15 May 2022
How to prepare Salesforce B2C Commerce Developer Certification?
The complete guide to the Salesforce B2C Commerce Developer Certification: exam structure, study resources, sandbox access and the modules that matter most.
- certification
- salesforce-b2c-commerce
INTRODUCTION
☁️ Hello SFCC Community! ☁️
If you are a Salesforce Commerce Cloud developer, this Ultimate Salesforce B2C Commerce Developer Certification Exam Guide is a must-read!
You are thinking about it, or maybe you’ve already scheduled your Salesforce B2C Commerce Developer Certification Exam date, and you are now searching for the maximum of resources to be well prepared for the exam?
You are at the right place!
In this article, we will cover everything about this Salesforce Commerce Cloud certification and you will get all the study materials you need.
Let’s go for The Ultimate Salesforce B2C Commerce Developer Certification Exam Guide!
FAQ
Why become a Salesforce Certified B2C Commerce developer?
You might wonder what are the benefits of being a Salesforce Certified B2C Commerce developer. There are 3 main advantages:
Merge Pull Requests into official Salesforce Partner Cartridges repositories
Probably the most important reason. When you are certified, you are officially able to make the code review into third parties cartridges repositories and merge the Pull Requests to git branches.
You can also check the whole cartridge code to add your “certified” label on cartridges. Yes, companies need a certified dev to get an official certified cartridge to sell to end customers.
“Prove” your skills to recruiters
I agree that’s a discussable point. But it seems that recruiters are still loving certifications, and we can’t ignore that. They think it is something incredible to be certified and this is the proof of all your hard skills at SFCC.
The good thing is that agencies can easily suggest your profile to the end customer by telling them that you are good because you are certified.
Start a Community Group
Of course, that’s not the most important one, but you can take it into consideration after you’ve completed a certification.
You can see more about Salesforce Community Groups on the official Salesforce trailblazercommunitygroups.com website. Following is the information on this website:
To create a new Community Group, you should have proven Salesforce product expertise by satisfying one of the points below:
- A Trailhead Ranger (100 badges, 50,000 points) **OR **having one active Salesforce certification.
- A Trailhead Expeditioner (50 badges, 35,000 points) AND have one active Salesforce certification.
In this case, certification can help 🙂
Do I need experience in Salesforce Commerce Cloud development?
Yes and no 🙂
Actually, if you have some experience on SFCC, it means you are already faced with real-world scenarios we can’t completely cover in theory courses.
If you don’t have any experience with SFCC, you probably won’t be prepared enough for all those real-world scenario questions. To get enough correct answers, you will have to be well prepared on technical questions about templates, models and controllers syntaxes, files and folders architectures, OCAPI hooks, logs, and so on.
Is the official course provided by Salesforce required?
No. The official SFRA course is not mandatory, but can be recommended if you are not familiar at all with Commerce Cloud.
If you are a complete beginner in the SFCC space, I would definitely recommend registering for B2C Commerce Developer with SFRA (CCD102) course.
Here is the official description coming from Trailhead:
“B2C Commerce Developer with SFRA is a comprehensive and hands-on course that introduces the core programming concepts, relevant files, and scripting language for Salesforce B2C Commerce. It is a must for developers new to Salesforce B2C Commerce and experienced developers looking to ramp up on Storefront Reference Architecture. Using real-world scenarios, this course covers how to customize the Storefront Reference Architecture and modify a B2C Commerce Cloud storefront.”
This course is very interesting when you’ve never put your hands on a Sandbox to develop on Commerce Cloud, but it’s very expensive as it costs about $3,600.00 (USD)!
How much time to prepare for the exam?
It depends on every developer, experience, and the amount of free time to prepare for the exam.
For most people, I think 1 month is a good preparation time. You will know that you don’t need as much if you are experienced enough in Commerce Cloud.
Thomas Theunen, Head of Commerce at Forward, created a poll on LinkedIn about certification exam preparation time, and the results were 3-6 weeks for 47% of people. You can see the poll results here:
Thomas Theunen’s poll about certification preparation time
How to get a Salesforce B2C Commerce Sandbox for training?
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to get a Sandbox…
If you are already working on a project, you can use it for training. But if you didn’t start working on SFCC yet, you probably won’t be able to use a Sandbox for Training.
Contrary to other Salesforce products, there is no Playground available for training on Trailhead, exactly like Salesforce Marketing Cloud. As a reminder, Salesforce bought Demandware in 2016 so the architecture for getting a sandbox is not the same as Salesforce Core.
You can try to send an email to sfcc-b2c-trial@salesforce.com but personally, I’ve never used it and I don’t know if this email address is relevant or not.
If you are working for a Salesforce Partner company, maybe you will have a chance to get a Sandbox 🙂 You should check those two groups from the Salesforce Partner Community to get more information about classic Sandboxes and On-Demand Sandboxes:
About the exam
If this is your first Salesforce Certification exam, there are a few things you should know before the D Day.
Manage your time correctly
With 105 minutes for 65 questions, you have less than 2 minutes per question. Don’t waste your time if you don’t know the answer, you can skip it and come back to it later thanks to a dedicated button at the end of the exam.
Multiple-choice questions
Contrary to the Trailhead quiz, you will always know how many answers you have to check for multiple-choice questions. Actually, your answer cannot be validated if the number of answers you checked doesn’t match with the number of expected answers.
4 different sections
The exam is divided into 4 different sections:
- B2C Commerce Setup (11%)
- Work With a B2C Site (12%)
- Data Management Using Business Manager (24%)
- Application Development (53%)
I would say that Work With a B2C Site is the most difficult one because it’s all about real-world scenarios when working on a real SFCC project, with some complex technical choices. If you don’t have a lot of experience with Commerce Cloud development, work hard on the other exam sections like technical syntax, folders architecture, etc.
Now let’s see the details for every part of the exam:
B2C Commerce Setup: 11%
- Given a sandbox environment, configure an IDE to use WebDAV to deploy cartridges to the correct version directories.
- Given a sandbox instance and data import files, import files using the Business Manager Import/Export modules.
- Given the code for a storefront site, add the correct sequence of cartridge names to the provided cartridge path.
- Given a sandbox environment, use the Business Manager to add a new site to the instance, configuring the default currency and taxation type according to business requirements.
- Given a recently created B2C site, assign the storefront data configurations according to business requirements.
Work With a B2C Site: 12%
- Given a Business Manager task, work with the product data model to manage products and product search model, their categorization, and associated inventory and pricebooks.
- Given a configuration for tasks, such as payment and shipping information, use Business Manager to complete storefront orders.
- Given a configuration task, use Business Manager to work with Content Assets, Page Designer, Content Slots, and Content Folders.
Data Management Using Business Manager Usage: 24%
- Given a business requirement, modify site search preferences and settings to enable searching for a specified term or product attribute.
- Given a business requirement, create and configure a new search refinement and sorting definition that can be used on the storefront.
- Given a debugging requirement or code, configure the logging categories and access the logs in Business Manager.
- Given business requirements, extend the storefront to expose a new attribute on an existing system object type.
- Given a business need to store custom data, determine if a custom object is needed and create and configure as required.
- Given a problem or performance issue and data, use relevant tools to inspect code performance and determine and implement solutions (cache configuration, profilers, etc) to resolve this issue.
- Given a specification and a sandbox instance, configure OCAPI permissions for Data and Shop APIs.
- Given a service configuration, recognize how they are applicable to the development process.
Application Development: 53%
- Given a development task, code ISML templates that use functionality such as: local include, remote include, components, and other ISML tags.
- Use debugging best practices and techniques to troubleshoot scripts and controllers and verify outcomes.
- Given a requirement, create and extend the functionality of a JavaScript controller that leverages models, decorators, factories, or helpers following API best practices and renders a template or returns a JSON response.
- Given a business requirement and design for a new marketing page, develop page types and components to allow a marketer to build a page with the Page Designer tool.
- Given a requirement to accept, validate, and persist information from a storefront customer, modify the appearance of a form, add validation and CSRF protection, and use bindings to process fields.
- Given localization requirements, implement and enhance templates, form definitions, static files, properties files, and persistent object attributes to ensure that pages are displayed in the expected language.
- Given a logging task and existing configuration, write code that logs non-sensitive data to custom log files with different log levels.
- Integrate, deploy, and use a service instance based on a given requirement.
- Given a use case, extend functionality or capture an event using hook extension points.
- Given code that violates documented best practices, identify the issues and modify the code to conform with best practices including performance and scalability.
- Given a business requirement, use OCAPI Shop and Data APIs to enable interoperability with an external system.
- Given a business requirement to perform a scheduled task, develop jobs and code job scripts.
Where to find resources to be fully prepared for the SFCC certification exam?
As you may know, Commerce Cloud learning materials are not always easy to find, especially when you are not an expert and you don’t know where to start to prepare for certification. That’s why I created a LinkedIn Post to talk about that and help people to prepare for the exam correctly. Don’t hesitate to follow me on LinkedIn for more SFCC content.
Let’s create the most complete list here, and I will add everything I can find as soon as I get new resources.
Step 0: Join the SFCC community
If not done yet, you should join the Salesforce Commerce Community to ask for some help if you need it. I would recommend 2 different communities to join:
Trailblazer Community
As you may know, Trailblazer Communities are is maintained and moderated by Salesforce employees. These resources can be very interesting to see technical discussions and search for a specific topic that has already been covered by someone.
You can use these groups to review resources, ask questions, help each other, and share experiences.
This group is dedicated to your success with Salesforce B2C Commerce. Join the conversation here to stay up to date on the product, how Salesforce can help you, and everything in between.
This group is dedicated to your success in developing on the B2C Commerce platform. Many B2C Commerce developer experience teams, Client Services, Sales Engineers, and Technical Architects are here to help along with our overall developer community.
This group is dedicated to your success with Commerce Cloud. Connect with fellow Commerce Trailblazers around the world. Learn about Commerce Cloud product innovations, strategy, hot new trends, upcoming events, career development, and more.
Salesforce B2C Commerce Unofficial Slack
Salesforce B2C Commerce Unofficial Logo
This one is another great resource to get fast answers to any question! You have channels for a lot of specific topics, and even a dedicated one for “newbies” if you are brand new to Commerce Cloud 🙂 People from the community are here to help you guys 💪 Today, we are more than 8000 people on this Slack, and the community is very active and growing every day!
How to join the group? This is open to everyone in the SFCC space, and instructions are detailed in this SFCC Unofficial docs repository.
You can also follow the Unofficial SFCC Community page on LinkedIn, go on the website and their Podcast on Youtube for great SFCC content! 🚀
Special thanks to our awesome admins: Peter Schmalfeldt, Oleg Sapishchuk, Gökay Gürcan, Thomas Theunen, Matthew Rose, Kyle Montgomery, Steve Holsinger, Daniel Anechitoaie, and all creators and contributors of this fabulous Slack! 👏
Step 1: Getting Started (For SFCC beginners)
If you already worked on at least one SFCC project as a developer, you probably don’t need to use these materials and you can skip it to the next step.
Otherwise, I would strongly recommend starting with classic BM Overview Videos and “Getting Started” webinars from Salesforce Success Events Webinars.
Salesforce Success Events Webinars filtered by “B2C Commerce” Product
After that, I suggest you start with the Develop for Salesforce B2C Commerce Trailmix before registering for the Official Salesforce instructor-led training course if you or your company can pay for it. If you are a beginner, you really should consider this course even if it is very expensive.
Step 2: Learn SFCC everywhere
Do you already have experience with Salesforce Commerce Cloud? Don’t worry, there are still a lot of materials to study for the certification!
Official Recommend Training
This Recommend Training from the Salesforce developer certification exam guide is good to start but not complete enough in my opinion. That’s why I created this ultimate guide to certification with a great collection of study materials.
Learn About Salesforce B2C Commerce
This “Learn About Salesforce B2C Commerce” website is a very good one to get very useful resources at the same place, and provided by Salesforce. You can explore it and learn everything you want to if you need more information about something.
Official “Learn About Salesforce B2C Commerce” website
IMPORTANT: I recommend you to not “waste” your time on the two last sections: Optimize with Einstein and Analytics and Get Holiday Ready. It’s interesting to know but you won’t get any questions on it during the Salesforce B2C Commerce Developer Certification Exam.
The perfect Trailmix for B2C Commerce
I also created a personal Trailmix on Trailhead to prepare for the exam, containing official Salesforce trails and additional useful modules. This Trailmix is very important and I recommend you to study and validate all the modules I’ve put inside.
Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) materials
- SFRA Storefront demo to see features and compare with the SFRA code from Github (requires Account Manager credentials)
- Setup and GitHub Access Instructions
- Technical Architecture Deep Dive
- UX Deep Dive
Fast Path to Certification
This Fast Path to Certification is a collection of 6 awesome videos from a Salesforce instructor. These modules are the most important videos you should see to be well prepared for the certification in addition to my trailmix.
- Module 1️⃣: Kickoff
- Module 2️⃣: Cartridges and Controllers
- Module 3️⃣: Models, ISML and Client-Side Javascript
- Module 4️⃣: Forms, Transactions, and Middleware Events
- Module 5️⃣: Page Designer and Job Framework
- Module 6️⃣: OCAPI and Webservice Framework
BONUS: I’ve also found interesting videos coming from the official Developer Academy | Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud. They are very similar to the Fast Path to Certification, so it’s up to you to view them all or not 😉 I would say it can be interesting if you have a lot of time to prepare it and you like to study, always get more information and be more confident for the exam.
Logs resources
Trust me, it could be more useful than you think for the certification. Here are the most important materials about logs:
I added these resources because I was surprised to get so many questions about logs during the exam. You should work on logs because it can be easy to get the correct answer if you prepared this part enough!
Salesforce Partner Learning Camp
This Salesforce Partner Learning Camp is a great website provided by Salesforce. It contains a lot of very interesting learning videos and activities, but it’s unfortunately limited to Salesforce partner companies. If you have access, you have to filter by the « B2C Commerce » Product on the left filter panel and enroll in the most useful courses for you.
Official Salesforce Partner Learning Camp filtered on “B2C Commerce” product
Knowledge Check
I recommend some knowledge check AFTER studying everything. You will be able to get an honest overview of what you know well and what you have to study a little bit more.
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Official training questions: Controllers
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Client-side JS: (not part of the exam, but useful to know for your SFCC projects 🙂)
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UNOFFICIAL training questions (flashcards) that other developers also suggested:SFCC commerce cloud (B2C) certificate - BM questions
Be careful with those training questions as it is not official. I would recommend checking them only if you have time after you finished studying all other materials because I have to admit that some questions can be useful to get before the exam.
Last tips to pass the exam
With this** Ultimate Salesforce B2C Commerce Developer Certification Exam Guide**, you should be able to pass it with ease. I add here some tips to improve your productivity during the certification exam and save some time as it’s very limited (1h45 for 65 questions).
Eliminate the Impossible Answers
For some questions, you can easily understand that one or more answers are not the good ones. Sometimes, you will even get 2 questions with conflicting answers. If you are completely sure about one of these answers, you can eliminate the other one to help you get the correct answer to the other question too 🙂
Skip questions you don’t know at first reading
I know that I already mentioned that tip in the About the exam section. But it’s very important, that’s why I’m repeating myself, in case you missed it. Please don’t waste your time if you don’t know the answer. Click the “Skip” button and recheck it at the end.
Don’t be afraid to fail
Fails can be part of success. No pressure, everyone can fail and you will be even better prepared for the next try. I know that it can be hard to fail, but failure is a very good teacher. Just see the positive in that failure, try again, and be certified!
Certification Maintenance
After being certified, Salesforce will require to complete the B2C Commerce Developer certification maintenance modules on Trailhead once per year to renew the certification.
Trailblazer profile with “Maintenance Due” message for B2C Commerce Developer certification
Don’t forget to link your B2C Commerce Developer certification to your Trailblazer profile to be able to show it publicly and get a notification when a new maintenance module is available!
Good luck with your SFCC journey guys 🙂
