It’s summertime, which means we get to check out the fresh release of the Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud. Join me as we delve into all the new features of the July 2023 (23.7) release.
Are you interested in last month’s release notes? Click here!
Environment Variables are now live on Managed Runtime
Environment variables allow you to add variables into the application process running in an environment, without having to make code changes. Environment variables are stored securely, making them ideal for use cases such as:
- API keys for third-party integrations
- Feature flags for application logic
- Configuration that differs between environments
Great news for users of Composable Storefront! You can now use the much-awaited feature of securely managing “secrets” and variables per environment!
Currently, the API is the sole choice that is minimally (for now) documented here.
Improve Product Discoverability with the Google Inventory Listings Cartridge
The Google Inventory cartridge is a B2C Commerce direct integration cartridge. You can use the cartridge to list your local store products on Google’s free product listings. Shoppers can discover products in stores near them. This increases local store foot traffic
In today’s world, it’s essential to connect with customers at multiple touchpoints. Among these touchpoints, Google stands out as one of the most significant. By showcasing your products in proximity to Google searches, you can attract both new and loyal customers to your physical stores or online shop.
It’s a proven strategy that can help your business stand out from the competition. You can download the cartridge to add to your codebase here to get started.
Business Manager
Receive Rejected Order Alerts in Business Manager
B2C Commerce Business Manager now displays an alert notification when orders are rejected by Salesforce Order Management. Users with access to the Business Manager orders module receive the alert and can review and act on rejected orders. The alert is also available in Slack when you connect your Business Manager instance to Slack.
A much-needed update in the platform to be warned that one of the orders was not synchronised with Salesforce Order Management!
Now we do not have to manually go to the page to see if an order was sent. But let us hope we don’t get any warning at all!
Configure Up to 10 Categorization Conditions
When configuring a categorization rule in Business Manager, you can now set up to ten categorization conditions per categorization rule set. Previously, Business Manager supported five conditions per rule set while the API supported ten conditions per rule set.
This latest update gives us greater control and precision over the products automatically assigned to a specific category.
OCAPI & SCAPI
Configure Promotion Search Refinement with OCAPI and SCAPI
You can now refine promotion searches in B2C Commerce OCAPI and SCAPI. Use the promotion search refinement APIs to generate and display results that help shoppers discover products that are on sale or part of a promotion.
The description may be brief, but there’s good news – a support-only feature switch previously available for SG/SFRA has been enabled for headless implementations, enabling filtering based on promotions.
Here are the steps to get started with this:
Development
Get Coupon-Based Promotions with New Script API
The
PromotionMgr.getActiveCustomerPromotions(boolean ignoreCouponCondition)script API returns all active promotions including coupon-based promotions when ignoreCouponCondition set to true. You can use the returned promotions to expose promotions on your storefront. For example, display a callout message for coupon-based promotions on product detail or product list pages.
Although it may seem minor, this update is actually quite significant as it grants us greater flexibility in terms of how we present promotions and campaigns to customers!
Script API Sort Methods Are Stable
As required by ECMAScript 2019, the B2C Commerce Script API methods Array.sort() and Array.sort(function) are now documented as stable, so equal elements aren’t reordered as a result of the sort.
Not much to say about this, but being closer to the Official JS rules is never a bad thing!
New Ideas
Just a gentle reminder to vote for your favourite new ideas to be added to the Commerce Cloud roadmap!
PWA Kit v2.7.3
- Add support for ES module import statements in ssr.js #1284
- Support Node 18 and NPM 9. #1265
This a minor release to ensure this version is compatible with the latest Node version (18), as the older versions will be deprecated soon!
PWA Kit v3.0.0
We’ve added lots of new features to PWA Kit v3, including:
- 🔨 Template extensibility: Greatly reduce your project's code footprint and reduce development toil, cost of ownership, and future upgrade headaches. For more details, see the Template Extensibility guide!
- 🪝 @salesforce/commerce-sdk-react "hooks" integration: Decouples API calls from a project's implementation, allows API calls to be upgraded as an npm library dependency, and brings along many of the great features (including state management, and others) via TanStack Query. See the the Commerce SDK React docs to get started!
- ⚛️ Major vendor library updates, including support for React 18, Node 16 / 18, Chakra 2, and more.
This a long-awaited update, bringing many new treats to development. With the new template extensibility options, we can now start overriding just like in SFRA… or at least something that looks like it.
Next to that, many updates to libraries and support for the latest stable Node version. One of the libraries is a favourite of mine: TanStack Query (or React Query), which makes state management a breeze with APIs.
Bugfixes
Currently, many known issues exist in the state “Solution in Progress“, so let us patiently wait until they are deployed!
Updated Cartridges & Tools
Compiling a list of updates has become more challenging since cartridges are no longer sourced from a single location…
b2c-tools (v0.18.0)
b2c-tools is a CLI tool and library for data migrations, import/export, scripting and other tasks with SFCC B2C instances and administrative APIs (SCAPI, ODS, etc). It is intended to be complimentary to other tools such as sfcc-ci for development and CI/CD scenarios.
- All requests now use a (Version identified) b2c-tools user-agent
- JSDoc refactoring and resulting bug cleanup by @clavery in #112
checkJsis on now
- set code version to active code version if not found in env vars by @sandragolden in #113
