Andrew Lawrence is a Director of Product Management for Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Today I am sitting down with him to talk about a wide range of topics related to B2C Commerce. We discuss how Salesforce has adopted a headless commerce approach, the new developer portal and experience for commerce developers and some of the new tools coming out.

Andrew also explains how the pandemic has impacted commerce in general for developers. It brought a variety of challenges for retailers and changed the way they navigated commerce. Tune in to learn more.

Show Highlights:

  • His early experience with technology and how that brought him to Salesforce.
  • The challenges and shifts the pandemic brought to B2C commerce.
  • How curbside pickup affected retailers.
  • How headless commerce wove many different systems together to make contactless commerce easier.
  • How developers can navigate all the different APIs and options being introduced.
  • What the new Commerce Developer Portal does for developers.
  • The community features of Commerce Cloud.
  • How the upcoming Omni Channel Inventory Microservice will help retailers manage inventory at a massive scale.
  • What Mobify is and what it will bring to Commerce Cloud.

Links:

Episode Transcript

Andrew Lawerence:
I spend my days talking to customers, focusing on the developer experience of how developers build on top of RBC commerce product.

Josh Birk:
That is Andrew Lawrence, a director of product management here at Salesforce for B2C commerce. I’m Josh Birk, your host for the Salesforce Developer Podcasts, and here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers for developers. Today, we sit down and talk with Andrew about a wide range of topics around B2C commerce, including headless commerce and the upcoming progressive web app, and a lot about what kind of impact the pandemic has had both in commerce, in general, and for developers. But we start as usual with his early years.

Andrew Lawerence:
I mean, it’s something… I got computer when I was a teenager and started writing things on it and making things happening. This was back in the eighties. So I was writing basic games that would come up and ask me questions on screen, right? And you’d type questions back and make things happen. But yeah, I mean, computers were kind of where I went. There wasn’t ever really a thought of doing something else.

Josh Birk:
So old schools Zork-style stuff?

Andrew Lawerence:
Of course. Yeah.

Josh Birk:
I love it. And what was your tech life before Salesforce like?

Andrew Lawerence:
So I worked for a computer building company in the nineties where we built computers, built PCs. And then after school, I went to a company called [Tom X 00:01:30] here in Salt Lake City where I am, and I built point of sale software. So systems for retailers, all of that. And then Tom X was acquired by Demandware and then Demandware was acquired by Salesforce.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Now, see. That was going to be my next question, is exactly how did you get introduced to Salesforce?

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah, yeah, it was via acquisition. And the interesting thing about it is that since Salesforce keeps my original time that I started at the original company that was acquired. My employee record says that I started at Salesforce in February of 1997.

Josh Birk:
See, I’m actually a little jealous about that because I did not come to Salesforce by way of acquisition. I jumped ship on part of the model crowd. So I jumped ship from Model Metrics to Salesforce and then Salesforce bought Model Metrics like the next year and suddenly all my old coworkers had tenure over me. And I’m not bitter about it all. Trust me. Not.

Andrew Lawerence:
No, it doesn’t sound like it.

Josh Birk:
Okay. Okay. So let’s frame things a little bit talking about B2C commerce, developing on our product and some of the challenges with it, but let’s start specifically with some of the challenges that we saw recently with the pandemic.

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the pandemic made a big difference with how retailers and commerce just started happening in general.

Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrew Lawerence:
I mean, we’re all aware of things having to move, you have to order things and go pick them up and stores are closing. And so all of these people that were formerly doing… In all honesty, some retailers that are doing commerce primarily have their stores and now they move to, well now we’ve got to completely do it digital. We have to completely build a digital commerce front end and that needs to be ideal for all of our customers. So it really exploded. And then companies quickly started pivoting their operating models. They’re trying to launch things directly to customers. They’re trying to do curbside pickup. They’re trying to do delivery. All of these things that they’re all of a sudden trying to do just to keep going through the pandemic. So it’s been really interesting to watch how things have shifted over the last nine months.

Josh Birk:
And that last part, I think is really kind of interesting because even on an e-commerce point of view, probably not a lot of stores thought we’re going to have to do curbside. Was that whole new pipelines that had to be put together in order to make that work?

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean that’s a great point. I mean, you have a lot of retailers who, the idea of having to pick anything up curbside from a craft retailer or from an office supply… I mean, those were things they just didn’t bother with before. You went into the store and picked it up. Well, now you can’t even go into the store. So yeah. Curbside pickup became a big thing and developers are suddenly having to go, they’re having their IT departments and their business units coming in and saying, Hey, we need to build this. Oh. And we need it running next week-

Josh Birk:
Like now.

Andrew Lawerence:
…Because of all of our stores are closed. Yeah.

Josh Birk:
Right. Yeah. That’s what I was just thinking about. A lot of enterprise cycles, they’re done, even if we’re in an agile mode, but they’re still two, three months long and these are changes that need to get out the door immediately or they’re just losing revenue.

Andrew Lawerence:
Yep. Exactly. That’s the way they’re going to get that. They need to get revenue. The stores are shut down. They need to pull revenue in from as many sources as possible.

Josh Birk:
I mean, I think of the evolution of the food delivery app that we use. And it went from having to put text into a text field, asking them to leave it outside the door to having the optional checkbox, do you want contactless delivery to the warning box that this will be contactless delivery? You have no choice, please deal with it. There is no option B basically.

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that was another piece that kind of with the whole delivery thing also, was this contactless thing. I mean, curbside pickup is one thing, but curbside pickup where it’s just like sitting there and waiting for you to pick a very different thing for a number of different retailers and what they had to pull together.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. And then we come to just a few weeks ago where people are debating whether or not they’re going to even travel for Christmas. What did a pandemic holiday look like for B2C commerce?

Andrew Lawerence:
Well, I think we should start, for B2C commerce just through the pandemic, we’ve seen major spikes. We were seeing numbers that were just huge that kind of looked similar to holiday 2019, just during the pandemic at different points in time. So it kind of upended things there. And then once we got to the holidays, it was really interesting to see how much shopping shifted into e-commerce. So we saw, if we just take cyber week as an example, our commerce platform itself saw an increase of about 50% growth just in overall sales and 80% in page views. This is just from one year to the next, I mean, we’re essentially seeing 50, 70, 80% increase on these things to the platform. And it was really amazing to see.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Well, I mean, amazing. I think actually your word is probably more app approved than nice on it. Okay. So we have more people online. We have more revenues to storefronts, more interaction points, much more traffic, not just the holiday, but leading up to it. So let’s talk about some of the tools on Commerce Cloud that we’re using to help build these solutions. And first let’s just kind of frame the concept in general, give me the elevator pitch for headless commerce.

Andrew Lawerence:
I think the elevator pitch for headless commerce is really about exposing APIs and making it so that your developers can build commerce experiences that they want to on their own timelines and using their own mechanisms to do it. So now they’re building directly against the APIs. They’re using agile processes and modern technologies to present these experiences to their consumers, whether they are the full storefront that’s running when you go to that website in your browser, on your computer, whether it’s a mobile application that they’re building around your phone, whether it’s an app to run in a Google voice assistant or voice assisted shopping. All of those are things that now with providing APIs that you can do commerce experience, now you open up all these possibilities for experiences.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha. So if I have to add that allow contactless delivery, you’re exposing, I’m talking to the same end points to get that done, and then just transferring it to the different clients that I’m going to be exposing to my users.

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah, yeah. And giving them the flexibility of where they need to do that. I mean, with retail and with commerce, it’s amazing how many systems may come into play just from a simple commerce transaction, right? I mean, if you think about just a simple commerce transaction, where you go online, you order one thing, you put it in your basket, you say that I would like to have it delivered this day and that’s it. And then you pay for it. There’s so many systems that come into play, weaving all of that stuff together. And so making APIs available to make it easier to weave pieces together is what headless is really all about.

Josh Birk:
And talk to me just a little bit about scale since it’s a real power of our cloud. When we’re talking about all of these spikes and overall traffic, how easily did our B2C APIs scale to that demand?

Andrew Lawerence:
We actually did really well. So back to cyber week last year, we saw there was a 50% increase in just the amount of APIs coming in. We essentially saw just during cyber week, we saw about a billion API calls come into the platform to be able to do what was needed of them and being able to do all of that with kind of a trust and scale and performance. I mean at Salesforce, we say that trust is our number one value. And it really has to be to be able to support that kind of scale. It’s all hands on deck to focus, but also a lot of thought and process on how to get things ready for those types of environments.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Any interesting shopping trends that you saw over this particular holiday? Any favorite items that were flying around?

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah, I mean, we see a number of items that were out there and listed. We saw lots of things for soap.

Josh Birk:
Soap. Well, okay.

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. The kind of things that you would think from the pandemic, we’ve seen lots of searches for soap and sanitizer. We saw lots of searches over the holiday for PS5’s.

Josh Birk:
Of course.

Andrew Lawerence:
And then the Xbox.

Josh Birk:
Yep.

Andrew Lawerence:
So yeah, the kind of things you would think. Although I would admit that toilet paper and stuff was in there. In 2019, I would not have thought that toilet paper would’ve been a big [crosstalk 00:10:35].

Josh Birk:
That that would have been… Yeah, exactly. And I have to say, I think I’m guilty of most of those. So I think I was part of your traffic spike there. Okay. So let’s talk, breaking down the API, but actually APIs, how many different APIs are we talking about here?

Andrew Lawerence:
For us? We have currently listed on our developer site, there are 19 different APIs, but inside each API they have a varying number of end points. So there’s somewhere between a hundred and two hundred endpoints for getting into the system. Yeah.

Josh Birk:
And did we construct any new APIs recently either because it was on your roadmap or because we decided these needed to be edited because of the demands of the pandemic?

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. So the interesting thing is kind of how things fortuitously it came together. So we had been making kind of a shift to get more focused on headless and get more focused on being API first, meaning thinking about the APIs as being the primary thing that we build first, and then we build things on top of them. We had efforts around that starting at the beginning of 2019.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Andrew Lawerence:
And had been building up a number of things and getting ready for a new API platform that we were going to be introducing in the late summer of, well I was going to say this year, but now it’s last year, 2020.

Josh Birk:
2021. Yeah.

Andrew Lawerence:
So we were gearing up for that. And then the pandemic started in March, April, May, and it became even more obvious that this was going to be even more important. So we did get this new API platform out and available in August of last year.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Andrew Lawerence:
And it’s been great to see adoption and see customers and what they’re trying to do on top of that platform.

Josh Birk:
Got it. So let’s talk a little bit more about that. You’ve got a lot of APIs, a lot of end points, a lot of different options. How is the developer able to navigate all of that?

Andrew Lawerence:
We have a few things that we need to do. We’ve had APIs for a while for B2C commerce. They’ve been out there and available. They haven’t really been documented super well, and they’ve been a little bit cumbersome. There was even a period of time where we had the documentation for them behind authentication. You couldn’t actually see the documentation if you weren’t already a customer of B2C commerce.

Andrew Lawerence:
We knew that in introducing these new APIs that that couldn’t continue, we needed a better place to make them available and make them available publicly. So we partnered actually with Mule Soft inside of Salesforce and we created what’s called our Commerce Cloud developer center, which you can get to, if you go to developer.commercecloud.com, you’ll find it. And that’s where we posted all the information about the APIs. You can see all the details for every single end point and what it looks like. And there’s a mocking service there. You can send an example request and see what the example response will be and getting all of that became just as important as making the APIs themselves.

Josh Birk:
So I want to touch on that one point that you just mentioned, because I feel like in the community, there’s the belief that you’re only a commerce developer once you have to be one. And if I’m not a customer of Commerce Cloud, what’s the developer experience like for me, how much can I really kick the tires?

Andrew Lawerence:
Yep. Out in the developer center, you can go through all of the APIs and you can see them, you can see the responses, the requests and responses with the mocking service, you can interact with them. I’ll admit at the moment right now to actually get a sandbox of running for Commerce Cloud that is still… Sandboxes are for existing customers, but we will have some trial sandbox options coming up here in the next couple of months.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Andrew Lawerence:
So to get directly Sandbox access, it is still closed off a little bit, but the public availability of all the documentation is out there and available, and you can look through it and use the mocking service and see what’s there.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. And so tell me a little bit more about the mocking service, because it sounds like if I’m not a customer, I could still tinker around with the JavaScript client, [inaudible 00:14:46] and at least be able to say, Hey, I need these three actions in order to do cart fulfillment and Commerce Cloud can definitely do that for me.

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. You could see those details that are there. And to mention actually, one thing I forgot, is there’s a new SDK that’s out there and available also connect to the APIs. And the SDK itself is completely open source. So you can find the SDK in GitHub. You can see all the details in there. You can download it, bring it into your builds and your environments and experiment with it. And then once you do get a sandbox, then you’re ready to just rock and roll.

Josh Birk:
You’re just ready to roll. Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about the SDK. Is it JavaScript only? What’s the technical hinge points there?

Andrew Lawerence:
It’s a no JS SDK.

Josh Birk:
Okay.

Andrew Lawerence:
For B2C commerce, we kind of classify our APIs in two different modes. There are shopper APIs and there are administration APIs. You can kind of think of it in two different ways. A shopper based API is an API that you will interact with from your storefront. So the authentication into it is the guy at home at his computer who’s logged in wearing his pajamas, put in his user and password, it’s his authentication to get in and use those APIs. Whereas the administration APIs are meant for employees of the retailer, whomever it is that’s using it. So both of those APIs are exposed in the SDK and it’s all no JS based to get in and use it.

Josh Birk:
Okay. So it does some of the lovely things like reduces those rest API end points down to objects and lets me do all the nice transactional stuff in node.

Andrew Lawerence:
Yep. Correct. And it has some of the authentication pieces are kind of built in to give you some helpers there. There’s some low level caching that it does to assist with some of the performance items.

Josh Birk:
Oh nice. Nice. Cool. So what about the community aspects of the developer center? If I’m looking to reach out to other commerce developers and have a forum for them? What kind of features are there?

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. Out on the communities it’s built up. There are a number of forums that are out there available right now. We have over 7,000 registered users of the developer center right now. So there’s a lot of people that can see and ask questions and more importantly answer questions. So, yeah. There’s a great community out there of places where you can go and just get information and ask your questions about B2C commerce in general, not only for these new APIs, but even for other things that we have available for B2C commerce.

Josh Birk:
Got it. And of course, I assume there’s some kind of Trailhead love out there.

Andrew Lawerence:
And there are Trailhead links as well. Yes. Brilliant segue. But of course, nothing would be complete without putting some things in Trailhead. So there are a number of trails for just building on top of B2C commerce in general, but there are also trails specifically around headless and how to do some of the headless things there, and all of those you can find links to on the developer center.

Josh Birk:
So I know this is picking of your favorite children, but do you have a favorite API?

Andrew Lawerence:
Do I have a favorite API? That’s an odd question.

Josh Birk:
It is.

Andrew Lawerence:
I mean, when it comes to commerce, really the favorite of the APIs is just getting product information. I am still surprised. I’ve been doing retail and commerce for over 20 years now. And I am still surprised at the type of information that some retailers want to store with their items. Fashion retailers have size and color and those types of things, but sometimes they store details related to materials that made up things or fashion groups that make up things. And just the data that you can get on a product is always fascinating.

Josh Birk:
What they feel is going to be selling that to the customer?

Andrew Lawerence:
What they feel is… And sometimes not even important to the customer, it’s just data they need for a segmentation or whatever they’re doing. But yeah, there’s just all sorts of data that they connect to their products.

Josh Birk:
That’s funny because I used to work, back when I was in a .com consultancy and we were doing a lot of e-shops and stuff like that. And the joke around the shop was that we just sell ball-bearings right. We were doing the same thing over and over again. And so to us, it’s just ball-bearings, but to the actual customer, I suppose it gets a lot more distinct and detailed.

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. There’s always a root of that, I mean, you’re still just selling things and taking a credit card payment and doing it, but the nuance to everything. No two customers are ever the same.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. Well, through the magic of podcast time travel, by the time this airs, you will have already been on Readiness Release Live. Can you give me just kind of the quick overview of some of the demo magic that you were showing there?

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. So in the Release Readiness Live, we go through a general kind of overview of these new APIs and what they’re doing, and kind of our philosophy for headless commerce as a whole. I mean, we see headless commerce as a piece and an opening to what you can do, but our B2C commerce platform that we have is really about giving developers the flexibility to do what they want. If you wanted to deliver a modern experience and what’s there, you can. And if you want to deploy commerce anywhere, you can as well. And then when we get to the demo that we’ll have in Release Readiness Live, we quickly built up a Google voice assistant application.

Josh Birk:
Oh, cool.

Andrew Lawerence:
Connected it to the SDK and started doing shopping from a Google voice assistant, looking for items, finding items, getting details about items. And the reality is it took me longer to record the demo and get through all of that than it took for the developer to actually build it.

Josh Birk:
So quick ballpark, how quickly did the developer actually build it?

Andrew Lawerence:
They built a number of things, middly they were already familiar with Google, but it was really just an afternoon.

Josh Birk:
Oh, wow. Wow. And I am still looking for this term and I will invite my audience to give it to me… And somebody came up with a good one, but there is, I feel like there should be a term for the amount of time it took in order to create the same amount of content. Right? So five minutes on Readiness Release Live could take X number of hours to actually execute them.

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And the ratio is probably much higher than anybody would think is rational.

Josh Birk:
Is actually rational. And I will point to the 10 minutes it will sometimes take me to do a 30 second bumper. So well, I guess, welcome to the new normal, since we’re all recording video and audio these days.

Andrew Lawerence:
Exactly.

Josh Birk:
Okay. So moving onto some of the new stuff, give me the elevator pitch for the omni-channel inventory microservice, because boy, that’s a lot of nouns.

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. So our new omni-channel inventory microservice is coming in the spring 2021 release. It’s really a new API service that can provide kind of a single source of truth for your location level inventory, across multiple channels. And you can group them together. And it’s really about being able to give a quick real-time inventory information so that you can more easily do things like pick up from store and those type of omni-channel interactions.

Andrew Lawerence:
Inventory is this fascinating thing that I’ve seen over the years, that the idea of real time inventory is always this elusive unicorn that’s out there, that people are trying to chase. When you go shop online. And if it tells you that we still have three available, how they got to that three number can be multiple systems and multiple hops. And then there’s probably a number of buffers that they put into place. They may actually have 10, but they don’t quite trust that. So they said there’s only three, all these things that go in. And this new service is built super fast, built on Salesforce platform and giving you the ability to get that inventory at massive scale and then manage it from there.

Josh Birk:
Yeah, no, that, that brings to an interview which will have aired by the time this airs, but has not come out yet with Abraham David Lloyd. And we’re talking about BSE architecture and the problem of failed carts, right? Not having a cart conversion. So if you put three items into something and then I put three items in my cart and then I walk away from my cart and I never come back again, is that six items in the cart? Or is it really three because you are an active user and you’re going to go purchase them?

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. And then bring a physical store into that. I know we’re kind of reduced in what we’re doing in stores right now, but bringing our physical store into it where you want to sell the item that is sitting out in a store, you want this person to be able to go pick it up. But if it says there’s one left, there is no guarantee. First of all, you have to have great trust in the people actually counting inventory in the store. And the second is you have to have trust that it may be in the store, but it may be sitting in somebody’s shopping cart, right this moment. How do you know if it’s okay to sell it to you or not?

Josh Birk:
Right. I hadn’t even factored in because you have breakage and theft and things that are not recorded either accidentally or sometimes intentionally through malicious reasons or something like that. And so, yeah. Does the storefront actually know that it’s actually there?

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. And the biggest thing to be able to get around these is to be able to update those numbers just as often as possible. And this service can help with that.

Josh Birk:
Can help with that. So I really appreciate that in part, because I cannot say how many times as a consultant, I would stare my client in the eyes and just ask them, when you say real time, do you actually mean real-time? Or is a five second delay okay? Or is a one minute delay okay? When you say you want this right away, what do you actually mean? And I feel like this is one of the rare use cases I’ve heard where there’s justification from one end to the other to get that information as accurately as possible, as quickly as possible.

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah, exactly. Because there’s nothing worse for a retailer than selling something to a customer and having to essentially tell them, I’m sorry, we actually don’t have it. That’s the worst customer experience they can give. So they take all these measures to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

Josh Birk:
Cool. Sounds like a really cool product. So let’s talk roadmap wise, because I don’t know if many people are familiar with a recent purchase that has occurred. We’ve recently added Mobify to our family. What is Mobify and what are they going to bring to Commerce Club?

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. Great question. So we made a recent acquisition of the company called Mobify back in October. Mobify is a front-end as a service offering that they make to run storefronts for customers. So if you’re building a headless storefront, you’re building the front end web UI, and you’re connecting it to something that’s operating the server piece and where that’s happening and then you’re connecting to APIs. Where that storefront is actually running, you either host yourself, you run it out of AWS or GCP or something like that. And then you have to manage all the stuff that goes with it, it has to have a CDN in front of it. You’re going to have to do low balancing. You’re going to have to do a disaster recovery, all those things you’re going to have to manage yourself.

Andrew Lawerence:
Mobify basically gives you a managed runtime environment that we will run for you, but you still have full control of the environment and can do the types of things that you want to build a storefront. And at the same time, Mobify has a progressive web app that can be a starting point for your headless storefront that you’re trying to build. So we got two pieces out of the acquisition, the one we’re calling the PWA kit, the progressive web app, that’s the kit that you can use as kind of a starting launching point to get up there. And then the manage runtime is the environment that we’ll give you so that you have a place to run these storefront environments.

Josh Birk:
So let’s break that down a little bit, starting with that first part. So one of the things I do like is that so this kind of leans into what you were talking about before with commerce anywhere, because you’re giving easy access to something that can be both desktop and mobile at the flip of a switch.

Andrew Lawerence:
Right. Right.

Josh Birk:
Okay. And then what does that kit look like? Is it a series of templates that somebody without coding experience can kind of tinker with, or is this something leaning towards the JavaScript CSS developer?

Andrew Lawerence:
No, it is definitely leaning towards the developer. So it’s built using no JS and React.

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Andrew Lawerence:
So it’s a React front end to build this PWA storefront that’s operational there. So there are templates in terms of like code templates and things in there, and it’s laid out so that you can connect in if you have a third party content management system, you can connect that in for bringing things up. So it’s definitely code, but it’s kind of standard code that most developers nowadays know how to do.

Josh Birk:
A modern standard storefront starter kit for somebody in the react family of things.

Andrew Lawerence:
Exactly.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha. And then when it comes to that manage runtime, so that’s like a machine image where I can kind of kick the tires of my progressive storefront before throwing it against the pure power of the B2C APIs?

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah. I mean, it’s really about running the storefront in an environment. So our manage run time is it’s running on top of AWS and then you can fire up instances to test things and then point production to given instances that are out and running.

Josh Birk:
Nice. So that sounds like it’s a really nice companion to all this stuff that we were talking about earlier in the episode where it’s like, you’re giving APIs for flexibility and agility and getting things done fast. And now if you don’t have that client that you don’t have that starting point for that client, well, you’re not going to have that excuse anymore.

Andrew Lawerence:
Yeah, exactly. I mean, so what we’re starting to see with people as we were doing initial headless, our headless work back in beginning of 2019 and moving in through and talking with customers and partners, what they’re trying to build, we’d have many customers that would come and say that, “Hey, I want to build a headless storefront.” And we’d have longer deeper conversations with them. And they were talking about building a React app or a view app, or those types of things to run their storefront.

Andrew Lawerence:
And then we get talking about, okay, so you’re going to run it, right? You’re going to host something in AWS and build it CDN and all that stuff. And they’re like, Oh no, no, no, we don’t want to do that. We just want to build this storefront. We’re like, Oh, okay. All right. There’s a piece missing here that we probably need to get to more people so that we have a place where they can go deploy and run these things and let Salesforce manage it, which is what they’re paying us for. They’re like, no, we want you to manage that. Okay. We needed something to do that.

Josh Birk:
Got it. And all things being Salesforce, I’m just going to take a guess here that maybe Mobify won’t be called Mobify in a few months.

Andrew Lawerence:
That’s correct. It won’t. So there are two pieces to it. There is the PWA kit. So there’s the B2C commerce PWA kit and the B2C commerce manage runtime. And both things will become available. Initial betas will begin in April. The GA should start sometime in the summer. And the most important thing is that these are not additional licensing things for B2C commerce. So if you have B2C commerce, these are both things that will be made available for you to use if you desire to do so.

Josh Birk:
All hail the [inaudible 00:28:17].

Andrew Lawerence:
That’s right.

Josh Birk:
And folks should know that I’ve already started talking to some of the folks from Mobify. We will definitely have a follow-up episode to talk more details about those kits coming out. And that’s our show. Now we will have in the show notes of this episode, links to the various resources we were talking about, including the new commerce developer portal, a trail head on using those progressive web apps and the wonderful Readiness Release Live video. Now, before we go, I did ask after Andrews favorite non-technical hobby. And I got to say, gang, I think we might have to have a contest at some point as to which one of these answers is the most adorable.

Andrew Lawerence:
If you could see, I don’t know, you probably can’t see, and nobody else can either, but I have a wide collection of Lego Star Wars and other Lego kits that I like to put together. I think the other piece is this is more of my wife’s hobby, but I like riding along. She recently bought a Jeep and I live in Salt Lake City, Utah, not far from many Jeep trails in that. And so that’s become her new hobby and I like sitting in the passenger seat.

Josh Birk:
I want to thank Andrew for the great conversation and information. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about the show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast, where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes and transcripts, and have links to your favorite podcast service. And by the way, if you happen to like Fortnite, you can catch me playing nearly every Thursday at five o’clock central. When I play with fellow Salesforce employees, and a few people from the community in order to raise money for Extra Life. My twitch.tv user ID is simply Josh Birk and you can find me there. Thanks again, everybody. And I’ll talk to you next week.

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