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Salesforce to acquire business e-commerce startup CloudCraze
Salesforce.com Inc.’s latest acquisition focuses on addressing the rapid growth of the e-commerce market.
The company late Monday signed a definitive agreement to acquire CloudCraze LLC, a Chicago-based startup with a cloud platform for managing online storefronts. What sets the service apart is a specialized feature set geared not toward selling to consumers, but rather toward business-to-business transactions.
CloudCraze is used by major brands such as the The Coca-Cola Co. and L’Oréal S.A. to streamline the purchasing process for bulk buyers. The platform enables companies to offer business customers many of the conveniences available to consumers when they shop online. A merchant can personalize a CloudCraze storefront for different user groups, create promotions and automatically process purchases.
The startup said the platform is useful for selling much more than consumer goods. CloudCraze has customers in the software, healthcare and industrial sectors, to name a few.
The acquisition will enable Salesforce to add a set of market-tested enterprise e-commerce capabilities to its Commerce Cloud, which currently focuses mainly on the consumer side of the market. In the process, the deal is set to open up a massive new opportunity for the company. Forrester Research Inc. predicts that annual B2B e-commerce sales will grow from $889 billion in 2017 to $1.2 trillion by 2021.
Salesforce is enhancing Commerce Cloud in other ways, too. The company last week struck a partnership with soon-to-be-public Dropbox Inc. to develop new integrations between their platforms. As part of the alliance, Commerce Cloud users will gain the ability to access and share data kept in the file sharing service directly from the native interface.
Salesforce actively invests in important partners to support their efforts. It has provided funding both to Dropbox, which is set to sell an additional $100 million worth of stock to the company following its initial public offering, and CloudCraze.
CloudCraze has raised a total of more than $30 million. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Image: Salesforce
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