Additional technology stacks
The Salesforce ecosystem encompasses much more than just the Salesforce Platform, which is why we need an overall solution architect in the first place! This section provides a high-level overview of the Salesforce ecosystem, including how individual products are built on specific technology platforms, and how conceptual clouds – or families of products – can span across technologies.
The following figure depicts the multiple technology platforms on which a B2C solution is built:
Figure 1.8 – Platforms, products, and clouds
In Figure 1.8, the shopping cart icon identifies products that are part of Salesforce Commerce Cloud and the magnifying glass icon identifies products that are part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This shows how clouds (such as Commerce Cloud) can be composed of products (such as B2C Commerce and Order Management) that are built on separate platforms (such as the B2C Commerce Platform and the Salesforce Platform).
Your job as a B2C solution architect is to design solutions that incorporate and integrate products across this ecosystem, regardless of their underlying technology, to create a cohesive solution.
Salesforce Platform and beyond
As described earlier, there are many Salesforce products built on top of the Salesforce Platform, but you should also understand that many are separate technologies. This is a vital difference to understand as a B2C solution architect since your job is to help your company or your clients to create an integrated experience that spans multiple products and clouds.
In the following sections, we'll touch on products beyond the Salesforce Platform and how they'll impact a B2C solution.
Core B2C solution technologies
For a B2C solution architect, the most important non-Salesforce Platform products to understand are the enterprise B2C Commerce product and the Marketing Cloud product. You may recall that the B2C Commerce product is part of Commerce Cloud, but that clouds in the Salesforce language don't necessarily represent specific technology, they just represent logical groupings of related components. The other products in Commerce Cloud, including Order Management and B2B Commerce, are built on the Salesforce Platform.
We'll be covering B2C Commerce and Marketing Cloud in detail during Chapter 3, Direct-to-Consumer Selling with Commerce Cloud B2C, and Chapter 4, Engaging Customers with Marketing Cloud, respectively.
Since you'll be helping Packt Gear migrate their commerce experience to Salesforce, you'll be thinking across all of these products throughout the process.
Integration-focused technologies
Beyond B2C Commerce and Marketing Cloud, it's helpful to understand the role of Salesforce products such as MuleSoft and Heroku in a B2C solution. These products serve the needs of enterprise integration scenarios and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) use cases. We'll be covering these two products in more detail during Chapter 7, Integration Architecture Options.
Out-of-scope technologies
Finally, there are many other products owned by Salesforce (the company) that are not part of the Salesforce Platform, such as Salesforce Anywhere, Slack, Tableau, and myTrailhead, but are not in the scope of this book since they aren't a core part of B2C solution use cases. That certainly doesn't mean you can't use these products in B2C solutions, you certainly can, but they are value-added rather than being a core component.
Solution architecture methodology
When you're integrating any product or technology into your overall solution, the approach is the same, whether it's another Salesforce technology, an in-house system, or a third party:
- Review and understand the capabilities of the product and the role it will play in your overall solution; what gaps does it fill?
- Review and understand the integration methodologies supported by the product.
- Map your data across systems, determining what will reside in this new product and be accessed on-demand from other products and what will be synchronized.
- Orchestrate your business use cases that include this new product across other products in the solution.
The next three chapters will cover steps 1 and 2 as they relate to Service Cloud, B2C Commerce, and Marketing Cloud, respectively. Chapter 8, Creating a 360° View of the Customer, will be focused on step 3 across the solution, and Chapter 9, Supporting Key Business Scenarios, will do the same for step 4. This will give you a clear methodology you can follow for any product or technology not explicitly covered in this book when you need to incorporate it into your solution.
In the next section, we'll cover some of the Salesforce acquisitions and legacy terminology you'll encounter in the B2C solution space.