An honest look at Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein in 2025

Trying to stand out in the e-commerce world can feel like shouting into a void. Every online store is competing for the same customers, and shoppers today expect a lot more than just a grid of products. They want to feel like the store gets them. This is where AI-driven personalization comes in, and it’s quickly becoming a non-negotiable for boosting sales and keeping people coming back.

Salesforce, a name you definitely know in CRM and e-commerce, has its own tool for this: Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein. It's built to help merchants personalize the shopping experience from the second someone lands on their site. This guide will walk you through what Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein actually is, what it does, how to set it up, and honestly, where it falls a bit short. By the end, you’ll have a much clearer idea of whether it’s the right move for your business or if you might be better off with a more flexible AI tool.

What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein?

What's the deal with Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein? In a nutshell, it’s a set of AI-powered features baked directly into the Salesforce B2C and B2B Commerce platforms. Think of it as having an in-house data scientist who’s constantly working to make your storefront smarter.

Its main gig is to crunch all your shopper data, every click, purchase, and search, to automate merchandising tasks and create a shopping experience that feels unique to each visitor. The end game, of course, is to get customers more engaged and boost your revenue.

The most important thing to grasp about Einstein is that it's an embedded AI. Unlike many third-party tools that you have to wrestle with to integrate, Einstein is native to the Salesforce Commerce Cloud ecosystem. This gives it direct access to the goldmine of data already in your store, from your product catalog and order history to the real-time clickstream data from shoppers. This tight integration means it can generate insights and personalization without you having to patch different systems together, as long as everything you need lives inside Salesforce.

Key features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein

Einstein’s features are split into two main buckets: tools that make the shopping experience better for your customers and tools that help your merchandising team work smarter, not harder.

Features for the shopping experience

These are all about helping customers find what they want, faster.

• Einstein Product Recommendations: This is probably one of Einstein's most well-known features. It uses machine learning to suggest products to shoppers while they browse. The suggestions are based on what they’ve looked at before, their purchase history, and what’s popular on your site right now. It works for both first-time visitors and logged-in customers, always tweaking its recommendations to nudge that cart size up.

• Einstein Predictive Sort: We’ve all been there, scrolling endlessly through a category page hoping something will jump out. Predictive Sort tries to solve that by personalizing the order of products on category and search pages for every single shopper. It looks at a user's behavior and bumps the products it thinks they’ll like to the top of the list. This is a lifesaver on mobile, where screen real estate is precious and a long scroll can be a deal-breaker.

• Einstein Search Recommendations: This feature basically gives your store’s search bar a "Google" brain. It offers up personalized, AI-driven suggestions as you type and even auto-corrects typos. For instance, if one shopper starts typing "s," Einstein might suggest "sandals" because they’ve been looking at summer shoes. For another, it might suggest "sneakers." It’s a small detail that can make a big difference in getting a customer from search to checkout.

Features for the merchandising team

These tools are built to take repetitive tasks off your team's plate and give them data to back up their decisions.

• Einstein Commerce Insights: This feature is a shopping basket analysis dashboard that helps your team see which products are often bought together. Armed with this info, merchandisers can build better product bundles, create "complete the look" sections, or run targeted promotions that feel genuinely helpful to the customer.

• Einstein Search Dictionaries: There's nothing worse than a "no results found" page. Einstein Search Dictionaries helps prevent this by analyzing your site's search data to find terms that shoppers are using but you haven't accounted for. Let's say people are searching for a "mauve" sweater, but you've only listed it as "pink." The system might suggest adding "mauve" as a synonym. It's a simple fix that ensures customers can find what they're looking for, even if they use slightly different words.

Setup, integration, and pricing

Einstein's features sound great on paper, but it’s just as important to know what it takes to get them running, how the pricing works, and what the integration story looks like.

Setup and implementation process

Getting started with Einstein isn't a one-click affair. It's a two-step dance of enablement and implementation.

• Enablement is all about configuring the settings in the Salesforce backend.

• Implementation usually requires a developer to jump in and update your site's templates and code so the Einstein-powered features actually show up.

This means you’ll probably need a team on it, including a developer for the code and a merchandiser for the setup in Business Manager. The timeline can be all over the place. Some features, like Predictive Sort, can be switched on pretty quickly. Others, like Product Recommendations, might take a few development sprints to get just right. And once you do flip the switch, the actual deployment of Einstein can take up to 24 hours to chew through your data.

For teams without developers on standby or those just looking to move faster, this can be a real roadblock. In comparison, tools like eesel AI are built to be completely self-serve. You can connect your helpdesk and knowledge sources with a single click and have a working AI agent up and running in minutes, not months, usually without needing a developer at all.

Integration limitations

Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein is designed to live and breathe inside its own world. Its smarts come almost entirely from the data within Commerce Cloud. While that makes it great for on-site merchandising, it also creates a massive blind spot: it has no clue what's happening outside your storefront.

It can't learn from the valuable conversations in your support tickets on platforms like Zendesk or Freshdesk, your internal notes in Confluence, or your team's chats in Slack. This is a pretty big drawback, since your support history is a treasure trove of information about customer pain points, product feedback, and frequently asked questions.

This is where you see a big difference with modern AI platforms. Tools like eesel AI are designed to connect all your knowledge, no matter where it is. eesel AI can instantly plug into your helpdesks, internal wikis like Google Docs or Notion, and chat tools to create one unified brain. This allows its AI to give much more accurate and context-rich answers, whether it's powering a customer-facing chatbot or helping an agent answer a ticket.

Pricing

When it comes to the price tag, Salesforce is a bit shy. If you go to their official pricing page, you won't find a single number. Instead, every plan just has a button that says "Contact for pricing."

This kind of mysterious pricing is pretty common with enterprise software. It usually means the cost is tied to your Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), so as you sell more, you pay more. This can make your expenses unpredictable and budgeting a real headache. It also forces you to talk to a salesperson just to get a ballpark idea of the cost.

It’s a different story with a solution like eesel AI, where the pricing is transparent and predictable. You'll find clear monthly and annual plans based on how many AI interactions you need. There are no hidden fees or percentages of your revenue. This lets you forecast your costs without any surprises and means you aren't penalized for having a great sales month.

When Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein isn't enough

While Einstein is a solid tool for what it's designed to do, its narrow focus on merchandising means it leaves a lot to be desired for businesses that also need to automate their customer support.

Limited to merchandising and search

Einstein’s specialty is showing the right product at the right time. It's a merchandising tool, first and foremost. It wasn't built to handle the heavy lifting of a support team, like automatically sorting new tickets, drafting replies for agents based on similar past issues, or just solving common customer questions on its own. It improves the shopping experience but doesn't do much to lighten your support team's load.

Lack of granular control and safe testing

With Einstein, the AI models working behind the scenes are mostly a black box. You can set up rules and strategies, but you don’t get much say over the AI’s behavior or personality. Plus, there isn’t a simple, built-in way to test how the AI will handle thousands of real-world scenarios before you let it loose on your customers. This can make rolling out new settings feel like a bit of a coin toss.

This is another area where dedicated AI support platforms really shine. For example, eesel AI has a powerful simulation mode that lets you test your AI agent on thousands of your actual past support tickets. This gives you a clear forecast of how it will perform and helps you spot areas for improvement before any customer ever talks to it. You also get a fully customizable workflow builder, giving you complete control over the AI's persona, the exact kinds of tickets it should handle, and any custom actions it can take.

The need for a holistic AI strategy

Modern customer service is happening all over the place: on your website, in your helpdesk, in internal chat tools, and across different knowledge bases. A truly useful AI strategy has to be able to work across all of them.

While Salesforce Einstein polishes the storefront, it leaves your support queue untouched. For a complete solution, you need a platform that's actually built for support automation. This is exactly what eesel AI was made for. It’s designed to automate your entire support operation with a set of connected tools:

• AI Agent: An autonomous agent that works in your helpdesk to resolve frontline support tickets all by itself.

• AI Copilot: An assistant that drafts replies for your human agents, cutting down response times dramatically.

• AI Triage: A system that automatically routes, tags, and organizes incoming tickets to keep things tidy.

• AI Internal Chat: A bot for Slack or MS Teams that gives your own employees instant answers to their internal questions.

Here’s a quick side-by-side to make things clearer:

Feature	Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein	eesel AI
Primary Use Case	E-commerce merchandising & product discovery	End-to-end customer support automation
Setup Time	Days to weeks, requires developers & merchandisers	Minutes, fully self-serve with one-click integrations
Key Integrations	Deeply embedded within Salesforce Commerce Cloud	Help desks (Zendesk, Freshdesk), chat (Slack), knowledge bases (Confluence, etc.)
Knowledge Sources	Storefront data (clicks, orders, catalog)	Past tickets, help centers, Google Docs, Slack, Shopify, and 100+ more
Automation Scope	Product recommendations, search, sorting	Ticket resolution, agent reply drafting, triage, internal Q&A, chatbots
Customization & Control	Limited to predefined rules and strategies	Fully customizable prompt engine and workflow builder for granular control
Testing	Limited preview capabilities	Powerful simulation on thousands of historical tickets before going live
Pricing Model	Opaque (Contact Sales), often tied to GMV	Transparent, predictable plans based on usage, with no per-resolution fees

The bottom line on Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein: Merchandising AI vs. support AI

So, what's the verdict? Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein is a powerful, native AI tool and a solid bet for businesses that are already deep in the Salesforce ecosystem. It’s excellent at on-site merchandising and helping customers discover products more easily.

But its value pretty much stops once the customer leaves the product page. It isn't a solution for automating the support side of the business, which is where a lot of companies are feeling the most strain. It can’t learn from your past support conversations, it can’t resolve tickets in your helpdesk, and it can’t give your team instant answers from your internal knowledge base.

This video provides an overview of the AI-powered features embedded directly into Salesforce B2C Commerce to create a smarter shopping experience.

For businesses that want to automate their support workload, slash agent response times, and offer instant answers everywhere, a dedicated AI support platform is the only way to go. eesel AI is built to fill that exact gap, plugging into the tools you already use to provide comprehensive automation that picks up right where Einstein leaves off.

Ready to see how you can automate your frontline support in just a few minutes? Try eesel AI for free.