Grow your business in 2026 with Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud

Although Salesforce is best known as a CRM platform, it offers much more than that. Its wider ecosystem includes tools to help companies manage their contacts and sales. One of the most useful of these tools for business-to-business sellers is B2B Commerce.

If you sell to other businesses, you’ve probably experienced the pressure. Your customers want to buy in the same way they do in their personal lives – online, at a time that suits them, with the correct pricing already applied. Meeting this expectation is exactly what this platform is designed for.

In short, Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud is Salesforce’s platform for selling to business customers online. It brings catalogues, personalised pricing, and order management into one system, built on the same platform as your CRM, so commerce and customer data work together.

In this article, I’ll explain what Salesforce B2B Commerce actually is, what it can do, and how to use it to grow your business. If you’ve already decided to adopt it and want the practical steps, see our guide on how to start with Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud.  

What is Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud?  

Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud is part of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the family of commerce tools within the Salesforce ecosystem.

Just a quick note on the name – although Salesforce now refers to the product as simply ‘B2B Commerce’ within ‘Commerce Cloud’, many people still search for and refer to ‘B2B Commerce Cloud’, so we will use both terms here. The underlying product is the same.

Salesforce has steadily unified the commerce experience, by bringing B2C (formerly Demandware) and B2B (formerly CloudCraze) onto one platform, alongside D2C and Order Management, with a shared customer base and shared content components.

The philosophy stems directly from CRM – the customer is at the centre of every process. The platform supports the features that B2B selling actually needs, such as buyer groups, entitlements, account-specific pricing and promotions. As it is built on Experience Cloud, it can be easily extended using low-code tools such as Flow, or custom Lightning Web Components.

To put it simply, it’s an online B2B store within Salesforce rather than a separate store that needs to be kept in sync with your CRM.  

How a B2B commerce platform differs from ordinary ecommerce 

While it may be tempting to think of a B2B store as just a B2C store with a different logo, the reality is that it has a much harder role to fulfil.  

A proper B2B ecommerce platform has to handle the realities of business trading:

• negotiated contract pricing,
• account-specific catalogues,
• large and repeat orders,
• approval workflows,
• multiple buyers within a single customer organisation.

A consumer tool bent into shape rarely copes with all of that.

This is where B2B Commerce Cloud earns its place. Buyer groups let you show the right catalogue and pricing to the right customers. Entitlements control who can buy what. Promotions can mirror the deals your sales reps already offer, so the store reflects real trading relationships instead of forcing your business to fit a consumer template.

Treat your B2B customers like B2C customers 

This is the most important shift. B2B buyers are starting to behave like consumers. They shop on mobile and expect personalised content, and while price still comes first in B2B, experience is a close second.

Meeting this expectation doesn’t require a huge technical project. Commerce Cloud includes built-in personalisation and merchandising tools that can be used to tailor product recommendations to each buyer, and much of this can be configured without the need for extensive custom code.

B2B customers also tend to want long-term relationships, rather than one-off sales. You can build on this by offering loyalty incentives to reward repeat buyers, such as dedicated discounts and promotional schemes. One of the simplest ways to grow revenue from the accounts you already have is to treat them with the same care that a B2C brand shows its shoppers. 

Connect your direct and indirect sales  

If you already sell through sales reps, the aim isn’t to replace them. The goal is to add e-commerce as another sales channel and ensure that customers are treated the same, regardless of how they reach you.

For example, if a customer receives a discount from a sales representative, offer the same promotion online. There is nothing that erodes trust faster than a buyer finding a better price by phoning instead of ordering online. If you already use Salesforce Sales Cloud, Commerce becomes an extension of your existing processes, sharing the same 360-degree customer view. Orders placed online and orders taken by a sales representative end up in the same place. 

How to plan for growth with Salesforce Commerce

Before you start designing the store, consider your customers. It’s important to understand the different personas: selling to a final customer is different from selling to a dealer or distributor, and the platform has to reflect that.

From there, a few principles keep a growth plan on track:

• Map your customer journeys – every B2B business is slightly different. Configure the system around how your customers actually buy, rather than accepting an out-of-the-box default.
• Plan the whole journey, not just the checkout – marketing, customer onboarding, post-sales support, and web analytics all matter to growth.
• Design for both channels – keep direct and indirect sales consistent, so the experience is coherent wherever a customer lands.

If your teams use several Salesforce products, it also helps to understand how different Salesforce cloud tools fit together around commerce, marketing, and service.

Do not plan for years ahead 

One lesson stands out from the B2B Commerce projects we’ve delivered – the ones that ran for months before releasing anything were rarely the successful ones.

Today, nothing can be set in stone. What works this quarter might not work next year, so it’s better to test your business model with a proof of concept than design the perfect store on paper. Salesforce is well suited to this approach.

Conduct focused discovery, use quick demos to familiarise your business teams with the platform and avoid customisations that don’t justify their existence. Deliver business value early on, even if that means including a few mock-ups and placeholders in the first version. Time to market is the most important factor, and you will learn far more from a live store than from another planning workshop.

Wrapping up

Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud gives business sellers a way to meet modern buyer expectations without leaving the Salesforce ecosystem. It simplifies the complexities of B2B selling, provides a personalised experience that meets modern buyer expectations and unifies your direct and indirect channels around a single customer view.

With B2B buyers behaving more like consumers every year, the opportunity is real. The businesses that act now will be the ones to keep those customers. The key is to start small, test your model, and develop it from a live project rather than a theoretical one.

If you’re ready to take the next step, read our guide on how to start with Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud, or explore our Salesforce services and talk to our team about your commerce plans.

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