Comparing Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2C Enterprise(fka Demandware) Vs Salesforce D2C
This post is about comparing Saleforce Commerce Cloud B2CE (fka Demandware) with Salesforce Commerce Cloud D2C built on top of Core Platform
Summary
In this post, I will be doing a high level comparison of the feature set provided by the SFCC B2C Enterprise (Demandware) and the D2C commerce platform. For those who are not familiar, in 2016 Salesforce acquired a commerce platform called Demandware and then later somewhere in 2021 they also launched their own D2C/B2B2C commerce platform. This newer platform is built on top of the Salesforce Core Platform whereas in comparison B2CE has a completely different technology stack.
TLDR
Catalogs
B2CE
B2CE supports two different catalogs called master catalog and a storefront catalog.
- Master catalog owns the product data and is never assigned to a site.
- Storefront catalog is where you create the categories that appear on the storefront.Products must be assigned to storefront categories to show on the storefront. A storefront has only one catalog: the storefront catalog. The category structure you create in a storefront catalog is used for your storefront navigation.
D2C
In comparison, D2C only supports a single catalog also known as store catalog.In terms of use case, the store catalog works the same as B2CE storefront catalog.
Categories
We create categories and subcategories to organize and group products in the store.
B2CE
- Product can be assigned to more than one category. One of these category can be a primary category.
- Category can have one or more sub categories. This is limited to 1000 sub categories per category.
- Category can have one or more standard and custom fields.
- Category can be scheduled with onlineFrom and onlineTo date.
- Category can have one or more search refinements/filters/faucets.
- Category inherits the refinements of parent category.
- Category can define its own refinement.
- Category can block the refinement inherited from parent category.
- Category can have its own default sorting rule.
- Category can define a categorization rule.Rule based categorization rules automatically assign all products that fit a criteria to a category. Create rule sets to establish this criteria. Products that fit the criteria are automatically assigned to the category.
D2C
- Product can be assigned to more than one category. One of these category can be a primary category.
- Category can have one or more sub categories. This is limited to 100 sub categories per category.
- Category can have one or more standard and custom fields.
- Category cannot be scheduled with onlineFrom and onlineTo date.
- Category cannot define their own search refinements/filters/faucets.
- Category cannot have its own default sorting rule.
- D2C doesn’t support rule based categorization.
Products
Products are the items and services merchants sell online.
B2CE
B2CE supports different types of products.
- Standard/Simple Product. This is the most basic product type. This is best suited for products that don’t have any variations. For Example, a Cap.
- Variation Base Product. A base product is a non-sellable product type that represents all the sellable variations of a product.For example, a shirt base product can have size and color as variations.
- Variation Product. A variation product is a single product with specific values for all the base product attributes. For example, a medium size red color shirt.
- Variation Group. A variation group is a group of variation products that shares a common attribute, such as color or size.
- Product Bundle. A product bundle is a bundle/group of products that is always sold together.
- Product Sets. A product set is a set of products that can be purchased individually or together.
- Product Options. A product options enable you to sell configurable products that have optional accessories, upgrades, or extra services. For example, Warranties in 1, 2, and 7-year lengths. These can have their own prices.
D2C
D2C supports different types of products.
- Standard/Simple Product. This is the most basic product type. This is best suited for products that don’t have any variations. For Example, a flower pot.
- Variation Parent Product. A base product is a non-sellable product type that represents all the sellable variations of a product.For example, a shirt base product can have size and color as variations.
- Product Variation Product. A variation product is a single product with specific values for all the base product attributes. For example, a medium size red color shirt.
- Variation Group. This is not supported.
- Product Bundle. This is not supported.
- Product Sets. A product set is a set of products that can be purchased individually or together.
- Product Options. Currently, this is not supported.
Pricebooks
Price books are the way you define prices for products. Both platforms provide very similar capabilities.
B2CE
- Product can be assigned to one or more price books.
- A pricebook can have one or more pricebook entries but only of a single currency.
- Pricebook can be scheduled with onlineFrom and onlineTo date.
- Pricebook entries can be scheduled with onlineFrom and onlineTo date.
- Pricebook entries can be used to give bulk product discounts aka Tiered pricing.
D2C
- Product can be assigned to one or more price books.
- Pricebook can hold one or more pricebook entries with different currencies.
- Pricebook can be scheduled with onlineFrom and onlineTo date.
- Pricebook entries cannot be scheduled with onlineFrom and onlineTo date.
- Price Adjustment schedules can be used to give bulk product discounts aka Tiered pricing.
Inventory Management
B2CE
The B2CE Commerce platform provides basic storefront inventory tracking functionality. It’s intended to work with an external inventory management system, with the external system as the system of record for inventory data. For more powerful functionality, B2CE commerce platform integrate natively with Salesforce Omnichannel Inventory.
D2C
The D2C platform currently has no storefront inventory tracking functionality and neither it natively integrates with Salesforce Omnichannel Inventory.
Customers
B2CE
The B2CE platform supports following use cases.
- Customer Profiles with PII data.
- Customer Addresses
- Customer Saved Payment Methods
- Customer Product Lists (Wishlists, Gift Registeries, Custom lists etc). Platform supports multiple product lists.
- Customer Orders
D2C
The B2CE platform supports following use cases.
- Customer Profiles with PII data. This is supported through Person Accounts.
- Customer Addresses
- Customer Saved Payment Methods are not supported
- Customer wishlist (Summer’23 release) (Note: Platform does supports multiple productlists but B2C LWR template only supports a single productlist(wishlist))
- Customer Orders
Content Management
B2CE
The B2CE platform supports following use cases.
- Content Assets (You use content assets to provide your customers non-product related information such as customer support pages, special sales etc.)
- Content Slots (Used to show personalized content)
- Page Builder/Designer (Visual editor to create content pages). Pages can be localized and personalized through customer groups.
- Folders (Group content by category)
- Content personalization i.e. show different components to different customers based on criterias.
D2C
D2C platform support content management via Salesforce CMS. The platform supports almost all use cases provided by B2CE. In Summer’23 release support for content personalization is added via Expression Based Visibility.
Searchandizing
Searchandising or search merchandising, is the process of curating search results in ways that drive conversions for e-commerce stores.
B2CE
Salesforce B2C Commerce enables you to control how customers find your products on your own site as well as through external search engines, such as Google. B2CE supports following searchandizing features.
- Synonyms are words or phrases that mean exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase. For example, shirts, tshirts
- Hypernym is a broad term for a group of products.Hyponym is a term for an item in the group that the hypernym describes.
- Common phrase is a search term with 2-5 words which must be next to each other and in a specific order
- Compound word is a query term that a customer might enter as a single term or a phrase.
- Stop words aren’t indexed and therefore are ignored when they’re entered in a query. These are words that don’t influence the result of a search query
- Search Suggestions feature is when a shopper starts to enter a search term on the storefront, the storefront application shows terms that can help complete the search. B2CE suggestion the following types of content
- Categories
- Products
- Content
- Brand Names
- Additional Phrases
- Search Autocorrections - When enabled, the spelling of the words in the user’s search phrase are automatically corrected or completed before the actual search is executed
- Einstein Search Recommendations - Commerce Cloud Einstein can improve searches with personalized type-ahead guidance.When enabled, this feature provides AI-driven autocorrection and term completion.
D2C
D2C platform provides AI-powered search uses natural language processing to interpret queries and return relevant results that account for synonyms, alternative spellings, abbreviations, typos, and more. This custom-built AI algorithm works behind the scenes by training on your storefront activity data.
- Synonyms
- Alternative spellings
- Abbreviations
- Misspellings
- Search Suggestions (Summer’23 release)
Promotions
B2CE
The platform supports different types of promotion and use cases like Product, Order and Shipping level promotions. The platform has extensive support of creating rule based promotion criterias like give 10% discount on all products who have color value as red. Additionally B2CE platform also supports restricting promotions to a specific payment method.
- Product Promotions
- Percent Off
- Amount Off
- Fixed Price
- Price from Price Book
- Bonus Products
- Choice of Bonus Products (For example, spend at least $1,000 on living room furniture and get your choice of three different types of televisions.)
- Combination of Product Promotion (For example, buy all items in an advertised outfit to receive the discount.)
- Buy X Get Y Promotion (For example, buy 2 pairs of jeans to get a third pair at 50% off.)
- Buy X and Y Get Z Promotion (For example, buy a T-shirt and jeans to get a free belt.)
- Buy X for Total Promotion (For example, buy three discounted products for $30.)
- Order Promotions
- Percent Off
- Amount Off
- Bonus Products
- Choice of Bonus Products
- Shipping Promotions
- Percent Off
- Amount Off
- Fixed Price
- Free Shipping
D2C
The supports different types of promotion and uses cases like Product, Transaction(Order) level promotions. The platform doesn’t support creating advanced rule based promotion criterias based on product attributes, price etc and neither it supports restricting promotions to shipping or payment methods.
Documentation on different promotion use cases - https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.comm_example_promotions.htm&type=5
- Product Promotions
- Percentage Discount - Deducts a percent from the price of a product or transaction.
- Fixed Amount Off Unit Price - Deducts a currency amount off a single unit of a product.
- Fixed Amount Off Line Item Total - Deducts a currency amount off a line item total.
- Fixed Amount Off Transaction - Deducts a currency amount off the entire order.
- Fixed Price - Designates a promotional price for a product.
- Total Fixed Price - Designates a promotional price for a set of products.
- Combination of Product Promotion (For example, buy all items in an advertised outfit to receive the discount.)
- Buy X Get Y Promotion (For example, purchase two items and get your third product at 50% off!.)
- Buy X and Y Get Z Promotion (For example, buy a top and bottoms to receive a complimentary accessory!.)
- Buy X for Total Promotion (For example, Buy three discounted products for $30.)
- Order Promotions
- Percent Off
- Amount Off
- Shipping Promotions are not supported.
Stores (Storelocator)
B2CE
B2CE platform supports the Brick to Click business model.The Brick and Click model gives customers options for where they can shop.
As a merchant, you make physical store information, such as address, phone number, hours of operation, and sales events easily available to customers online.You can create stores in Business Manager and use the store geolocations file to provide geolocation details for the B2C Commerce store locator functionality.
You can also offer the pick-up from store capability within your online retail store. To set up pick-up from store, you associate a store with an inventory list using the B2C Commerce APIs and a Business Manager setting.
D2C
Currently, D2C platform doesn’t support this use case.
Gift Certificates
B2CE
Create gift card certificates for shoppers to use on your storefront. Shoppers can purchase a gift certificate and email it to a recipient of their choice, redeem a gift certificate as a method of payment, and check a gift certificate balance
D2C
Currently, D2C platform doesn’t support this use case.
Shipping Methods
B2CE
B2CE supports configuring shipping methods in the business manager.The platform support following use cases
- Default Shipping Method (When set a default shipping method is pre-selected in checkout)
- Fixed and percentage value shipping costs.
- Product Fixed Cost
- Product Shipping Surcharge
- Excluding shipping method based on Address.
- Excluding shipping method based on Product.
- Restricting shipping method to certain customer/buyer groups.
D2C
D2C platform does supports a native shipping service. This feature is not as feature rich as B2CE and only supports simple use cases.
Payment Methods
B2CE
B2CE supports configuring payment methods in the business manager.A site can support one or more payment methods from different payment gateway providers. The platform support following use cases
- Restricting payment method to certain customer/buyer groups.
- Restricting payment method to certain countries.
- Restricting payment method to certain currencies.
- Restricting payment method to min and max basket total.
D2C
D2C patform also supports payment methods. Unfortunately, a storefront/site can only support a single payment gateway provider. D2C doesn’t support any advanced use cases of restricting payment methods similar to B2CE without customization.
SEO
B2CE
B2CE supports following use cases for SEO optimization.
- SEO friendly URLs for Category, Content, Product.
- Rule based SEO friendly urls based on product, category fields.
- Custom Replacement Rules (Set up rules on how characters are replaced in the incoming URLs.)
- URL Redirects to redirect B2CE url to another B2CE url.
- Static and Dynamic mapping to redirect unknown urls to B2CE urls. This is used to migrate urls from legacy platform to B2CE platform. This support both static and dynamic redirect rule.
- Sitemaps
- Robots.txt
- Page Meta Tag Rules (Page meta tags are used in HTML documents to provide structured data about a web page. Common tags are title, robots, description, and social tags such as open graph tags.)
D2C
D2C support following use cases for SEO optimization.
- SEO friendly URLs for Category, Content, Product.
- Rule based SEO friendly urls based on product, category fields.
- Custom Replacement Rules are not supported
- Internal URL Redirects to redirect D2C url to another D2C url. See here
- External URL redirects. See here
- Dynamic URL Redirects. This is only support for LWR stores and it is still in Beta. See here
- Sitemaps. See here
- Robots.txt. See here
- Meta Tags for Store Pages. See here
Commerce Einstein
B2CE
B2CE platform supports following uses cased for commerce Einstein
- Product Recommendations
- Search Suggestions
- Predictive Sorting
- Search Dictionaries (When enabled, Einstein Search Dictionaries consumes all site searches and search-related settings, and surfaces terms that are searched for but are not in a dictionary.)
D2C
B2CE platform supports following uses cased for commerce Einstein
- Product Recommendations
- Search Suggestions (Summer’23 release)
Site Performance
B2CE
B2CE platform provides numerous way to track the site performance. These are as follows
- Reports and Dashboards (This provides average response times of all the pages vised by the customer on live site)
- Pipeline profiler
- Code Profiler
D2C
Currently, D2C platform doesn’t provide any way to track the site performance. Maybe in future Salesforce Scale Center and Performance Assistant can fill this gap.
Dynamic Imaging service (DIS)
B2CE
- B2CE platform supports Dynamic Imaging service (DIS) to streamline serving images to your storefront. The service eliminates the need to upload a catalog of different-sized images to meet your storefront requirements.The service uses a single, high-resolution image as a source image that is dynamically transformed to your specifications, and served to your storefront. The DIS transformation parameters give you control over an image’s size, crop, overlay, format, background color, and quality settings.
D2C
- Currently, D2C platform doesn’t support DIS.