The Digital Commerce platform leverages a Salesforce Community to provide authentication and hosting features for guest users. After the Digital Commerce package is deployed, the next step is to create a Salesforce Community. At a minimum, you just need the community URL. However, if you intend to support guest users, you will need to enable that within the community settings. After deployment, the angular library will provide a Visualforce page that you can set as the default page for all page settings within the community. For example home, login, forgot password, change password, and more). Being that it is a single-page application that is designed to handle all incoming requests.

Creating Communities in your Org

The default storefront for E-commerce is created with the Digital Commerce package. You need to create a community for E-commerce.

You can create communities using a wizard. This wizard helps you select community templates that suit your business requirement.

To create a community

  1. Go to Setup > Customize > Communities > All Communities and click New Community.
  2. Select from one of the Standard Community templates. For example, Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce.
  3. Click Get Started.
  4. Type a community Name. URL displays the domain name of your community. In Optional, type a suffix for your community and click Create. For example, Name = E-Commerce or Partner Commerce, Optional = ecom or pcom.

Your community is created.

Creating Sites

Sites enable you to create your Digital Commerce websites that are directly integrated with your Salesforce org—without requiring users to log in with a username and password. To create sites, refer to Create Sites for detailed information.

Activating the Community

After you set up a community, you must activate the community.

To activate a community

  1. Go to Setup > Customize > Communities and click All Communities.
  2. Click Workspaces and under My Workspaces click Administration.
  3. From the Settings page, click Activate Community.

Your community space is now activated.

Setting Up the Default Page

After the community is created and activated, you need to set up Default Page for your community.

After deployment, the angular library will provide a Visualforce page that you can set as the default page for all page settings within the community.

To set up a default page

  1. Go to Setup > Customize > Communities and click All Communities.
  2. Click Workspaces and under My Workspaces click Administration.
  3. Click the Pages option.
  4. From the Community Home drop-down, select Visualforce Page.
  5. Search and select ECommerce for your eCommerce template and click Save.

Configuring Sharing Settings

Perform the following steps to configure the Sharing Setting for Default External Access:

  1. Go to Setup, in the Quick Find Box, search and select Sharing Settings.
  2. Click Edit.
  3. Compare the Default External Access with Default Internal Access and update the Default External Access with the same option selected as Default Internal Access.
  4. Click Save.

Granting User Access to Community via Profiles

You can enable users to access the community through profiles based on the level of access you want to grant. Ensure that you provide access to at least an admin user, community user (e-commerce), and guest user.

To enable users to access a community

  1. Go to Setup > Customize > Communities and click All Communities.
  2. Click Workspaces and under My Workspaces, click Administration, and select Members.
  3. Under the Select Profiles section, from the Available Profiles column, select respective profiles and add them to the Selected Profiles column.
  4. Under the Select Permission Sets section, from the Available Permission Sets column, select respective permission sets and add them to the Selected Permission Sets column.
  5. Click Save.

Allowing External Users to Self-Register

Perform the following steps to allow the external user to self-register:

  1. Go to Setup > Customize > Communities and click All Communities.
  2. Click Workspaces and under My Workspaces, click Administration, and select Login & Registration.
  3. Under the Registration Page Configuration section, select Allow external users to self-register.
  4. Click Save.

Publishing Communities

Perform the following steps to publish the community:

  1. Go to Setup > Customize > Communities and click All Communities.
  2. Click Workspaces and under My Workspaces, click Builder.
  3. Click Publish.

Setting Up Guest Users

You can set up guest users for your community. The concept of guest users is simply hiding access to certain pages.

To set up a guest user

  1. Go to Setup > Customize > Communities and click All Communities.
  2. Click Workspaces and under My Workspaces, click Administration.
  3. Select Pages, select the Force.com section. This section takes you to the underlying site record for your Salesforce community. 
  4. Under the Site Visualforce Pages section, ensure the pages are listed for the guest user to access. The pages that are not listed cannot be accessed by a guest user.
  5. Once done, click Public Access Settings where you can see the guest user profile for our storefront. This displays what a guest user can access and manage object and field-level permissions.
  6. Click Save.