What Is the Salesforce Commerce Cloud?
A state-of-the-art Saas platform enables merchants to reach more users and give a more full eCommerce experience. Also previously known as Demandware.
A SaaS platform means, software as a service. When you purchase a server, you don’t only get a bare metal server, but it has proprietary code to run an application. We can call it is as a core engine.
Along with the core engine, you can easily set up a site. It is also called SiteGenesis (SG). In SFCC front end site, which is used by the end-user is called Store Front.
You can do the following things once you get the server:
- Storefront: Once you set up a site, it will be visible to the user to access it.
- Product and Catalog: You can create as products as many you want and assign them to your site. You can create one site catalog and multiple master catalogs.
- Inventory: The assigned inventory to the site will track all orders and adjust their values. You get options to set it in stock, pre-order.
- Price book: Each product has prices, right? It is handled by price book settings.
- Indexing: Based on all products settings, it will generate new documents which will make it faster to load results of the product on the storefront.
- Reports: You can review various reports regarding sales and actions.
- Order and Customer settings: You can define order sequence numbers and for how long they should be kept in the system. When to delete order and customer from the system.
Here is the example of Site genesis site: https://production-sitegenesis-dw.demandware.net/on/demandware.store/Sites-SiteGenesis-Site
As you can see, this site is on the production instance. SFCC provides a list of servers in the package:
- Production
- Staging
- Development
- Sandboxes
You can read here for a more detailed explanation here: https://medium.com/salesforce-commerce-cloud-tales/the-ecommerce-platform-396172591089
Most of the technology used for the platform is proprietary. It uses as follow:
- ds: Used for scripting code
- isml: Used for frontend-related work. It is a view part.
- XML: Used for forms, pipelines flows.
- JS: Now, instead of pipeline controller is being used. The controller is written in JS.
Commerce cloud can be integrated easily with other platforms. For example, when you integrate OMS with SFCC, it can easily send data to OMS and also can sync order status and inventory from 3rd party.
Commerce Cloud is having 2 parts: B2B and B2C.
- B2B: When you are targeting segment is only business. Like, you are manufacturing some product and other business user purchases in bulk to sell locally.
- B2C: When you are selling products to direct end-users.
