California Apparel News

NEW YORK—During the National Retail Federation’s NRF 2019: Retail’s Big Show,held at the Javits Center in Manhattan Jan. 13–15, San Francisco’s CRM-focused software provider Salesforce took the opportunity to unveil new offerings. With enhancements to its Commerce Cloud platform, the company is optimizing the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI).

By easing the shopping process for consumers, Salesforce is helping retailers bring their products to the forefront of shoppers’ minds. Through expanding the capabilities of Commerce Cloud, the company is introducing new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), platform services and developer tools to help retailers remain competitive, according to Michele Davolos, Salesforce’s director of product marketing for Commerce Cloud.

“Einstein Visual Search is the ability to snap a picture and search by that picture in a merchant’s storefront,” she said. “If you see a style that you don’t know how to describe in words, such as skinny jeans or a tote bag that has multiple dimensions to the color or pattern, now you can search by picture at a brand or retailer’s storefront using our artificial intelligence.”

The platform also offers the Einstein Recommendations API, which relies on artificial intelligence to help brands anticipate the items that will interest customers based on product data, order history and live customer clickstream.

“We’re seeing that our AI product recommendations are driving 26 percent of revenue on our brands and retailers’ storefronts,” Davolos revealed. “Now we’re opening that up as an API, so you can embed that into other channels.”

Through the platform’s Inventory Availability Service, shoppers are able to view availability of products, allowing them to easily find the goods they want within their region.

“When some products drop, we can see spikes in traffic and transactions on a brand or retailer’s website,” Davolos said. “Through our new Inventory Availability Service, we’ll prevent things like oversell or missing a sale. We’re doing that at millions of requests per minute across incredible scale. Over this past holiday season, we saw 690 million unique monthly shoppers.”

By blending the capabilities of the recommendation and inventory APIs, Salesforce also allows brands to notify shoppers when they are within the vicinity of a product they might want.

“If you’re in an Uber or on Instagram—any channel that is location aware—you can surface location-based product recommendations to help you get to products that are near you for that same-day gratification,” Davolos explained.

The API enhancements to Commerce Cloud also include methods for developers at apparel brands and retailers to build commerce offerings that are unique to the experiences of their particular customers. Through On-Demand Developer Sandboxes, Open Commerce API (OCAPI) Explorer and Commerce Cloud Developer, Salesforce is providing brands with the freedom to tailor the platform to meet their needs.

“It’s about the power of the platform,” Davolos said. “We’re helping merchants of all sizes access all these capabilities that are helping you deliver AI-powered shopping experiences at the speed of consumer expectations.”