Smarter Commerce Experiences: the Latest Developer Tools

At Salesforce Commerce Cloud, our customers consistently tell us, “we want to deliver a premium experience wherever customers interact with our brand.” This rings true today more than ever before. As shopper behavior continues to profoundly transform commerce, it’s hard to be everywhere your shoppers already are, and even harder to predict where they will be in the future.  

That’s why it’s crucial to remove any bottlenecks that prevent retailers from moving fast. The Salesforce Commerce Platform gives you the AI-powered tools to deliver premium branded experiences anywhere, with speed, innovation, and efficiency. Our click-based, low-code tools and templates gets your ecommerce storefront up and running fast, while code and APIs deliver new and engaging shopper experiences.

At  TrailheaDX — Salesforce’s must-attend conference for everyone who wants to learn about building on the Salesforce Platform — developers, admins, and architects will learn about and get hands on with new tools that empower brands to build awesome commerce experiences faster than ever.

Here’s a sneak peek at the latest innovations:

Heroku Solution Kits for Commerce Cloud

Heroku is a cloud-based platform as a service for building, deploying, monitoring, and scaling world-class business applications. Now, for the first time, we are making three different solution kits available for using Heroku and Commerce Cloud to help brands build premium, highly bespoke ecommerce experiences.

The powerful combination of Heroku and Commerce Cloud gives brands the benefit of lightning fast app development, and integration with commerce data from Commerce Cloud. This means brands can build immersive apps with innovative features like social media integration, discount alerts, chatbot engagements with customer service agents, and much more.

These solution kits provide guidelines and best practices for brands to build commerce apps for common use cases:

• Mobile App: Build a custom, mobile-native app for Commerce Cloud and easily scale it in Heroku to reach shoppers wherever they are.  
• Mobile Web Storefront App: Build a bespoke, engaging storefront experience in Heroku to match your brand positioning and enrich your shopper experience.
• In-Store App: Build a custom clienteling app on Heroku to empower store associates, unlock inventory across channels, and offer personalized services to shoppers.

Heroku is integrated with the most popular developer tools, embedded data services, and a powerful runtime for powering modern apps, which makes it ideal for developers who are building commerce apps to enhance customer experience and promote their brand across all commerce touchpoints.

The solution kits will help developers build innovative commerce experiences faster, using the frameworks and languages they already know and love.

Developers will see this in action at TrailheaDX, where we will showcase customers and SI/ISV partners who have built amazing commerce apps with Heroku and Commerce cloud.

Heroku Solution Kits for Commerce Cloud will be available late May.

On-demand developer sandboxes

On-demand sandboxes provide an easy and immediate way to spin up sandboxes (a testing environment) for developers building new innovations.

The new on-demand developer sandboxes are entirely cloud-based — no infrastructure required — and can be created or removed in a matter of minutes. This gives development teams the agility to respond to business requests, and deliver innovation, faster than ever before. Developers can acquire a sandbox on their own, then immediately begin testing new workflows, customizations, and integrations.

Development teams spend far less time waiting for and building a testing environment, and more time delivering premium experiences. This is crucial, as ecommerce storefronts are in a constant state of change based on business needs and customer demands. With on-demand sandboxes, scoping projects and sticking to timelines are much more straightforward, accurate, and transparent.

This reduces the potential for friction between development and business teams, and creates more opportunities for collaboration that empowers teams to build brand-rich experiences much faster. 

Pricing and general availability for on-demand developer sandboxes will be announced in Q3.

OCAPI Explorer: the new Open Commerce API interface

Commerce Cloud is built on an architecture that gives developers direct access to their storefront code and third-party integrations. The core platform is wrapped around a full set of Open Commerce APIs (OCAPI) that allow external applications to interface with core commerce functionality, such as cart, checkout, search, and more.

Developers just want to move faster, and now they can. The new OCAPI Explorer is a simple user interface that lets developers easily and quickly browse through their Commerce Cloud OCAPI (Data, Meta, Shop) in a single portal. Developers can also connect OCAPI Explorer to their sandbox providing a quick way to access the API of their own environments.

With OCAPI Explorer, developers have quick and efficient access to the API, can build new extensions and integrations, and try new things that allow for continuous site improvement and implementation of engaging ecommerce experiences. It aligns with Salesforce DX principles and Swagger-based development frameworks that help developers efficiently consume and test Commerce Cloud’s APIs in their own environments. OCAPI Explorer is available now.

All of these new tools are designed for one purpose: to help developers build incredible, engaging commerce experiences faster, more efficiently and with greater agility than ever before. Heroku Solution Kits for Commerce Cloud are now available.