How to achieve Business Intelligence on Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Here are several ways to achieve business intelligence (BI) on Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) and gain valuable insights to optimize your e-commerce operations:

Utilizing Built-in Reporting and Analytics:

• SFCC Business Manager: This built-in tool offers pre-built dashboards and reports for key metrics like sales performance, customer behavior, and product trends. You can filter and customize reports to gain insights into specific areas.
• Einstein Analytics for Commerce: (Note: This feature might be in pilot or limited availability) This advanced analytics solution provides pre-built dashboards and allows creating custom reports with deeper insights. It leverages machine learning for predictive analytics and recommendations.

Leveraging Third-party Integration:

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integration: Integrate SFCC with Salesforce Marketing Cloud to gain a unified view of your marketing efforts and their impact on e-commerce performance. Analyze campaign performance, customer segmentation, and personalized marketing effectiveness.
• Business Intelligence (BI) Tools: Connect SFCC with external BI tools like Tableau, Domo, or Looker. These tools offer advanced visualization capabilities and the ability to combine data from SFCC with other sources for a holistic view of your business.

Data Export and Analysis:

• Data Export Service (DES): SFCC allows exporting data to external platforms for further analysis. You can export data on products, orders, customers, and more. Use this data in conjunction with BI tools or spreadsheets to uncover trends and patterns.
• Custom Reporting: For specific needs, consider developing custom reports using SFCC APIs or third-party tools. This allows for tailored reporting on unique business metrics beyond pre-built options.

Here's a breakdown of when to consider each approach:

• Built-in Reporting and Analytics: Ideal for getting started with basic insights on key e-commerce metrics. Easy to use and readily available within SFCC.
• Third-party Integration: Useful for advanced analytics, custom reporting needs, and gaining a broader business perspective by combining data from various sources.
• Data Export and Analysis: Suitable for in-depth analysis using specialized BI tools or custom reports requiring data manipulation beyond SFCC's built-in capabilities.

Additional Tips for Achieving BI Success:

• Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Identify the metrics that matter most for your business goals. This will guide your data collection and reporting efforts.
• Clean and Consistent Data: Ensure data accuracy and consistency across all sources to avoid misleading insights.
• Regular Reporting and Analysis: Schedule regular reporting to monitor trends and identify areas for improvement.
• Data Governance: Establish clear data governance policies to ensure data quality and accessibility for BI initiatives.

By using a combination of these strategies and focusing on your specific business needs, you can leverage SFCC to gain valuable business intelligence and make data-driven decisions to optimize your e-commerce operations for success.

You can leverage the various dashboards and reporting tools available within the platform. Here are the key steps and tools you can use:

1. Sales Dashboard

The Sales Dashboard in Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides a comprehensive view of key sales metrics, which include:

• Total and average revenue
• Order counts
• Units sold
• Average order value
• Units per transaction
• Tax collected
• Shipping costs

Accessing the Sales Dashboard:

1. Open Business Manager.
2. Navigate to Merchant Tools > Analytics > Reports and Dashboards.
3. Click the Home tab.
4. Select the Sales Dashboard.

Features:

• Date Range Filtering: Allows you to filter metrics by specific date ranges to analyze the impact of promotions or campaigns.
• Customer Segmentation: Distinguishes between new and returning customers, and registered versus unregistered customers.
• Data Export: Supports downloading reports as CSV files for offline analysis, with up to 1,000 rows of detailed data.

2. Reports & Dashboards App

The Reports & Dashboards app offers advanced analytics and reporting features, enabling you to gain insights into various aspects such as revenue, top-selling products, promotion profitability, and more.

Key Benefits:

• Real-Time Data Updates: Provides a comprehensive view across different digital channels, customer types, and devices.
• Enhanced Analytics: Track daily revenue, review Einstein Recommendations, identify top-selling SKUs, analyze promotion performance, and view technical metrics.
• User Access Management: Managed through Account Manager administrator credentials, with site-specific access available upon request.

3. Additional Dashboards

• Search Conversion Dashboard: Reflects how customer searches translate to orders and revenue.
• Traffic Dashboard: Shows data about the visitors to your site.
• Shopper Journey Dashboard: Evaluates how shoppers move from site visit to order conversion.
• Einstein Dashboard: Reviews the performance of Einstein recommendations.
• Inventory Dashboard: Tracks inventory movement by SKU.
• Technical Dashboards: Provides insights into server-side technical operations, OCAPI requests, and SCAPI requests.

4. Analytics Reporting Integration

Salesforce B2C Commerce records storefront events to provide robust analytics. For SFRA (Storefront Reference Architecture), you can integrate analytics by constructing URL patterns using helper methods in the reportingUrls.js module.

Example:

const reportingUrls = require('*/cartridge/scripts/reportingUrls');
const reportingURLs = reportingUrls.getReportingURLs();
pdict.reportingURLs = reportingURLs;
        

5. Product Insights

Analyze aspects of product performance using the Products Dashboard, which includes:

• Top Selling Products
• Movers & Shakers
• Co-Buy Frequency
• Average Selling Price

6. Search Analytics

Monitor and analyze search results to uncover emerging market trends and determine the success of promotions or marketing campaigns.

Accessing Search Analytics:

1. Navigate to Merchant Tools > site > Analytics > Reports & Dashboards.
2. Select the On-Site Search tab.

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