The Total Economic Impact™ Of Salesforce Commerce Cloud Composable Storefront

Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By Composable Storefront

A Forrester Total Economic Impact Study Commissioned By Salesforce, February 2024

Retailers need to create commerce sites that are fast, flexible, and adaptable to changing consumer preferences. Salesforce Commerce Cloud Composable Storefront decouples the front- and back-ends of e-commerce solutions, creating a more modular and scalable architecture. This allows developers to operate more effectively and offers digital teams and shoppers improved storefront performance. The Composable Storefront gives retailers a headless front-end and the ability to deliver consistent experiences across different channels and devices, create sites that drive better conversion, and reduce technical debt.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud Composable Storefront supports organizations that want to improve their digital experiences and create a headless digital storefront. Composable Storefront enables developers to innovate, experiment, and create experiences that drive higher conversion. Composable Storefront uses progressive web application (PWA) architecture for a flexible and efficient front-end that decouples the customer-facing presentation layer from the backend e-commerce functionalities. Decoupling these layers enables organizations with choice to independently select best-in-breed vendors for creating the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) across various digital touchpoints or leverage native Commerce Cloud capabilities. Composable Storefront is the newest B2C storefront framework offering, improving on previous SiteGenesis and Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) front ends. Organizations can leverage any Commerce Cloud storefront independently or blend multiple storefronts together in a single site using a hybrid methodology. There are no additional licensing costs to adopt Composable Storefront.

Salesforce commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Composable Storefront.1 The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Composable Storefront on their organizations.

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Return on investment (ROI)

271%

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Net present value (NPV)

$7.46M

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed four representatives with experience using Composable Storefront. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization.

Interviewees said that they adopted Composable Storefront to improve their ability to adapt to changing customer expectations, reduce storefront maintenance costs, improve site performance, and have more options with a modular architecture.

After the investment in Composable Storefront, the interviewees said their organizations’ development teams were able to do more without increasing headcount, improved site performance, improved customer experience and conversion rates, and reduced technical debt costs.

Key Findings

Quantified benefits. Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

  • Accelerated time to market and more than doubled developer capacity. With a headless front end, the composite organization’s development team can release updates and new features more quickly, improving their continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) process. Enhanced flexibility, modular components, automation, and insights drive better productivity, more experimentation, and better outcomes. Over three years, the additional developer capacity is worth $2.85 million to the composite organization.
  • Better customer experience increased conversion rates by 5 basis points. Improvements to site performance, SEO scores, control over merchandising, and immersive experiences all contribute to a better customer experience, driving up conversion rates on mobile and web. Moving from a 2.5% conversion rate to a 3.0% conversion rate drives 20% more revenue for the composite organization over three years and is worth $7.09 million in additional profit to the composite organization.
  • Reduced front-end tech debt by up to 25%. The reduction of tech debt and reliance on third-party service contracts enabled the composite organization to consolidate and decommission pieces of the legacy environment. Over three years the reduction in tech debt is worth $264,000 to the composite organization.

Unquantified benefits. Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include:

  • Improvements to the developer experience.
  • Improvements to talent attraction and retention.
  • Improvements to accessibility.

Costs. Three-year, risk-adjusted PV costs for the composite organization include:

  • External licensing costs total $1.09 million. The composite organization incurs no external costs for the licensing of Salesforce Composable Storefront and no additional cost for hosting the headless site. The composite organization leverages its existing investment in B2C Commerce and native commerce platform capabilities like Business Manager and chooses to integrate a content management system (CMS) and a search tool to support its front-end experience.
  • Internal implementation labor and system integrator (SI) costs total $1.50 million. Thirteen internal business and technical resources dedicate a portion of their time to implementation over the course of nine months to the implementation of Composable Storefront alongside a SI.
  • Training and ongoing management total $157,000 over three years. Upskilling existing resources and a portion of a Salesforce administrator are included in the composite organization’s ongoing costs for Composable Storefront.

Results. The representative interviews and financial analysis found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $10.21 million over three years versus costs of $2.75 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $7.46 million and an ROI of 271%.

“We want to build lifetime value with our customers. We want to continually listen to them and react to what they’re telling us and what they’re showing us by their shopping behaviors. And [Salesforce Composable Storefront] gives us that ability.”

Head of e-commerce, footwear

Key Statistics

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    Return on investment (ROI)

    271%
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    Benefits PV

    $10.21M
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    Net present value (NPV)

    $7.46M
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    Payback

    6 months
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Benefits (Three-Year)

Increased developer capacity Improved conversion profit Legacy technology savings

TEI Framework And Methodology

From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester constructed a Total Economic Impact™ framework for those organizations considering implementing Salesforce Composable Storefront.

The objective of the framework is to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that Salesforce Composable Storefront can have on an organization.

  1. Due Diligence

    Interviewed Salesforce stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to Composable Storefront.

  2. Interviews

    Interviewed four representatives at organizations using Composable Storefront to obtain data about costs, benefits, and risks.

  3. Composite Organization

    Designed a composite organization based on characteristics of the interviewees’ organizations.

  4. Financial Model Framework

    Constructed a financial model representative of the interviews using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewees.

  5. Case Study

    Employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling the investment impact: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication of ROI analyses related to IT investments, Forrester’s TEI methodology provides a complete picture of the total economic impact of purchase decisions. Please see Appendix A for additional information on the TEI methodology.

Disclosures

Readers should be aware of the following:

This study is commissioned by Salesforce and delivered by Forrester Consulting. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.

Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential ROI that other organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their own estimates within the framework provided in the study to determine the appropriateness of an investment in Composable Storefront.

Salesforce reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the study.

Salesforce provided the customer names for the interviews but did not participate in the interviews.

Consulting Team:

Veronica Iles

Kara Luk

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