What is Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud? A Complete Guide to Features, Architecture, Benefits & Pricing

Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based e-commerce platform designed for retailers and businesses that directly deal with their customers. It is part of the Commerce Cloud solution suite, which also includes B2B and D2C Commerce Cloud. 

Originally introduced in 2004 as Demandware, it was later acquired by Salesforce for approximately $2.8 million and was renamed ‘Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud’. It enabled Salesforce to cater to the needs of B2C businesses and offer a complete CRM solution. They could connect their web storefronts natively to Salesforce marketing, sales, and service clouds, manage everything from product catalogs and promotions to customer support and AI-driven personalization with Einstein, all in one place. 

Fast-forwarding to 2025, Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud is serving 11,370+ businesses globally. They are not only utilizing the platform but are also experiencing quantitative benefits. E-commerce businesses that moved from legacy systems to this cloud platform saw a 29% increase in their digital revenue.

At the same time, it helped a variety of users, such as merchandisers, developers, and administrators, by automating workflows 27% faster (Salesforce), highlighting B2C Cloud as the ultimate solution for modern businesses. 

Want to know how Salesforce did it? Explore this blog!   

Why is Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud a Modern Solution for E-commerce Businesses? 

Here are the key business challenges that B2C Cloud solves. 

1. Poor Checkout Experience and Cart Abandonment 

Complex or slow checkouts are major friction points for businesses. As per Baymard’s premium research findings, 70% of users abandon their carts due to an inefficient checkout experience. A lengthy and complicated checkout process requiring multiple steps, charging hidden fees, or unfriendly mobile experiences can make the customer abandon their purchase.

B2C Commerce Cloud provides optimized, mobile-first checkout experiences through its variety of features. Let’s see how: 

Templated Checkout and Cart Experiences  

You get pre-built templates that can be tailored to match your brand tone and identity. Plus, you can integrate payment gateways of your choice. 

Einstein’s predictive intelligence helps you create upselling opportunities that are similar to what the customer is looking for, removing friction and reducing shopping cart abandonment. 

“Buy Now” Express Checkout

With the latest Payments plugin, B2C Cloud enables an express “Buy Now” experience. It bypasses the full cart while preserving existing cart contents. This one-click flow significantly simplifies the conversion of leads into customers. 

Simplified Cart Cleanup 

Customers can modify items, shipping details, or apply coupons mid-checkout without restarting the process. This prevents losing progress and ultimately reduces friction as well.   

The built-in cart-lifetime feature retains cart contents across sessions, both for signed-in and guest users. This makes it easy for shoppers to resume where they left off. 

Marketing Cloud Integration and Abandoned Cart Journeys

Commerce Cloud integrates with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, enabling automated abandoned-cart email journeys:

• It tracks customer behavior.
• Automates sending personalized reminder emails, discount emails, and more. 
• Plans multi-step email sequences to re-engage shoppers.

2. Scalability and Performance Issues

Many businesses struggle to manage increased web traffic during busy shopping seasons. This leads to website crashes, lost sales, failed transactions, and slow performance, which ultimately affects the revenue.  

B2C Commerce Cloud automatically adjusts its resources as per demand surges to maintain high performance. It increases or decreases the number of application servers and processing power in real time to manage increased traffic.

With layered caching and its seamless management, it minimizes downtime and server strain. This can speed up the processing of data-heavy content in B2C storefronts, such as videos.

It allows you to control response times, traffic patterns, and bot activity to quickly identify and resolve bottlenecks.  

3. Competitive Pressure and Customer Experience

Improving how customers perceive a brand and their overall experience is often challenging in this growing competition and economic uncertainty.

A variety of B2C commerce cloud features come together to work on it. 

The headless commerce and API-driven architecture allow you to make changes to the front-end and back-end separately. This promotes independent working and eliminates the risk of false deployment. It works for both web and mobile-first experiences, ensuring a consistent, fast shopping experience across web, mobile apps, kiosks, social media, and in-store touchpoints for customers.

It ensures global storefront management through multisite setup, including multi-language and multi-currency support. Therefore, using centralized control, you can scale swiftly across the globe while also delivering localized experiences. 

Using Page Designer, your business teams can quickly build and refresh landing pages with banners, carousels, and product sets. This offers richer user experiences.

4. Market Adaptation and Future-Proofing

Businesses need to adapt quickly to changing market conditions, customer preferences and trends, and competitive challenges. According to Talend, 95% of purchases are expected to be made online by the year 2040.

Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud helps in catering to this challenge better. It utilizes Einstein AI capabilities to the fullest to ensure your business adapts to the changing market trends. It works on personalized recommendations, predictive merchandising, and search optimization. 

On the other hand, Agentforce agents assist across different domains, from trend and merchandising analysis, handling routine requests, to booking follow-ups, and much more. It optimizes customer experiences and operational processes, adapting to market behavior with minimal manual intervention.

With omnichannel support and all-over sync, you get a consistent experience across all channels and platforms. With this flexibility, you can enter new markets quickly and deliver culturally adaptive, relevant shopping experiences with ease where your customers are present. 

Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud Architecture

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is the base resource on which all your instances and live sites run. You do not directly interact with it, but it acts as a foundation. 

Realm-Based Architecture

A Realm contains all your commerce instances where you can develop, stage, and deploy multiple sites with different branding ideas and tones. 

An instance is a specific environment within a realm that acts as an application infrastructure, comprising components such as web servers, application servers, and databases. 

If your business has different teams or locations, consider using multiple realms. You get isolated environments for different business units or geographical regions, yet easy data shareability. This allows each team to manage their sites separately if they have different processes or policies. 

Websites within the same realm can share product data with each other. However, websites in different realms cannot share data directly through the catalog. You can still share data by importing it into different realms.

Understand Instances 

Talking about the instance group, there is a primary instance and a secondary instance group. Let’s understand them. 

There are 6 B2C Commerce instances: 3 or more Sandbox instances for code development and 3 different instances for site staging, testing, and deployment.

Primary Instance Group’s Component: 

• Staging Instance
  • It is used to test your site before deployment. 
  • Data and code are uploaded to the staging environment and then copied to production or development.
• Development Instance
  • It is used for configuring the site, enhancing data, and importing data. 
  • It mimics the production environment. 
  • This instance serves as the final step for testing code and adding content.
• Production Instance
  • This is the live site that customers use.  
  • It connects to the CDN provided by B2C Commerce Cloud.  
  • Caching is turned on.

Secondary Instance Group:

It contains Sandbox instances for development and testing, where developers can easily modify code without affecting the live environment. 

Other points to consider while understanding B2C Commerce Cloud Architecture

Data Movement Process

Understand how data flows inside the system. 

• Import/Export System: This system brings in data, such as product, pricing, and inventory details, from other sources into B2C Commerce. You can also use Import and Export to transfer data between different types of instances.
• Data Replication: This process securely transfers data and code between instances. It only moves from the Staging instance to either a Development or Production instance.
• Code Upload: This feature allows you to upload code from a developer’s local machine to a Sandbox or Staging instance using UX Studio.

Essential User Roles  

This specifies the particular access as per the roles. 

• Developer Role: The role of Salesforce Developer is to create or change templates, pipelines, and scripts on their local machines. They are responsible for uploading code to the Staging instance and testing. 
• Merchandiser Role: Merchandisers create campaigns and promotions, manage product information, and set up search behaviours. 
• Administrator Role: Administrators grant access to instances and certain features. They restart instances, manage data feeds, and upload certificates.

Top Businesses Using Salesforce B2C Commerce

Here are some of the key businesses that have used the platform and seen better results (Source: Salesforce):

1. YETI 

It is a world-renowned retailer of innovative outdoor products and a durable range of drinkware. 

Challenges

• They wanted a fully customized and unified experience to guide their customers/visitors through their wide variety of drinkware range portfolios. However, their existing commerce templates allowed limited customization, which restricted them.  
• They wanted to launch campaign experiences without compromising performance on the mobile platform. 

Solution

• The composable storefront feature in B2C Commerce Cloud offered them the freedom to combine existing templates with new ones without disrupting them. 
• The capabilities of Einstein AI helped deliver highly personalized content and product suggestions. 
• B2C cloud’s auto-scaling capability helped deploy campaigns without affecting the performance
• The omnichannel feature enabled seamless campaign management over mobile channels as well. 

Results

• They were able to prioritize their customers’ experience and improve their year-on-year mobile engagement rates by 63%.
• Campaign pages loaded faster, looked better, and engaged users more despite heavy content like videos.
• Business teams could iterate and deploy unique shopping experiences faster than before. (source) 

2. ReserveBar

It is a premium beverage e-commerce leader.

Challenges

• They wanted to scale their business and offer their customers on-demand delivery with real-time inventory. 
• They wanted to have access to a headless commerce model to manage high traffic during new product drops.
• ReserveBar was dealing with complex payment and merchandising logic that resulted in poor checkout performance. 

Solution

With the capabilities of SFCC (Salesforce Commerce Cloud), they were able to: 

• Enable real-time inventory, pricing, and order sync across partners
• Support a headless architecture for flexibility in UI/custom pages
• Leverage API/SDK integrations for embedded checkouts on third-party sites
• Roll out multisite architectures easily (e.g., GetStocked)

Result

• They scaled their operations and introduced new product catalogs as well.
• Built the GetStocked site in just 30 days.
• Evolved from multi-day delivery to 20 min–2 hr service through real-time inventory and pricing (source) 

3. Siemens

Siemens is Europe’s largest industrial manufacturer, with operations in 190 countries. 

Challenge

• They struggled with disconnected, siloed offerings across hardware, software, and services, which hampered customer buying and engagement. 
• They lacked a unified digital storefront for seamless ordering and personalized commerce.

Solution

• Siemens built Xcelerator Marketplace using B2C Commerce Cloud. It consolidated its offering into one integrated, user-friendly e-commerce platform. 
• They leveraged Einstein AI to recommend tailored hardware-software-service bundles.

Result

• The Xcelerator Marketplace was launched in under six months.  
• By combining CRM, AI, and Commerce, Siemens increased engagement and advanced customer-centric selling. 
• It improved their field service workflows, resulting in first-time fix rates by 100%. (source) 

Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud Implementation Challenges

Here are some of the top challenges that you might face while implementing Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud. 

Implementation Challenges: 

• Migrating large volumes of legacy data (e.g., products, orders, customers) can lead to duplication, inconsistency, and errors. 
• Integrating with ERPs, payment gateways, and third-party systems adds complexity due to API constraints and data mapping issues.
• Over-customizing the platform results in fragile codebases, complications during upgrades, and deployment delays.
• New users might struggle to adapt to the platform quickly, requiring structured onboarding and support.
• Ensuring role-based access control, securing customer data, and complying with standards like PCI or GDPR are critical yet complex. 
• Strict platform limits, such as API call quotas and undocumented features, may affect scalability, performance, and the ability to integrate seamlessly.

How Can These Be Dealt With? 

You need skilled Salesforce experts to address implementation challenges and ensure a smoother setup of B2C Commerce Cloud. 

Developer:

• Automates data migration using transformation scripts and APIs.
• Writes clean, modular code and documents customizations.
• Implements secure coding practices, including encryption. 
• Monitors API usage, builds retry/batching mechanisms, and shares best practices through internal workshops.

Architect:

• Designs scalable ETL (Extract, Transfer, Load) pipelines and chooses the best integration tools as per your business suitability.
• Balances out-of-the-box features with custom extensions. 
• Defines API and data governance strategies aligned with compliance needs.

Administrator:

• Performs data cleansing, defines field mappings, and validates data integrity in your system. 
• Implements access control policies and monitors API usage logs.
• Builds user training guides and enforces governance practices.

Security/Admin:

• Conducts regular security audits and log monitoring.
• Resolves vulnerabilities and ensures compliance with regulatory standards.

Salesforce Support/Consultant:

• Provide strategic and technical advice along with hands-on assistance. 
• Delivers role-specific training. 

Here is Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud Pricing (Updated) 

Salesforce B2C Commerce offers various pricing tiers, each tailored to different business needs and scales. Here’s a breakdown of the pricing levels:

Name	B2C Commerce—Growth	B2C Commerce—Plus	Commerce Cloud B2C Premium
Pricing	2% of Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), which refers to the total monetary value of all goods sold on a platform or marketplace over a specific period.	3% of Gross Merchandise Value (GMV).	Contact Salesforce for pricing.
Features	– Allows 5 sites and 10 pricebooks. – Offers 1.2 million on-demand Sandbox credits.(Varying amounts of Sandbox credits for testing and development purposes.)	– Allows unlimited sites and pricebooks. – 2 Million on-demand sandbox credits.	– Offers unlimited sites and pricebooks. – 2 Million on-demand sandbox credits – Full Order Management – 500K Data Cloud Credits.

Summary 

Undoubtedly, Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud can elevate your business’s e-commerce operations to the next level. From managing customer experiences to streamlining storefront management, everything can be done with utmost efficiency and automation. 
However, successfully implementing such a powerful platform requires expertise and the right team. That’s where we come in! Our skilled Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud developers are here to help businesses leverage the platform capabilities seamlessly. Whether you need skilled developers, certified Salesforce B2C solution architects, consultants, or project managers, we have you covered.