Salesforce Commerce Cloud Cartridge

This guide explains how to integrate the Bloomreach Engagement cartridge for Salesforce Commerce Cloud. The cartridge speeds up data exchange setup between your SFCC store and Bloomreach, reducing integration time from months to weeks and lowering overall integration costs.

How it works

The Bloomreach Engagement cartridge is a code package installed directly into your SFCC store by a developer using Eclipse IDE configured with the Force.com IDE Plug-In. You can download it from GitHub. It's open-source and available under an MIT license.

Once installed, the cartridge provides a full initial data export and near real-time incremental updates. These updates support various StartRight (Plug and Play) use cases. Data feeds are generated as CSV files by frequently scheduled jobs and imported into Bloomreach via the Imports feature. You can configure the frequency of these jobs yourself.

Supported SFCC versions

The cartridge can be installed on the following SFCC versions:

• SiteGenesis (also known as Demandware): Commerce Cloud Platform Release 16.8 and Site Genesis 105.2.0 or later.
• Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA): Commerce Cloud Platform Release 16.8 and SFRA 6.0.0 or later.

Plugin features

When the plugin is activated, the data feeds run an initial import and generate near real-time updates. The imports include:

• Customer data feed: Customer information, including an initial full dump and incremental near real-time updates.
• Purchase and purchase item feed: Purchase data for placed orders, covering both registered customers and guest orders. Includes an initial full dump and near-real-time incremental updates.
• Catalog feeds: Product and variant product item definitions. Full dumps are run daily from the SFCC staging environment.
• Inventory feeds: Product and variant availability and stock amounts. Full dumps run every 4 hours from the SFCC production environment.

Set up the cartridge

The cartridge's data schema is tailored to fit the Plug and Play use cases out of the box. That said, your SFCC instance is likely customized, so you'll need to adjust the cartridge to match your setup.

Configure mapping

Start by configuring the data mapping in Salesforce Business Manager > Site Preferences. If you need more advanced customization, you'll have to make changes at the code level.

Install the cartridge

A developer with access to your SFCC store, or your Salesforce agency (system integration partner), handles the installation. The process typically takes a few hours. Once installation is complete, your administrator takes over to configure the cartridge settings.

To speed things up, work closely with a Bloomreach consultant from the start. Both systems need to be configured correctly for data exchange to work. The full installation and configuration guide is available on GitHub, with separate instructions for each SFCC version.

Required project IDs

Your project needs the following IDs configured:

• customer_id: Hard ID. This is the Salesforce Commerce Cloud Customer ID, extracted from user registration.
• email_id: Hard ID, lowercase, trimmed. The email address is the primary customer identifier in Bloomreach. This information is extracted from registration or from a guest order.

Limitations

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Warning

The cartridge must be downloaded and installed by a developer or agency for your SFCC instance.

This integration currently does not support the following:

• Consents as events (customer flags can be imported as part of the customers feed).
• Web tracking (use the JS SDK to handle web tracking separately in your Tag Manager).
• Real-time tracking under 2 minutes (cadence is defined on the Salesforce side, depending on export job schedules).
• Multi-storefront installations (no support for separating data into different projects).
• Storefront-based data filtering (the cartridge exports all data into files without filtering by storefront, which creates issues if you want data from an SFCC installation separated by storefront into multiple Bloomreach projects, for example by region).

Additionally, note the following:

• Data transfer runs through frequently scheduled import jobs, which has broader implications for data freshness and timing.
• SFCC may be configured to use 3 levels of product grouping: (1) primary, (2) variation group, and (3) variations. The cartridge and use cases are set up to use only 2 levels: (1) products and (2) variants. If you need 3 levels, you must duplicate and adjust the primary feed and update the use cases on the Bloomreach side to work with these 3 levels.