So, you’re running your e-commerce store on Salesforce. Chances are, you’ve heard the name "Einstein" thrown around a lot. It’s Salesforce’s built-in AI, and its job is to add a dash of machine learning to your storefront to make shopping feel more personal. It’s a pretty neat tool, but its smarts are stuck inside the Salesforce ecosystem.
And while Einstein can give you a boost, it has a bad case of tunnel vision. Here, we’ll get into what Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein actually is, what it’s good at, and where it stumbles. We’ll look at its main features and see how newer AI tools can pick up the slack to create a support system that actually sees the whole picture.
What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein?
Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein is basically a set of AI tools that live inside your B2C and D2C Commerce platforms. You can think of it as an in-house data analyst and merchandiser who never sleeps. Its primary goal is to sift through your store’s data to handle merchandising tasks on autopilot and give each visitor a more tailored shopping experience.
So, how does it pull this off? Einstein is always learning from three key sources of information:
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Clickstream data: It’s a bit of a people-watcher. It tracks how shoppers move around your site, what they look at, what they search for, and what they toss in their cart.
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Order data: It looks at past purchases to spot buying trends and figure out what’s popular.
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Product data: It familiarizes itself with your entire catalog, learning how different products relate to one another.
By chewing on all this data, Einstein tries to nudge important e-commerce numbers like conversion rates and average order value (AOV) in the right direction. It’s Salesforce’s attempt to make predictive AI available to everyone, so you don’t need a team of data scientists on payroll. The idea is simple: use the data you already have to make your store smarter and your customers a little happier.
Key features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein
Einstein isn’t a single feature but a bundle of them, each meant to improve things for both your customers and your team behind the scenes. Let’s dig into what it can do.
How Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein makes shopping easier for your customers
These features are all about helping people find what they want without a bunch of hassle.
- Einstein Product Recommendations: This is the feature you’ve probably seen a million times. It uses a shopper’s behavior and site-wide trends to display personalized product suggestions. You’ll find them in carousels with familiar titles like “You Might Also Like,” “Customers Also Bought,” or “Complete the Set,” which cleverly suggests accessories to go with an item someone is looking at.
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Einstein Predictive Sort: On a typical site, a category page sorts items by bestsellers or new arrivals for everyone. Predictive Sort mixes things up. It re-shuffles the products on category and search pages based on what it thinks a particular shopper is most likely to click on. By analyzing their previous activity, it bumps the most relevant stuff to the top so they don’t have to scroll for days.
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Einstein Search Recommendations: This tries to bring that fast, predictive Google search feeling to your own site. As a shopper types, Einstein pops up with personalized, type-ahead suggestions. For example, if someone who usually buys running gear types "s-h-o," it might suggest "trail running shoes." But if a customer who buys casual clothes does the same, it might suggest "boat shoes" instead. It’s all about getting them to the right product, faster.
How Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein helps your merchandising team work smarter
These tools are for your internal team, designed to make their jobs easier and more data-informed.
- Einstein Commerce Insights: Think of this as a dashboard for basket analysis. It digs through your order data to reveal which products are frequently purchased together. Are people who buy a specific yoga mat also grabbing a certain brand of water bottle? Commerce Insights will tell you, giving you solid data to build smart product bundles, create "shop the look" sections, or run more effective promotions.
- Einstein Search Dictionaries: Have you ever searched for something on a website using a common term only to get zero results? This feature is designed to prevent that. Einstein reviews all the search queries on your site and flags terms that shoppers are using but that aren’t in your official system. For instance, if people are looking for a "mauve sweater" but you’ve only tagged your products as "pink" or "purple," Einstein will suggest adding "mauve" as a synonym. It’s a straightforward fix that stops you from losing sales over simple vocabulary mismatches.
| Feature | Primary User | Key Benefit |
|---|---|---|
| Product Recommendations | Shopper | Discovers relevant products, increasing cart size. |
| Predictive Sort | Shopper | Finds desired products faster with personalized search results. |
| Search Recommendations | Shopper | Gets intelligent, personalized type-ahead search guidance. |
| Commerce Insights | Merchandiser | Understands purchasing behavior to create data-driven campaigns. |
| Search Dictionaries | Merchandiser | Improves search relevance by identifying and adding missing synonym terms. |
Getting started with Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein (and its limits)
Turning on Einstein is pretty easy, but its power isn’t without its limits. Let’s walk through the setup and, more importantly, the constraints you need to know about.
The Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein setup process
Enabling Commerce Einstein is mostly about flipping a switch in your settings and making sure your catalog and products are ready to go. Once you activate it, Salesforce starts chewing on your data, which can take up to a day. After that, its performance is completely dependent on the quality and amount of data you have. For it to offer genuinely personal results, it needs a good chunk of historical click and order data to find its footing.
Key Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein limitations to keep in mind
While Einstein is a decent place to start, it has a few big limitations that can get in the way of creating a truly connected customer experience.
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The "black box" problem: Einstein operates like a black box. You put data in, and recommendations come out, but you get very little visibility into why it made a certain decision. You can’t really get under the hood to tweak the algorithms or customize how it thinks. This simplicity is nice when you’re starting out, but it becomes a major headache when you want more say over your AI’s behavior.
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It only knows what’s in Salesforce: This is probably Einstein’s biggest blind spot. It only learns from data inside the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, your products and what shoppers do on your site. But what about all the other places your company’s knowledge is stored? It has no idea about the helpful context buried in your Zendesk tickets, the detailed product specs in your Confluence pages, or the quick fixes shared in Slack. This silo means Einstein is working with just a sliver of the full picture, which can lead to recommendations and answers that feel incomplete.
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No way to test with confidence: There isn’t a reliable way to simulate how Einstein will behave before you let it loose. You can’t take a new recommendation idea and run it against thousands of your past customer interactions to see how it would have done. This makes every new change feel like a bit of a gamble, without any real data to back up how it might affect your sales or support costs.
A modern alternative to Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein: connecting all your knowledge
Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein is a good first step, but being stuck in one system is an old-school way of thinking about AI. To really improve your customer experience, you need an AI that can learn from all of your company’s knowledge, no matter where it’s saved.
This is where a tool like eesel AI changes the game. Unlike Einstein, eesel AI is built to tear down those knowledge silos. It plugs into your whole tech stack, your helpdesk, internal wikis, chat tools, and yes, even Salesforce, to create one central brain for your business.
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You’re in the driver’s seat: Forget the black box. eesel AI gives you a simple but powerful prompt editor to define your AI’s exact tone and behavior. You decide which questions get automated and which ones still need a human to step in. You can even build custom actions that let the AI look up order details or update ticket information on the fly.
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Go live in minutes and test with confidence: You can connect your helpdesk with a click and get going in minutes, no long sales calls needed. Even better, eesel AI has a simulation mode that lets you test your setup on thousands of your own past support tickets. This gives you an accurate, data-backed preview of how it will perform before you ever turn it on for customers. It takes all the guesswork out of the process.
- Supercharge your stack, don’t replace it: The best part is that you don’t have to rip anything out. eesel AI works as an intelligence layer on top of the tools you already use. It can grab information from your Salesforce knowledge base, mix it with insights from past Zendesk tickets and internal Google Docs, and provide an answer that’s way more complete than anything an AI stuck in a single system could manage.
Pro Tip: Start small, then scale.
With a tool like eesel AI, you don’t need to automate your entire support operation overnight. Use the simulation feature to find the top 5-10 most frequent, easy-to-answer questions. Set up automations for those first and let your team focus on the trickier stuff. It’s a great way to build confidence and get some quick wins.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein: Connect your knowledge, create a better experience
Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein is a useful tool for any e-commerce business using the platform. It gives you native AI features for personalizing the shopping journey based on your sales data.
But today’s customers expect more. They want smart, consistent help, and that can only happen when your AI can learn from every single customer conversation and knowledge source you have. To really deliver an experience that stands out, you have to break your data out of its silos.
An AI platform like eesel AI connects all of your knowledge, giving you the control to automate support confidently, empower your team, and ultimately, create happier customers.
Ready to see what a unified AI can do? Try eesel AI for free.
Frequently asked questions
There isn’t a strict minimum, but its performance depends heavily on having substantial historical clickstream and order data. Without enough information to analyze, the personalization it provides will be generic and less effective at improving conversions.
For the most part, you are working with its built-in logic. Einstein is often described as a "black box," meaning you can’t get inside to tweak the core algorithms, which is a key limitation for teams wanting more direct control over their AI’s behavior.
It exclusively uses data from within the Salesforce Commerce Cloud ecosystem, such as your product catalog and on-site shopper activity. It cannot access external knowledge sources like helpdesk tickets or internal wikis, which limits its overall context.
Its primary goals are to increase key e-commerce metrics like conversion rates and average order value (AOV) by personalizing the shopping experience. It achieves this by automatically showing individual shoppers more relevant products and search results.
While ‘bestsellers’ is a global ranking shown to all visitors, Predictive Sort personalizes the product order for each individual shopper. It analyzes a user’s past browsing and purchasing behavior to predict what they are most likely to click on and moves those items to the top of the page.
