference between mCommerce and eCommerce. Mobile commerce promises remarkable productivity, immense market potential, and increased profitability. It is making almost paperless office and required low resources to operate the office. Today customers cannot imagine a life without mCommerce as this technology is more convenient in their day-to-day lives.
Although the business world is witnessing the tremendous surge of mCommerce, it still has some downsides. To survive in this massive market with bottomless potentials, mCommerce industries need to face the challenges. Today, we will discuss mobile commerce’s challenges and how Salesforce SFRA gives answers to all our queries.
Significant Problems For Mobile Commerce
Hostile Conditions
The condition at which customers browse is constantly changing, so while developing a strategy for eCommerce, the business has to keep count on this fact. Ensure you provide a personalized experience in mobile commerce, especially important in sensitive regions of the service such as checkout. The mCommerce apps and services need to cater to these unstable conditions, and not delivering a solution based on the requirements can work against you.
Small Visuals
The limited space in the mobile app forces eCommerce retailers to create smaller images, smaller text to adjust all details so that the customers can get all information regarding the product. To make sure that they are delivering an equally satisfactory experience in their mobile commerce services as in eCommerce, businesses need to do additional research and learn to cope with small screens.
Payment Troubles
The apparent outcome of a tiny keyboard is errors in typing. It is harder for people to type the credit card number and other details, so the customers remained concerned about their security. The risk of data theft and misuse of payment cards for fraudulent transactions increases as mobile devices are more prone to get stolen or misplaced.
Development of Mobile Devices
To get a competitive advantage, mobile device manufacturers constantly attempt to come out with innovative smartphones. So, online sellers have to keep on upgrading their software and fulfill the customer requirements. It is quite a big challenge to stay alert round the clock, 365 days, and ensure that their services do not fall behind in the eCommerce industry.
The Quandary in Mobile Apps and Responsive Website
Choosing between mobile apps and responsive websites is the common dilemma often faced by eCommerce businesses. Although both the options have their own merits and demerits, many companies build a responsive website first since creating a mobile app is considered a more expensive option.
Streamlining the Buying Experience
Mobile Commerce is a highly crowded market where dozens of mobile-friendly websites sell the same products as you do. With the continuously changing trends, you need to focus on streamlining the buying experience. It has become quite tricky to beat the giants and other competitors by offering discounts and coupons, becoming a boring option and the prices of the products being similar.
Why SFRA a solution to the mCommerce challenges?
With the introduction of Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA), Salesforce Commerce Cloud Architecture and development has undergone a significant transformation. While mobile-first sites have become a necessity SFRA, a user experience framework provides a best-practice architecture that refers to the storefront owners when building pages on the Commerce Cloud platform. SFRA provides the blueprint of the site design and is more than just a codebase.
What is Salesforce Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA)?
The main concept of SFRA is connecting digital platform and storefront through an API layer. This allows brands to integrate with third-party providers, bring in new code, and progressively iterate the onsite design.
To build and customize your storefront site, SFRA is Salesforce’s new approach. It provides an entire library of core site capabilities including cart, checkout, homepage, product detail pages, and more. It helps you to give your shoppers an incredible experience. It enables a flexible deployment with decoupled layers of commerce services, scalability to pivot quickly, and the speed to make accelerated updates. And what lies at the core of headless commerce are APIs and API-led connectivity. It uses a conventional Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture and sits outside of the platform API layer. Maintain and update your storefront easily with the SFRA customization model.
Let's Know a bit about Storefront Reference Architecture
Starting from merchandising, site blueprint, and technical architecture, the Storefront Reference Architecture issues a mix of premier practices from domains.
JavaScript controller is used in Commerce Cloud SFRA. Controllers handle the storefront requests as in B2C commerce, they are server-side scripts. To process each storefront request, they create models and generate an appropriate response by managing the application’s flow of control.
A cartridge contains code or data, and developers are only free to develop functionality on top of the core code as it is not available for edit. This means, features such as wish list, Apple Pay, and payment integrations can be built, and developers can independently plug them into the storefront. For continuous, iterative, and evolutionary site design, this architecture allows for a lightweight and cleaner codebase. The implementation of SFRA makes it easy to maintain and update each cartridge’s contents by merchant customization and segment B2C Commerce delivered code and third-party integration code into discrete cartridges.
Key benefits of implementing SFRA
- Developers are empowered to design pixel-perfect sites and extend the SFRA codebase to create unique web experiences meticulously.
- It is an evolution of the old Demandware Site Genesis (1.0 and 2.0) programs. It can use third-party elements, APIs, and prebuilt widgets/integrations with data objects.
- Responsive mobile-first design based on screen size
- Provides layout based on a predefined set of viewport sizes and other characteristics
- Uses the popular Bootstrap front-end component UI library
- Build the entire app with its Sass variables, extensive prebuilt components, responsive grid system, and powerful plugins built on jQuery.
- To increase conversion, SFRA provides a complete and intelligently designed storefront built.
- Leverages JavaScript controllers, Bootstrap 4 development framework
- With prebuilt integrations from a trusted network of technology providers and an enhanced set of mobile APIs, extend core functionality.
- Build a mobile-first site based on the mobile design with site design consultations and accelerators offered through the Commerce Cloud practice team
SFRA is not targeted as a tool to improve page load speeds but to alleviate site development needs for front-end changes. However, SFRA improves perceived mobile load speeds and server-side load times because the integrations still introduce third-party technologies and scripts to the page. SFRA performs faster than custom built-integrations as it contains several pre-connected integrations with the SFCC backend.
How the implementation of SFRA solve mCommerce challenges for the retailers?
Without going through many hassles, Commerce Cloud SFRA can provide a complete, highly customized, scalable, and fully functional online storefront. To provide a seamless shopping experience to their online customers, Organizations purchase this eCommerce solution.
Retailers are looking for an architecture that supports and creates their online storefront as unique as their brand. Salesforce Commerce Cloud has come up with the Storefront Reference Architecture with a basic framework. SFRA provides a smooth and enjoyable shopping experience across all devices as this framework is responsive to any screen size.
Conclusion
SFRA is considered a game-changer in the retail industry. SFRA framework has greater extensibility and adaptability for future upgrades and the improved user experience and redesigned front-end. Let’s see one use case.
PUMA, the iconic sportswear company, saw a boom in its conversion rate by 50 percent after redesigning and relaunched its websites using the SFRA framework. To create an incredible shopping experience, PUMA focused on site speed, navigation, usability, content. Implementation of SFRA increases their efficiency as the mobile sites fully loaded 65% faster and quickly released updates.
Thus, moving to SFRA, brands will offer these benefits to customers at lower cost and time and ensure an ideal, hassle-free shopping and checkout experience across devices. Please get in touch with ETG, and we’ll let you know how fast you can adapt to the new present!
About ETG Digital
ETG is a Crest Level Salesforce Partner headquartered in Plano, Texas. We are ISO 9001:2015 certified company with a global delivery center in Hyderabad, India. We have dedicated teams of professionals spanning continents located in US, Canada, UAE, UK, Australia and India. Our ability to maintain talent hubs in multiple locations and working on projects for clients from various domains gives us a very unique advantage. An advantage to leverage proven technologies like Salesforce Commerce, Sales, Service, Partner and Marketing Clouds and using them to deliver tailor made solutions for clients to suit their business requirements.
If you are looking to take your business into the next league, you are at the right place. Connect with us at info@etg.digital or call us at +1 469 666 1119
