Commerce Cloud
Commerce Cloud is Salesforce's product family for running online stores.
Definition
Commerce Cloud is Salesforce's product family for running online stores. It covers consumer storefronts, business buying portals, product catalogs, pricing, promotions, carts, checkout, and the order fulfillment that follows a purchase. The family has two main commerce engines plus a fulfillment layer. B2C Commerce powers high-traffic consumer sites and grew from the Demandware platform Salesforce acquired in 2016. B2B Commerce on Lightning Experience runs business-to-business and direct-to-consumer stores natively on the Salesforce Platform. Salesforce Order Management handles what happens after checkout.
The point of the family is to keep shopping connected to the rest of the customer record. A storefront alone is one channel. When commerce shares the same accounts, contacts, and orders with Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Data Cloud, the shopper experience stays consistent. B2C Commerce is hosted and operated by Salesforce for retail scale. B2B Commerce is configured by admins inside a Salesforce org like any other cloud. Both share the cart, order, and customer concepts, and both can run headless when a brand wants full control of the front end.
How the Commerce Cloud family fits together
B2C Commerce architecture: accounts and instances
B2C Commerce, the platform that came from Demandware, runs consumer storefronts that Salesforce hosts and operates. The top organizational unit is an account that holds a primary instance group and a secondary instance group. Inside those groups sit the instances where teams build, test, and run a site. There are four instance types. Sandbox instances live in the secondary group and are where developers write code, with most system jobs disabled and caching off. Development, staging, and production instances live in the primary group. Staging is where code and data are prepared, then replicated outward. Production is the live instance that handles real storefront transactions, with caching and a CDN in front of it. Each instance bundles web servers, application servers, and database servers. This hosted model means a retailer does not patch servers or size hardware for a sales peak. Salesforce runs the infrastructure, and the brand focuses on the catalog, the storefront code, and the shopping experience layered on top of it.
Building B2C storefronts: SFRA, Page Designer, and the Commerce API
Most B2C Commerce sites start from the Storefront Reference Architecture, known as SFRA. It is a reference storefront built on a model-view-controller pattern that teams copy and extend rather than build from a blank page. SiteGenesis was the older reference architecture and predates SFRA. Page Designer gives merchandisers a drag-and-drop way to assemble landing pages and campaign content without a developer for every change. For data and behavior, the Salesforce B2C Commerce API and the older Open Commerce API (OCAPI) expose products, baskets, orders, customers, and more over REST. Server-side logic runs in scripts and controllers. The API surface is what makes headless possible. A brand can keep B2C Commerce as the commerce engine while a custom React or native mobile app renders the experience. That decoupling buys design freedom but costs some of the conveniences the stock storefront gives you for free, so teams weigh the trade before committing to it.
B2B Commerce on Lightning Experience
B2B Commerce runs business-to-business and direct-to-consumer stores natively inside a Salesforce org. Admins build a webstore, then style and lay it out with the Commerce Experience Builder template, the same Experience Builder used elsewhere on the platform. Because it lives on the core platform, B2B stores share accounts, contacts, and orders with Sales Cloud and Service Cloud directly. Business buying has its own rules, and the platform models them as first-class. Catalogs organize products, including variations, bundles, and configurable products. Entitlement policies decide which buyers can see and buy which products. Buyer groups segment customers so different organizations get different catalogs and pricing. Price books and contract-based pricing handle negotiated rates, tiered discounts, and account-specific deals. The same engine supports B2B2C, where a business sells through to end consumers. B2B Commerce is available in Developer, Enterprise, and Unlimited editions, and it connects to Einstein, Data Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Revenue Cloud for personalization, analytics, and quoting.
Salesforce Order Management after checkout
A completed checkout is the start of fulfillment, not the end of the work. Salesforce Order Management, often shortened to OMS, takes the order from capture through delivery and any servicing that follows. It bridges B2C Commerce, B2B Commerce, and Service Cloud so agents see one view of order and service history. The system captures the order, authorizes and later captures payment, allocates inventory, routes fulfillment, and handles returns, exchanges, appeasements, and reships. It is built for retail volume. Order Management can ingest up to 5,000 B2C Commerce orders per minute and process up to 2,500 per minute, which is what a large sale event demands. Store pickup and ship-from-store flows like BOPIS are supported with guided steps. The order summary record surfaces in the Service Console, so a service agent can answer questions about products, charges, captured payment, fulfillment status, and shipping without leaving the case. That connection is where commerce-only programs usually fall short.
Catalog, pricing, and promotions across the family
The commerce experience is mostly catalog, price, and promotion working together. Catalogs hold products, and both engines support variations, configurations, and bundles so a single product can fan out into sizes, colors, or assembled kits. Pricing is where B2C and B2B diverge most. A consumer site usually shows one list price with seasonal markdowns. A business store layers list price, contract pricing through price books, customer-specific rates, and volume tiers, because a negotiated account expects its own numbers. Promotions drive conversion on both sides: discount codes, automatic promotions, free shipping thresholds, and bundle deals. Getting this layer right is what turns a browsing session into an order, and getting it wrong shows up immediately in conversion. Merchandisers tune these levers constantly, which is why the tools that manage them, Page Designer on B2C and Experience Builder on B2B, are aimed at business users rather than developers. The faster a merchant can change a promotion, the faster a campaign can respond to what shoppers are actually doing.
Personalization with Einstein, Data Cloud, and Marketing Cloud
A storefront that treats every shopper the same leaves revenue on the table. Commerce Cloud connects to the wider Salesforce stack to personalize what each visitor sees. Einstein powers product recommendations, predictive sorting, and search tuning based on shopper behavior. Data Cloud unifies profiles across web, app, service, and marketing into one view of the customer, and that unified profile feeds personalization back into the storefront. Marketing Cloud drives engagement around the purchase, such as abandoned-cart reminders, post-purchase follow-ups, and segmented campaigns that pull the shopper back. Because B2B Commerce lives on the core platform and B2C Commerce integrates through the broader stack, the same customer record can inform a marketing email, a service case, and a product recommendation. The value is consistency. A shopper who returned an item should not get an ad for it the next day, and a service agent should see the same order the storefront created. Stitching these surfaces together is the reason brands choose Commerce Cloud over a standalone storefront.
Choosing B2C versus B2B, and where teams stumble
The first and most expensive Commerce decision is matching the engine to the buyer. Consumer buyers want fast, anonymous, low-friction checkout. Business buyers want logins, account hierarchies, negotiated pricing, purchase orders, and approval routing. Putting a business buyer through a consumer flow, or a consumer through a business flow, creates friction that no amount of polish fixes later. B2C Commerce is the answer for retail scale and rich personalization. B2B Commerce is the answer for account-based selling on the platform, and it also covers B2B2C. The second common stumble is performance. Peak events like a major sale are existential for a retailer, and skipping load testing before launch invites an outage at the worst moment. The third is treating commerce as an island. Without an Order Management and Service Cloud connection designed in from the start, post-purchase support is uncoordinated, and that is where many commerce programs quietly lose the customers they worked hardest to win.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- B2C Commerce ArchitectureSalesforce
- Salesforce B2B CommerceSalesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Commerce Cloud.
- B2C Commerce Developer DocumentationSalesforce
- Salesforce Order ManagementSalesforce
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Commerce Cloud.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
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