Get to Know B2B Commerce
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how the Salesforce B2B Commerce app helps you achieve a strategic advantage within the Agentforce Commerce ecosystem.
- List the benefits of developing on the Lightning Web Runtime (LWR) application model.
- Identify the Commerce app features enhanced by Agentforce Commerce tools.
What Is Salesforce B2B Commerce?
B2B businesses are complex operations that sell bulk goods to buyers from other businesses. They generate revenue from orders, reorders, and subscription services for those bulk goods. B2B businesses operate in four primary markets: producers, resellers, governments, and institutions.
The Salesforce B2B Commerce app is the ultimate tool for B2B companies that want to enhance their ecommerce presence. Think of it as a digital warehouse where the virtual shelves are always stocked. And now, with Agentforce Commerce, it's smarter than ever.
The B2B Solution
B2B businesses operate in four primary markets: producers, resellers, governments, and institutions. As world markets expand and competition increases, B2B sellers seek innovative solutions to stay ahead of their competition. The Salesforce B2B Commerce app is the ultimate tool for B2B companies that want to enhance their ecommerce presence. B2B Commerce enables you to build dynamic and engaging B2B stores that drive buyer engagement and boost sales. It’s like a digital warehouse where the virtual shelves are always stocked. Business buyers serve themselves anytime, anywhere, which keeps a steady stream of orders, reorders, and subscription services flowing for your products.
Gain a Strategic Market Advantage
Take a look at the key benefits of B2B Commerce on the Salesforce Platform.
Business Value |
Strategic Advantage |
|---|---|
Modernize sales channels. |
Focus your B2B business on serving distributors, dealers, and small businesses with a digital-first, consumer-like ecommerce experience built around sales. Agentforce Commerce, including Guided Shopping and Merchandising agents, supports modern channel sales through digital engagement instead of a sales rep. |
Unify commerce operations. |
Run your business on a single global platform with a unified data model for B2B, order management, and your partner ecosystem. Get a single view of your buyers throughout the entire order lifecycle. |
Connect the customer’s journey from marketing to sales to service. |
Connect customer journeys by integrating B2B Commerce with Salesforce Marketing, Sales, Service, and Data 360 clouds to create a complete commerce ecosystem. |
Quickly launch full-featured stores with the Commerce app. |
Use low-code setup and customization, simplified data import, and shared workflows across Salesforce clouds. Store templates make it easy to get started quickly. Use standard Lightning components to set up checkout, payment, and store settings, and import commerce data for accounts, products, price books, and entitlements using CSV file import. |
Create personalized shopping experiences with Einstein generative AI. |
Use Agentforce Commerce, including the autonomous Guided Shopping Agent, to guide shoppers to their desired items and help them discover additional products. |
Merge customer data. |
Connect and manage customer data across your entire organization while you deliver personalized experiences powered by Data 360. |
Simplify order payment and shipping. |
Integrate with Salesforce Payments, tax, and shipping solutions, and access AgentExchange for additional partner integrations. |
Build on the Salesforce Ecosystem
B2B Commerce is a perfect fit for the Salesforce ecosystem. Every store includes the same performance, security, and scalability as all the standard Salesforce Platform technologies.
The Salesforce Commerce Platform is open and extensible. Its minimal configuration requirements and declarative programming layer mean that your admins and merchandisers can quickly complete setup and store development tasks. With streamlined setup and configuration, your dev team can focus their efforts on enabling integrations and extending platform capabilities.
Powerful Development Tools
With its robust features and capabilities, the Salesforce core platform provides developers with powerful tools and resources to easily create custom solutions tailored to the unique needs of a B2B business.
One advantage of the Salesforce core platform is its flexible architecture, which allows developers to integrate with various systems and third-party tools. A flexible architecture enables efficient data exchange, collaboration, and automation across different departments and functions within an organization. Custom JavaScript components seamlessly process core data service calls without disrupting standard platform upgrade cycles.
Lightning-Quick Web Stack
The Commerce app runs on the Lightning Web Runtime (LWR) application model, an LWR-only application framework designed for speed and sustainability. It takes care of routing and data loads, and offers reusable, web-based components. That means you can construct the same declarative, extensible code model, layout, and design for your apps. Take a look at the Lightning Web Runtime architecture stack below.
[Alt Text: Diagram showing the Lightning Web Runtime application stack layers, including Lightning Web Components and core data services.]
The LWR application model provides built-in routing, data binding, and performance optimizations out of the box, allowing custom JavaScript components to process core data service calls seamlessly without disrupting standard platform upgrade cycles.
Complete API Set
Additionally, the platform offers a comprehensive set of APIs and development tools that streamline the process of building and deploying applications. Though B2B Commerce offers fully functional page templates, developers can use these tools to create custom interfaces, workflows, and integrations that enhance the overall customer experience and drive business growth.
Developers love that the Commerce app is built on modern experiences and the latest web standards.
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Enhanced productivity with web standards: Use the modern language of the web: ES5+, custom elements, classes, modules, and imports.
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Open, transparent, and portable: Use modular building blocks to code the experiences you want with your preferred tools on the same platform.
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Built for enterprise-scale: Adopt the architecture that Salesforce has used to scale Lightning, Communities, and Mobile for years.
Every JavaScript developer can build a Lightning component: the standards-based programming model makes developer resources easy to find and ramp. Salesforce Commerce is engineered for performance; the browser executes more code instead of JavaScript abstractions for a blazing-fast experience.
Next Steps
In this unit, you got a broad overview of Salesforce B2B Commerce. You learned about its features, their strategic business value, and the advantage of building on the Salesforce core platform and running on the Lightning Web Runtime (LWR) application model. Next, learn about the Salesforce Commerce data model and how it functions to support B2B stores.