Salesforce.com, Inc. has added eCommerce functions to its Community Cloud via drag-and-drop Lightning Components, making it possible to display a “Buy Button” on any of its online communities.

Salesforce’s Community Cloud is a platform that allows businesses to build websites where they can easily interact with their customers. With the addition of eCommerce functionality, Salesforce is enabling a “whole new evolution of social commerce”, Mike Stone, senior vice president of marketing for Salesforce Community Cloud, told TechCrunch.

Lightning Components are reusable components developed by Salesforce partners like CloudCraze LLC, Demandware Inc. and Bigcommerce Pty. Ltd, and allow companies to quickly and easily add new capabilities to their community clouds. They were previously only available for clouds built by Salesforce. eCommerce has also been available for some time, but this functionality could only via complicated coding.

Soon, enterprise communities will be able to use Lightning Components to easily add various eCommerce functions, like buy buttons, add to cart, checkout, order tracking and so on. For example, the buy button can be displayed automatically in the middle of a conversation thread when a products’ name is mentioned, or they could pop up on the side of the page.

The move makes sense for Salesforce, because on-the-spot buy buttons are a growing trend appearing all over the Web these days. They’ve been introduced to considerable success on sites like TripAdvisor, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, and so it makes sense for Salesforce to offer the same services to businesses, Stone said.

“Our customers are seeing that there are leading companies using communities in this way,” he told TechCrunch. It allows businesses “to present their product directly in the flow, when the customer is engaging with them,” and also helps to “enable commerce and sales between community members.”

Stone added that while Lightning Components are only being used for eCommerce now, the company is planning to make other functions available to its cloud communities soon.

Lightning Components are built on the Salesforce1 platform, using its Lightning framework. Stone said they would be made available later this year with the new release of Salesforce’s Cloud Community Builder.