Salesforce Commerce Cloud Cartridge

The following article is a guide on how to integrate Salesforce Commerce Cloud Cartridge with Bloomreach Engagement.

Bloomreach Engagement cartridge for Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) enables you to set up data exchange between your system and Engagement much faster, from months to weeks. This cartridge lowers integration costs and time if your store runs on the SFCC commerce platform.

How does it work

The cartridge is a code installed into the SFCC store by developers using their Eclipse IDE configured with the Salesforce plugin (Force.com IDE Plug-In). It can be downloaded from Github and is provided as an open-source with an MIT license.

Cartridge provides full initial data export and incremental updates in near real-time, which is used in various StartRight (Plug and Play) use cases.

Data feeds in CSV files are generated by frequently scheduled jobs and immediately imported to Engagement via the Imports feature. You can configure the frequency of the jobs easily yourself.

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Note

The cartridge can be installed on these SFCC versions: the older SiteGenesis (also known as Demandware) since the Commerce Cloud Platform Release 16.8 and Site Genesis 105.2.0, and the newer Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) since the Commerce Cloud Platform Release 16.8 and SFRA 6.0.0.

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
  • initial full dump
  • incremental near real-time data feed
• Purchase and Purchase Item Feed: Purchase data for placed orders (for registered customers as well as guest orders)
  • initial full dump
  • incremental near real-time data feed
• Catalog Feeds: Product and Variant product item definitions
  • Full dumps every day from the SFCC staging environment
• Inventory Feeds: Product and Variant availability and amount on stock
  • Full dumps every 4 hours from the SFCC production environment

How to set it up

The data scheme of all feeds is tailored to fit the Plug and Play use cases out of the box. However, the SFCC instance is expected to be somewhat customized and the cartridge will need to be adjusted accordingly.

You can customize mapping in the Salesforce Business Manager > Site Preferences. More advanced customization requires specific customizations on the code level.

The cartridge is installed on your site by a developer with access to the Salesforce Commerce Cloud store or the client's Salesforce agency (system integration partner). The installation and configuration process may take a few hours. After that, your administrator can do the configuration of the cartridge.

To save time, you can close cooperation with an Engagement consultant . Your admins must configure both systems for the data exchange to work correctly. The installation and configuration guide is provided on GitHub, depending on the SFCC version.

A project needs to have the following IDs set up:

customer_id - Hard ID - Salesforce Commerce Cloud Customer ID. This information is extracted from user registration.
email_id - Hard ID, lowercase, trim; email address is the primary identifier for a customer in Bloomreach Engagement. This information is extracted from registration or from placing 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.

Currently, this integration does not support the following:

• Consents as events (customer flags can be imported as part of the Customers feed)
• Web tracking (you use our JS SDK to do web tracking in your Tag Manager separately)
• Real-time tracking (<2 minutes) (cadence is defined on the SF side, depending on the export jobs which run)
• Multi-storefront installations (no support for separating out data into different projects)
• Cartridge exports all data into files and does not filter based on storefronts. This poses a problem if you want data from an SFCC installation separated by storefront into multiple Engagement projects (e.g., by region).

Other:

• Data transfer is done in frequently scheduled jobs such as Imports, and has implications
• SFCC may be configured to use three levels of product grouping: (1) primary, (2) variation group, and (3) - variations. Use cases and the cartridge is set to use only two levels: (1)products and (2) variants. If you need three levels, you must duplicate and adjust the primary feed and update use cases on the Engagement side to work with these three levels.