How to deliver Amazon-like (conversational?!) eCommerce with Salesforce
B2B eCommerce portals for self-service ordering struggle with customer-specific pricing and real-time inventory. Customers struggle to find products in extensive catalogs from manufacturers or distributors. There is neither guidance nor Amazon-style suggestions for recommended accessories and required add-ons.
Salesforce can simplify the ordering experience to a conversational interface. Agentic AI can act as an intelligent “shopping assistant”. But there are no clear blueprints for getting started.
Self-service ordering vs. the “helpful” store associate
Picture a customer walking into a hardware store and asking for a specific faucet. A store associate (hopefully!) wouldn’t just hand them a 200-page catalog and walk away?
Ideally:
- The associate would ask a couple of questions to help identify the right faucet.
- They could do a quick barcode scan to confirm in-store availability.
- Finally, they might recommend the supportive hardware needed — saving the customer an extra trip to the store later.
The proactive guidance helps earn their gratitude and loyalty along the way.
The digital experience of this conversation—offered by manufacturers and distributors today—is a stark contrast due to technological challenges.
No inventory visibility
Syncing product catalogs, pricing and inventory from ERP and back-office systems is a complex systems integration project. Typical integration projects take 6–8 months to complete (with luck!). Expensive middleware apps need special skills for setup and ongoing maintenance of integrations. This makes it tedious to offer real-time visibility to buyers.
A Product Catalog is not a Shopping Assistant
Modern configurators, offering wizard-style guided quoting / buying experiences are not the norm. Customers struggle with outdated search tools. They navigate long catalogs, which can be frustrating. Without knowing product families or SKU categories, it’s hard for them to find what they want. The B2B eCommerce world lags far behind modern consumer experiences, such as Amazon’s product recommendations for frequently ordered-together items.
Maintaining customer-specific pricing is a pain
Legacy ERPs and CRMs have rigid pricebook structures. This makes it difficult to automatically apply customer or agency-specific pricing for self-service orders. Distributors worry about inadvertently exposing differentiated pricing information with the wrong audiences.
Bringing back the old-school “conversation”
Agentic AI offers an opportunity to go back – back to a friendly chat! Manufacturers can improve customer experience by replacing their legacy UI instead of just simplifying it. The digital equivalent of a simple conversation with a store associate is possible again!
A “buying assistant” that proactively guides – and listens!
No search boxes. No dropdown – or dozens of filters. Just plain natural English language prompts.
- The customer asks for what they are looking for in layman’s terms. The customer is suddenly accompanied by a helpful “intelligent” assistant, surfacing products efficiently, recommending add-ons and proactive suggestions for personalized context-aware cross-selling.
- Real-time inventory and lead times are instantly fetched from the ERP – or whatever back-office silos it resides in – without IT teams losing their hair to integration, ETL and data sync overhead!
- When a quote is requested for, the “assistant” can quickly check the customer’s pricing contract. Then, they apply exclusive pricing and pre-approved discounts to the shopping cart. A PDF quote is generated instantly and presented.
- Upon customer approval, an order is typed up and sent to the ERP. If needed, an invoice is generated, digital payment is collected, and payment receipt and order confirmation are issued with expected shipment dates.
ALL in a single conversation!
Customer Experience: Quote-to-Cart-to-Cash (re-imagined?!)
- No SKU-hunting. The customers don’t know internal SKU trees and product catalog structures – nor do they need to!
- It feels human. Natural language chat replaces endless catalog browsing and navigating menus.
- Nothing to learn. No “onboarding” friction. No user training. Everyone knows how to chat!
The No-Code Recipe: Faster, Cheaper, Better
Salesforce’s new usage-based licensing models boost affordability. This helps SMBs and mid-market businesses start using Agentic AI at a low cost. No-code, ‘point-and-click’ tools let you design portals and connect to ERP systems easily. You can complete projects in days, not weeks or months, with little setup effort.
This B2B self-service ordering portal (shown in this 2-minute demo) was put together in 5 days using these licensed components:
- Salesforce Experience Cloud, for the pre-built eCommerce portal experience. We suggest starting with a small shared pool of monthly logins. This way, you can begin without a big upfront licensing cost.
- Salesforce Revenue Cloud, for out-of-the-box catalog management and scalable maintenance of customer-specific pricing terms. Specialized licenses for Experience Cloud portals allow an easy start (you won’t be facing high licensing costs!).
- Salesforce Agentforce, for conversational product selection, configuration and pricing with proactive guidance and AI-driven recommendations. Usage-based licensing enables an affordable pay-for-what-you-need licensing strategy.
- AgentJunction from CloudJunction, for quick, no-code agentic integrations with ERP and inventory systems. This allows real-time visibility into inventory and lead times using a zero-copy architecture, and even includes built-in digital payment processing.
See it in Action!
This 2-minute demo shows how a customer or sales agent can start a conversation with a manufacturer’s or distributor’s AI agent. They can go from searching for a product to confirming and paying for their order, all in a single chat window.
Try it in your Sandbox
Contact CloudJunction to get a free proof-of-concept deployment in your Sandbox. You’ll also receive courtesy licenses from Salesforce.
