Sites and Storefronts

In Salesforce B2C Commerce, a site is the application and associated code that runs a storefront. A storefront the user's online experience. A site can have multiple storefronts with different URLs for different brands, locales (with currency and tax differences), or multiple channels. If you are referring to a specific URL, B2C Commerce uses the term storefront.

Site Architecture Scenarios

When designing your site, your architect must consider the following:

  • The geographical relationship between storefronts and the teams that maintain them
  • Data that is shared between sites, such as product data, tax and payment information, user roles and permissions, promotions, or application code
  • Whether the storefront needs to be localized for different market locales or restructured for them
  • Data that must remain separately controlled due to corporate structure or legal requirements
  • Whether customer, basket, or transaction data carries over from one storefront to the next

    Example: An apparel retailer lets customers shop simultaneously at both their adult and children's sites. On the other hand, a retailer with two very different customer bases, such as a book publisher for religious books and fantasy fiction, can prevent crossover.

One Site, One Storefront

The simplest scenario is one site and one storefront that it supports.

One Site, Multiple Storefronts

If you have many storefronts and a single team maintaining them, you can manage them easier as a single site, even if the products are different for each site. Similarly, if you want to share baskets between storefronts, the storefronts must be part of a single site. If you are deploying many localized sites with similar branding and products, it's faster and easier to manage new storefronts as an extension of an existing site.

Multiple Sites, Multiple Storefronts

You can have multiple sites, each of which supports multiple storefronts. You can also choose to share site data, such as customer data, between sites.