Salesforce Rebrands Demandware

Salesforce is reacting to a competitive market and pursing aggressive acquisitions, according to Bloomberg. The company announced a new product on Tuesday (Sept. 27), based on its recent acquisition of Demandware, which provides customer tracking for retailers to improve the online shopping experience for consumers. The service uses Demandware’s software to manage eCommerce with artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and it also supports Apple’s mobile payments system.

According to Shelley Bransten, Salesforce’s senior vice president of retail and consumer products, the integration of Apple Pay will be good news to online sellers who “increasingly see customers abandon the sale at checkout when they have to enter payment.”

The eCommerce technology CRM space is becoming increasingly crowded, and companies are scrambling to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning with Big Data.

Stephanie Buscemi, executive vice president of product and solutions marketing for Salesforce, said: “It really enables us to deliver that end-to-end story. Now, we’re able to have this unified commerce experience.”

CEO Marc Benioff is investing in new products and acquisitions to compete with giants, such as Oracle and Microsoft. Salesforce is also considering a bid for Twitter. Fortune reported that Salesforce’s research shows that eCommerce growth comes solely from the increasing use of mobile devices, which provide vast amounts of consumer data.

Salesforce has also incorporated artificial intelligence features into the Commerce Cloud Einstein edition, which should provide information on which consumers are ready to make a purchase versus those who may still be browsing.

This new offering complements Salesforce’s existing products as part of the company’s overarching goal to trace a customer’s whole shopping cycle from researching to buying to customer support. Bransten did not address any rumored partnerships with Adobe, which uses its own marketing software, and Microsoft, which offers sales tracking software.