B2C Commerce Solution for Grocery

Groceries

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In January 2020, only 5% of grocery purchases were made online. Then, COVID-19 arrived. Almost overnight, grocery stores experienced an unprecedented spike in demand. Demand has slowed, but certain behaviors are here to stay as consumers continue to rely on digital-first shopping for grocery. See Salesforce Industry Solutions for Retail.

Convenience and safety are driving online grocery shopping. Pre-COVID, this space was already trending, with 10% of U.S. consumers regularly shopping online for groceries and a market value that doubled from 2016 through 2018. COVID-19 has accelerated the growth of this opportunity, with a 30% increase in global online grocery sales, and over $7 billion in sales in the U.S. in the month of June 2020 (Digital Commerce 360, Supermarket News, Sharecast). That same month, Salesforce partners saw a 200% surge in B2C grocery revenue and customer visits (B2C Commerce Cloud GMV July 2019 - June 2020).

Offering groceries for online purchase and store pickup adds convenience to the shopping experience. And it offers unique opportunities for cross-selling, up-selling, recipe pages that inspire shoppers, nutritional requirement filters that guide their purchases, and analytics-informed promotions that are triggered by store-specific criteria.

The B2C Commerce Toolkit for Grocery allows developers to quickly stand up a digital storefront with prebuilt components to increase customer convenience at brick-and-mortar grocery stores. The full-featured implementation lets customers shop online and purchase groceries for store pickup at a time they select.

Bundled and ready-to-configure apps provide speed to launch. The B2C Commerce Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) grocery components provide an authentic grocery shopping experience. Shoppers can compare and filter groceries by price, brand, or nutritional profile. They can save shopping lists for future visits, fulfill targeted promotions, or select items by choosing a recipe. A time-slot manager app manages pickup scheduling, and even parking space reservations.

Also, store associates can pick and pack orders using a mobile Sample Picker App that accelerates order fulfillment.

  • Digital grocery storefront experience: reference architecture that includes grocery-specific PLP and PDP pages.
  • Store based pricing, promotions, and availability.
  • Pick up time management and selection.
  • Picker app for store associates (coming soon).

The Salesforce Commerce platform enables grocers with features and accelerators to meet the needs of digital-first customers.

  • High-Scale Customer Experience (with Storefront Reference Architecture)
  • Multiple and Localized Site Management
  • High-Scale Commerce Services: Search, Promotions, Campaigns, and More
  • Omnichannel Inventory - Across Hundreds of Stores and Thousands of SKUs
  • Page Designer and Content
  • Dynamic Imaging Service
  • Analytics
  • Privacy Tools
  • Embedded CDN
  • Integrated Payments
  • Curbside Pickup
  • Headless APIs - Extend commerce services to shopper touchpoints
  • Integration - integrate third-party data sources
  • AI-Driven Capabilities Powered by Einstein
    • Einstein Predictive Sort
    • Einstein Product Recommendations
    • Einstein Commerce Insights
    • Einstein Search Dictionaries
    • Einstein Search Recommendations
  • Salesforce Order Management - to decompose, orchestrate, and complete provisioning to assetize services and products.
  • B2C Developer Tools
    • Salesforce Commerce API
    • Open Commerce API (OCAPI)
    • Software Development Kits (SDK)
    • Mulesoft Connector for Data API
  • Ecosystem
  • Salesforce Marketing and Service Cloud integration
  • B2C Commerce Toolkit for Grocery from GitHub
  • Time Slot Manager from GitHub
  • Sample Picker App for Grocery from GitHub
  • Store locator
  • Heroku (or comparable PaaS) for Time Slot Manager app

The B2C Commerce Toolkit for Grocery is a free Salesforce Community solution offered as an unmanaged package. With this toolkit, you can access the full power of the community, such as shared code enhancements, and contribute to the toolkit yourself.

You customize, brand, and stand up your storefront on B2C Commerce Cloud and a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) such as Heroku, using a suite of B2C Commerce Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) GitHub plugins and assets. The solution incorporates best practices based on our proven and imminently scalable B2C Commerce grocery architecture.

The toolkit comes with sample configurations and data for best practice sharing on an operational grocery storefront. Implementation time depends on integration into your existing application landscape and customization requirements.

B2C Commerce licensing and professional services aren't included as part of the toolkit, which is provided under the BS-3-Clause. For full license text, see the LICENSE file in the repo root, or go to The 3-Clause BSD License.

Use B2C Commerce Toolkit for Grocery assets to brand your storefront and craft grocery-optimized customer journeys:

  • Build a self-serve digital grocery storefront for your chain.
  • Offer store-specific product range, pricing (including price-per-unit), and promotions dynamically loaded when customers select a store.
  • Manage time slots and capacity by store for shopper pickup times.
  • Feature grocery style product lists and product detail pages.
  • Support shopping list memory, filtered searches, and recipe and promotion pages.
  • Use and extend a sample picker mobile app (coming soon) for order assembly and order updates.
  • Grocery Storefront cartridges: A full-featured storefront use case with sample configurations that you operationalize with your SFRA integration.
  • Select Store plugin: Displays available stores, open times, and launches the selected storefront.
  • Theme Plugin: Supports customizing and branding of your storefront.
  • The Time Slot Manager:
    • Runs on Heroku or a comparable PaaS.
    • Integrated into the storefront.
    • APIs to manage time slots per store.
    • User interface for slot management via the B2C Commerce Business Manager cartridge.
    • Extensible to support parking space booking, table reservations, and so on.
  • Coming soon, the Sample Picker App for Grocery for store associates (mobile):
    • View order details (Fulfilled, In Progress).
    • Substitute products as needed.

The developer community and Salesforce Professional Services can advise and help every step of the way.

  • Gather payment gateway, product images, prices, inventory, and store feeds.
  • Acquire SFRA for Grocery GitHub assets and plugins from B2C Commerce Cloud.
  • Deploy a PaaS such as Heroku to run the Time Slot Manager service.
  • Brand and customize assets using low-code Page Designer.
  • Explore, model, and build out your solution using the included reference architecture storefront and sample data.
  • Integrate with existing warehouse management (for Sample Picker App), point-of-sale, and order management systems as needed.

  1. On the Homepage, shoppers choose between Just browsing or Select My Store.

  2. Shoppers find your store by entering their location, or searching by postal code, city, or state. Selecting a store displays its profile page, showing general information such as open hours. Clicking through launches the storefront, with store-specific assortment, pricing, availability, promotions, recipe pages, and pickup scheduling.

  3. Select a pickup time. Shoppers navigate available day and time slots, which the grocer configures using the Time Slot Manager cartridge for Business Manager. The earliest available times appear atop the list. Unavailable slots are listed as unavailable.

  4. Browse items on a Product List Page or Product Detail Page:

    • View available products by their price, including price per unit.
    • View nutritional badges, such as vegan and dairy.
    • Save to the shopping list.
    • Add to the cart.
    • View and modify the item quantity in cart.
    • View related promotions.
    • Filter by category, nutrition, brand, and so on.
    • Sort by popularity, price, or other metrics.

  5. View cart and mini cart, which allows shoppers to highlight substitutable (low inventory) products and save items to a shopping list. Items are grouped by category for a quick overview.

  6. Complete the order by converting all or some of the cart or shopping list to check out and pay.

  7. Save the order as a shopping list for future purchases. The shopping list is displayed on the shopper’s My Account page.

  8. Edit the order before pick up.

  9. Store associates fulfill the order using the integrated mobile Sample Picker App (coming soon). The app shows the order status, sorted by shopper pickup time. If a colleague is picking an order, the app displays an In Progress tag and it's locked for other pickers.

  10. Associates use the mobile Sample Picker App to check for products that the shopper highlighted as ok-to-substitute if inventory is depleted.

Launch a Commerce Quick Start Solution that provides out-of-the-box solutions for Grocery and Quick Service Restaurants, along with a Curbside Pickup with Order Management. Developers can offload implementation and managed services to partners in these offerings.

Buy Online, Pick up In-Store (BOPIS) Provide options for low- and no-contact pickup Quick Start for Grocery and Quick Service Sell essential grocery and food items online

Salesforce Professional Services teams can help you every step of the way. With deep industry and commerce expertise, customer success experts can help plan, scope, and build your next grocery project.

To access the Salesforce Commerce Cloud GitHub repository, you must have a GitHub account that is linked to your Commerce Cloud Account Manager Credentials. Authenticate your account with the Salesforce Commerce Cloud SSO Signup.