Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2C January Release Update

Security updates and functionality enhancements top the list of changes for the 21.1 release

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2C Commerce release notes for the first major release in 2021 have been made available for review. The 21.1 release preview will be pushed to SIG environments on December 8th, 2020. General Availability releases will start being pushed to PIG environments on January 5, 2021. The final update (for any defects) will be released January 21, 2021.

So, what's included in the SFCC B2C 21.1 release? 

Einstein functionality extended 

The “Complete the Set” Einstein functionality has been extended in the Business Manager. The Einstein Configurator now provides a “preview” tab so merchandisers can see the output by product ID.  This release will also allow a merchandiser to enable or disable multiple “Complete the Set” categories at one time. Previously this was only possible one category at a time.  These updated functionality and feature sets require SFRA 5.0 or later to be in use on the site.  

Order History 

A new method will be released to allow developers to retrieve the order history directly for the customer that is currently logged in. Previously the developer had to pass specific customer information to the Order method to get customer data, which could return inaccurate results. This new method allows for correct results based on the logged in data available. This method is also more secure, as malicious actors cannot simply “try” customer data to retrieve order history any longer.

Salesforce suggests that if internal order data is used in the code, the code should be refactored as soon as possible to use this new method.

 Shipping Method Updates 

Previously, all shipping method restrictions were based on the products in the default shipment. This could cause incorrect shipping method restrictions to be placed on shipments that were part of a multi-shipment order, but which did not have restricted products. This update allows the basket to validate each shipment’s products individually against all appropriate shipping methods to provide appropriate method availability to the customer.  

Promotion and Pricing Updates 

Previously, if a product was added to the cart fractionally (eg: 0.5 kg of a product), prices and promotions were not applied correctly (if at all) to the basket. This update also fixes the “Approaching Discount” upsell messaging for fractional products. This is especially helpful for customers who have opted to use the B2C Commerce Grocery Toolkit for their storefront.

SOAP Web Services Update 

If your company uses SOAP-based web services, this release has an update that will allow your developers to migrate to the updated Webreference2 package. More details are available in the documentation.

Job Step Component Updates

There have been a few changes in the way SFCC parses the steptypes.JSON files. Going forward, you must use the "parameter" option instead of "parameters". Also, any "@required" elements that are passed must use a string "true" or "false" instead of just a boolean. You can easily validate your steptypes.JSON file against the infocenter documentation found here. . 

Finally, not fully related to this release but in keeping with Salesforce’s commitment to equality, Salesforce announced that starting with release 20.7, legacy language in the platform will begin changing to more inclusive terms. APIs and documentation are not included in these changes, as there could be some implementation breaking changes. Salesforce will keep us updated in release notes for all future language changes released. 

A full list of all release information can be found on the Salesforce B2C release notes site.