Explore Page Designer and the Merchandiser Role
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain the business challenge that Page Designer solves for merchandising teams.
- Describe Page Designer as a no-code page authoring tool inside Business Manager.
- Identify the key capabilities available to merchandisers in Page Designer.
Address the Daily Storefront Content Challenge
It’s Friday afternoon. A flash sale kicks off at midnight. The promotional landing page is ready in your head: the hero banner, the product grid, the featured collections. But before anything goes live, you submit a ticket. The developer is mid-sprint. “I can look at it Monday,” they say.
Sound familiar?
For most B2C commerce merchandising teams, storefront content has developer dependencies. Every new page, every campaign landing page, every seasonal homepage update traditionally requires a developer to write or modify code. The content bottlenecks impact revenue. Flash sales live and die on timing. Campaign pages that miss their window capture a fraction of potential traffic.
Salesforce B2C Commerce built Page Designer to put page creation back in the merchandiser’s hands. You get a visual, no-code page authoring environment inside Business Manager, with control to create, update, and publish storefront pages on your own schedule.
Experience No-Code Authoring with Page Designer
Page Designer is a drag-and-drop page authoring tool built directly into Business Manager. You use it to design, configure, and publish storefront pages from a visual canvas without writing code.
The word “authoring” matters here. Page Designer is a page authoring tool, not a component builder. You don’t create components from scratch. Your developer builds reusable component types like hero banners, product grids, promotional tiles, and navigation blocks, and then registers them with Page Designer. After the developer uploads these component types to your site, they become available on the canvas for you to place and configure using Page Designer.
That division of labor is intentional. Here’s how the two roles split.
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Developer: Creates page types and component types. Packages them in a custom cartridge and uploads them to the site.
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Merchandiser: Uses the Page Designer visual editor to build pages from developer-supplied components. Configures content, sets schedules, and publishes.
Explore the Merchandiser Toolkit Capabilities
After the developer has uploaded the page and component types, Page Designer gives you a broad set of tools to build and manage storefront experiences.
Capability |
What It Does |
|---|---|
Drag-and-drop layout |
Drag component types from the palette onto the canvas. Arrange and rearrange them in regions. Some regions only accept specific component types. |
Content blocks |
Build modular, reusable compositions of one or more components. Create a content block one time in Page Designer, and reuse it across multiple pages and storefront regions. Content blocks appear with a purple highlight border and a special icon. Edit the block once, and the change automatically appears everywhere the block is used. Manage content blocks centrally using the Content Blocks module in Business Manager at Merchant Tools | Content | Content Blocks. |
Component visibility rules |
Control which customers see a component and when. Set visibility by customer group, date and time, or locale. Regions with a visibility maximum show only the first matching components. |
Page scheduling and targeting |
Set start and end dates for when a page goes live and expires. Restrict page visibility by customer group. |
Content block targeting |
Control when and to whom a content block is visible by adding it to a campaign or promotion or by applying custom targeting rules. Each content block supports one top-level targeting rule that replaces any existing rule. |
Localization |
Create locale-specific content variants. When you create a page in your base language, Page Designer adds a variation for each locale in the fallback hierarchy. Text, images, and links vary by locale. |
Content asset binding |
Bind component attributes to content asset attributes instead of entering content directly. The component displays the content asset’s data at runtime. Update the content asset once, and the change appears on every page that uses it. |
Media Manager |
Upload and manage files in your content library from within the visual editor. Add up to 1,000 images per folder. |
Component copying |
Copy up to 10 components at a time and paste them across pages if the target region accepts them. |
Preview and viewport testing |
Preview how a page looks for specific customers, dates, or dynamic attributes. View pages across different device viewports. |
Page Designer supports creating homepages, campaign landing pages, and Product List and Product Detail template pages. When you assign a category to a template page, all subcategories are implicitly assigned unless you explicitly change the assignment.
To create and manage pages, your Business Manager account requires either the Manage_All_Libraries functional permission at the organization level or the Manage_Site_Library permission at the site level.
Up Next
In this unit, you learned why developer dependency creates content bottlenecks for merchandising teams and how Page Designer tackles that challenge. You gained a clear understanding of what Page Designer does and reviewed the full capability set in the merchandiser toolkit.
Next, you open the Page Designer canvas and build your first storefront page.