What Most People Forget When Launching an E-Commerce Store

When developing a new e-commerce store in Salesforce B2C Commerce, there comes a time when the development phase is over, and we need to plan the go-live process.

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What Does "Going Live" Mean?

It means that we are moving away from sandbox environments and probably even from our development instance. Now, we need to configure our staging environment, which will serve as the final testing ground before launching the production environment—the live site that customers will see.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through some critical steps to ensure a smooth and successful launch.

Start with a Clean Staging Instance

My top recommendation is to start fresh with a clean staging environment. Why? Because during development, we create custom objects, attributes, and metadata that we may no longer need. If we don’t clean this up, we might carry unnecessary and outdated metadata into production.

👉 How to clean it?
If your staging instance already has unwanted metadata, you can request a DB initialization (DBini) from Salesforce. This will reset the instance to its original state.

Import Only the Metadata You Need

Once you have a clean staging environment, only import the metadata that is essential for your store.

✔️ Best practice: Keep everything versioned in Git and use CI/CD for deployments.
✔️ Alternative: If you don’t use Git, you can manually export/import data using Salesforce’s site import/export feature.

Configure Automated Jobs

Your staging environment is your "source of truth", meaning that your team (merchants, marketers, content managers) will manage promotions, campaigns, catalogs, and designs from here before pushing updates to production.

You need to configure jobs that:
🔹 Import the correct product catalog, prices, and inventory from the production data source (not the development data).
🔹 Adjust file paths and folder structures as they might differ from the ones used in development.

Update Your External Services & APIs

Many services in your store will still point to test environments, like your payment gateway, but others must connect to live production services.

✅ Identify which services should stay in sandbox mode and which must switch to production mode.
✅ Ensure that staging connects to the correct external APIs.

Separate API Clients for Different Environments

Any external system making API calls (Okapi, Skapi, etc.) to your e-commerce should have separate API credentials for each environment.

🚨 Why is this important?
If the same client ID is used across development, staging, and production, a security issue in one environment could affect the others.

🔹 Solution: Create separate API clients for each environment (development, staging, and production).
🔹 Don’t forget: In Okapi, permissions are managed in Business Manager and Account Manager, so you need to update access configurations for your new client IDs.

Final Thoughts: Get Ready for a Smooth Launch

These are some of the key steps that will help you avoid last-minute surprises when launching your store. In future updates, I’ll share even more insights on setting up staging correctly and making the final jump to production.

Let me know if you’d like to dive deeper into any of these topics! 🚀

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