Salesforce integrates ‘buy’ button into community sites
Tue 18 Aug 2015
Cloud software company Salesforce.com has decided to allow the companies that are its customers to integrate a ‘buy’ button into their sites that might be used for customer support, feedback, or information about that company and its products. This would simplify things, on the reasoning that if a company’s potential customers are already on a particular site which has to do with their products, then why not make it possible for them to purchase one of the products right there and then, simply with a click?
Salesforce joins the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest in this area, all of them having included a similar function in the last year. However, whereas this capability has only previously been available to retailers, Salesforce will also make it possible for other kinds of companies to do so.
According to Salesforce Community Cloud’s senior vice president of marketing, Mike Stone: “This makes things more frictionless”. He added: “Most businesses have separate community and commerce sites. Normally, combining the two would require a significant engineering effort.”
Salesforce will roll out the ‘buy’ button using their ‘Lightning Components’, which allow for the quick addition of new features, without the need for them to be created and managed by a software developer.
The feature will be included in the upcoming winter 2016 update to Salesforce Community Cloud. However, initially, it will only be available to those companies that are paying users of one of Salesforce’s three chosen partners, DemandWare, CloudCraze, and Bigcommerce.
With e-commerce becoming increasingly integrated into other things, are we headed for a dystopian future where literally everything is commercialised? Hopefully not, since in the realm of social media at least, the companies that treat people cynically as nothing more than potential customers are often shunned, in favour of those which engage more respectfully and humanly with people. That should be a guiding principle as e-commerce progresses, with the likes of ‘buy’ buttons being seen as providing simplicity (and thus enhancing customer service), rather than as monetisation per se.
