Alibaba Cloud and Salesforce announce plan to launch Salesforce Social Commerce

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Alibaba Cloud and Salesforce announce plan to launch Salesforce Social Commerce.

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence back bone of Alibaba Group and Salesforce, the CRM solutions provider, have announced they are working toward an agreement to launch Salesforce Social Commerce, a headless commerce product being designed and built in China to help multinational brands succeed in the region.

Salesforce Social Commerce is intended to help businesses unify data across their Chinese storefronts and offer integrations with key local systems. Salesforce Social Commerce is designed to be hosted in China on Alibaba Cloud, one of the world's top three cloud providers and the largest in APAC.

“This is a planned part of the partnership between two global technology leaders to bring Salesforce’s trusted products to mainland China. Once launched, this localised commerce solution will help brands meet the unique needs of the Chinese market while providing consistency with global Salesforce products. The partnership is designed to ensure that customers of Salesforce that have operations in mainland Chinawill have access to a locally-hosted version of Salesforce from Alibaba Cloud, which understands local business and culture,” said Lancelot Guo, VP of Alibaba Group, and President, Ecosystem and Sales Operations, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. 

Solving Key Challenges Global Customers Face in the Region

As the world’s largest online retail market, China is key for many multinational companies. Yet, brands face many challenges while operating in the region such as performance, data residency, and difficulty integrating with local Chinese platforms.

Salesforce Social Commerce is designed to provide a solution, transforming the way companies do business in the region. 

At launch, Salesforce Social Commerce will support e-commerce across China-specific channels, including Chinese websites and social network mini programs. It will feature integrations into key digital commerce systems such as customers’ order management systems (OMS), product information management systems (PIM), shipping providers, and more. It will also support local payments systems such as Alipay as standard payment processing. The product is being built with an API-first methodology which will allow the product to scale with customers’ needs in the market.

“Together with Alibaba Cloud, we plan for Salesforce Social Commerce to offer a new, localised product that will enable companies to manage and unify their first-party commerce experiences, from websites to social applications, to gain a 360 view of their customers,” said Ryan Aytay, Chief Business Officer at Salesforce. “We are committed to helping multinational customers succeed in China, and are energised to bring more products to the market together in partnership with Alibaba Cloud in the near future.”  

As China’s ecommerce market continues to evolve quickly, Salesforce and Alibaba Cloud intend to regularly deliver new features and integrations for Salesforce Social Commerce -- arming customers with the tools needed to stay on top of market trends.

Salesforce Social Commerce is intended to be the first product brought to market as part of the Salesforce and Alibaba Cloud strategic partnership. It is being designed to complement additional Salesforce products that may be brought to market.

Availability

Salesforce Social Commerce is intended to be built and hosted on Alibaba Cloud, distributed solely by Alibaba Cloud, and to be available only in mainland China. The product is anticipated to be generally available later this year.