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.
- List the benefits of developing on the Lightning web stack.
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. To succeed, they must cultivate and maintain numerous business relationships.
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. New Einstein AI technologies support modern channel sales that focus on buyer contact through digital engagement instead of a sales rep. |
Unify commerce operations. |
Grow your business with a single global platform and a unified data model for B2B, order management, and your partner ecosystem. With the Commerce app built on the Salesforce Platform, you get a single view of buyers throughout the order lifecycle. |
Connect the customer’s journey from marketing to sales to service. |
Take the fastest path toward a complete digital transformation with a CRM-powered, connected customer journey. B2B Commerce integrates with Salesforce Marketing, Sales, Service, and Data Clouds—a complete commerce ecosystem. |
Quickly launch full-featured stores with the Commerce app. |
Get B2B Commerce sites up and running quickly with low-code setup and customization, simplified data import, and shared workflows across Salesforce clouds. Take advantage of the store templates and quickly create and customize a customer-friendly B2B site. Use standard Lightning components to set up checkout and payment and configure store settings. Define customer experiences, including search, carts, and checkouts. Import commerce data for accounts, products, price books, and entitlements using a CSV file import. |
Create personalized shopping experiences with Einstein generative AI. |
Use Commerce Einstein Recommendations, powered by Einstein generative AI, and Search to guide shoppers to the products they want and discover additional products to purchase. |
Merge customer data. |
Connect and manage customer data across your entire organization while you deliver personalized experiences powered by Einstein AI. |
Simplify order payment and shipping. |
Integrate B2B Commerce with Salesforce Payments, tax, and shipping solutions. Also explore a rich ecosystem of AppExchange payment, tax, and shipping integrations from system integrator partners. |
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.
Lightning-Quick Web Stack
The Commerce app runs on the Lightning web stack, which takes care of web runtime and data service, and offers reusable, web-based components. How convenient! That means you 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.
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 stack. Next, learn about the Salesforce Commerce data model and how it functions to support B2B stores.