Explore D2C Commerce

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• List the benefits a traditional B2B customer can gain from going digital on Salesforce core.
• List the elements that can help you build an amazing D2C Commerce experience.
• Describe the D2C Commerce features.
• Describe the benefits that the Commerce app gains by being built on the Lightning Web Stack.
• Explain how Lightning Web Components work with Experience cloud and the Commerce app.

B2B with a Side of D2C

Ursa Major Solar is a Southwest-based supplier of solar components and systems. It’s a small company with around 200 employees, and growing fast. Ursa Major is committed to developing solar power systems that derive clean, pure energy and use Salesforce B2B Commerce for its online B2B business.

Many of Ursa Major’s customers, third-party suppliers, and installers, are equally passionate about the environment. More than a few of them, like Ray at Ray Solar Solutions, have been asking Sita Nagappan-Alvarez (she/her), Ursa Major Solar’s CEO, to consider developing products for the direct-to-consumer market. Ray wants to be the first to buy. He even volunteered to help with consumer solar product testing.

Sita has a healthy B2B business, but she wants to connect directly with customers. In addition to gathering information about who uses her products (first-party data), she also wants to understand why and how they use her products. This will be helpful as she plans for her future product mix, supply chain strategy, and so on. She's excited to start a new revenue stream

Sita’s integration partner tells her about Salesforce D2C Commerce, which is perfect for what she wants to do—B2B with a side of Direct to Consumer (D2C). 

Her COO and co-founder, Roberto Alvarez (he/him), typically cautious with IT expenditures, is glad to know that it’s built natively on top of the Salesforce Platform, providing a single system of record for orders.

Sita asks her team to take a deeper dive into this product.

What Is Salesforce D2C Commerce?

The team learns that D2C Commerce is built natively on the Customer 360 Platform with these amazing benefits.

• Fast time to market: Use the product catalogs and business data you set up for your B2B Storefront for your D2C store, saving lots of time.
• Intelligent experiences: Create personalized shopping experiences with drag-and-drop Commerce Einstein Recommendations and Search.
• Trusted platform: Grow with a single global platform on Salesforce core.
• Partner ecosystem: Explore a rich ecosystem of AppExchange integrations and systems integration partners to accelerate business.

So what does that mean to the Ursa Solar Major implementation team? It means that they get all these elements to help them build an amazing D2C shopping experience.

• Commerce management app: One app for creation, set up, and maintenance of B2B and D2C stores.
• Commerce components: Base components encapsulating data access/business logic for tailored D2C and B2B experiences.
• Core commerce services: Shared services (such as search, recommendations, and inventory) for managing end-to-end commerce transactions.
• Shared data model: Canonical entities (such as products, pricebooks, and promotions) applicable to all D2C Commerce applications, and other core products

What Are the Features?

The implementation team is eager to dive into the details. Each wants to report on their aspect of the project. 

Taylor Givens (they/them), the merchandiser, wants an easy-to-use interface and is most interested in these storefront management features.

Maria Jimenez (she/her), the admin, wants to get the store launched and running just as smoothly as the rest of her operation. For product set up and administration, here’s what she can expect.

• A unified commerce app (B2B and D2C)
• Catalog import via .csv file
• Basic order management
• Basic reports

Wei Leung (she/her), the developer, can’t wait to get her hands into the code. When she gets involved with customizations, she knows that she can rely on these features.

• AppExchange package discovery
• AppExchange packages for payment, tax, and shipping
• Included content delivery network (CDN ) providing D2C scale and performance
• PCI Compliant Payment Processing via third-party integrations
• Reference data and documentation

Implementation Personas

They are eager to start. Here’s how they map to the product’s out-of-the-box implementation personas.

Build in the Salesforce Ecosystem

Wei is glad to know that D2C is built on top of the Lightning Web Stack. For developers like her, that means it’s built on modern experiences and the latest web standards.

• Enhanced productivity with web standards: Use the modern language of the web: ES5+, custom elements, classes, modules, and imports.
• Open, transparent, and portable: Use modular building blocks to code the experiences you want, with your preferred tools, on the same platform.
• Built for enterprise scale: Adopt the architecture Salesforce has used to scale Lightning, Communities, and Mobile for years.

What does that include? D2C Commerce uses Lightning Web Components (LWC), Experience Cloud, and a content management system (CMS). Let’s take a closer look.

Lightning Web Stack

D2C Commerce runs on the Lightning Web Stack, which takes care of web runtime, data service, and the web and base components. How convenient! That means Wei can access the same declarative, extensible data model, and AppExchange for partner apps.

Lightning Web Runtime (LWR) is an LWC-only application framework designed for speed and customizability.

This standards-based programming model makes developer resources easy to find and ramp: Every JavaScript developer can build a Lightning component. D2C is engineered for performance; more code is executed by the browser instead of JavaScript abstractions for a blazing-fast experience.

Experience Cloud

D2C Commerce comes with the Commerce app, which is built on top of Salesforce core. Wei can select it from the App Launcher.

Wei uses Experience Builder to create a store. Once she creates the store, Taylor uses Experience Builder to:

• Choose a template for the storefront page format.
• Change the theme and branding.
• Create and configure pages.
• Customize with components.
• Add and configure custom components.

You get a collection of pages in a typical store, each page having:

• Theme layouts that you can brand and style
• A set of components that you can customize
• The ability to add custom components

Customize More

Taylor wants to take the Commerce store a step further to override some of the CSS styling and asks Wei to help. Wei can also create new components, templates, and themes in Visual Studio Code with the SFDX (Salesforce Developer) extension. She already uses Visual Studio Code, the go-to code editor for Salesforce developers. It’s free, open-source, and available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. This editor has easy-to-install extensions for syntax highlighting, code completion, and more.

Content Management System (CMS)

Taylor can use Salesforce CMS to manage the content from draft stage to publish and archive. Salesforce CMS, an app in Lightning Experience, is a unified shared service for all of Salesforce. Content created for D2C Commerce can also be used in B2B Commerce and vice versa. For example, the product images that show up on the product detail page reside in CMS, so it's easy to share them across multiple storefronts.

Next Steps

In this module, you explored how D2C Commerce can help you reach the direct-to-consumer market while you focus on your B2B customers. You learned about product features and architecture. Next, learn how the D2C Commerce data model compares with B2B Commerce.

Resources

• Trailhead: Salesforce B2B Commerce Basics
• Trailhead: Salesforce CMS Basics