By Stephannie Estrada Zimic, Solution Consultant at Swan Technology Solutions
The Wine Community, StoreConnect and Salesforce
The Wine Community (TWC) has been transforming their business processes with Salesforce over the past five years, resulting in impressive sales growth. Recently, TWC took their e-commerce experience to the next level by integrating StoreConnect, a native Salesforce e-commerce solution. This integration has streamlined their sales process and provided a cohesive solution that promises even more growth. Let’s explore how this transformation unfolded.
Who is The Wine Community (TWC)?
The Wine Community (TWC) specialises in tailoring wine selections to match their customers’ preferences, creating a truly personalised experience. They offer wine tasting events, home tasting programmes, subscription services, and even the option to include tasting bottles with regular orders.
Challenges That Led to a Change
TWC had been using a specialised e-commerce platform alongside Salesforce. While they had already achieved a streamlined operation with Salesforce, utilising an on platform ERP for order and inventory management, accounting, and finance, they sought a more cohesive solution for their sales process. They needed an e-commerce platform that could directly integrate with Salesforce without the need for multiple plugins, ensuring efficiency and security.
What is StoreConnect?
StoreConnect is an e-commerce and point of sale solution built directly into Salesforce, making it an ideal choice for companies already using Salesforce. With StoreConnect, businesses can manage all customer data in a centralised system, maintaining the 360-degree view that Salesforce enforces. This centralisation ensures that team members across different departments can access the information they need to serve customers effectively.
Why StoreConnect?
During a meeting with TWC last year, we proposed a game-changing idea: what if TWC could manage their website directly from Salesforce, with every sale automatically creating an opportunity? This sparked immediate interest, leading us to develop a proof of concept showcasing StoreConnect’s transformative capabilities.
By integrating StoreConnect with Salesforce, we redesigned TWC’s web experience and configured their subscription products using standard Salesforce objects. The implementation was intuitive and efficient, with everything visible within the Salesforce interface.
Key Benefits of StoreConnect for TWC
- Subscriptions Without Plugins: StoreConnect understands that split payments or subscriptions are crucial for any e-commerce business. Therefore, subscription capabilities were built as a configuration on the standard ‘Product’ object in Salesforce, without the need for additional apps. This reduced both costs and potential security risks for TWC.
- Native Salesforce Integration: Unlike other e-commerce platforms that require plugins to integrate with Salesforce, StoreConnect is natively built into Salesforce. This native integration allowed TWC to utilise data seamlessly across Salesforce, making adoption easier for their team.
- On platform automation for Efficiency: TWC’s custom process synchronises on platform ERP Inventory items with the creation of Salesforce products. Whenever a subscription product is sold on the website, StoreConnect generates an order, and automations created by Swan smoothly transition to finance. This automation significantly simplified TWC’s sales process, enhancing efficiency and allowing the sales team to focus more on customer relationships.
- Flexible Integration with ERP: TWC’s subscription products are composed of bundles (e.g., a monthly subscription for a six-pack of Shiraz wine). StoreConnect usually relies on other Salesforce licenced applications for this feature but was flexible enough to allow us to adapt the ERP order and inventory package, tracking the bundle composition from master items. This workaround saved TWC a considerable amount of money and allowed for a quick and smooth integration.
- Time-Saving Direct Link to Cart: StoreConnect offers an innovative feature allowing customers to go directly to their cart with selected products and pre-filled information, ready to pay. We implemented a feature that auto-generates a direct cart link from the contact record, streamlining the purchasing experience and saving valuable time for TWC’s customers.
What’s Next for TWC?
With StoreConnect’s seamless integration and impressive flexibility, TWC is excited to extend this solution across their entire product range and fully adopt the StoreConnect platform. The future looks promising, as TWC’s e-commerce journey is set to grow organically alongside their business.
Interested in boosting your e-commerce sales like TWC? Contact us to learn more about how StoreConnect can transform your Salesforce experience.