This is Part 5 of Vantage Point's Headless 360 series. Part 1 maps the platform-wide architecture, availability, and governance model; earlier parts cover the developer and admin perspectives and the HXL/Mosaic experience layer; the final part covers headless identity. This post goes deep on commerce: SCAPI, PWA Kit, Managed Runtime, and composable storefronts.
With Dreamforce weeks away, headless commerce deserves a spot on your prep list. It is the most mature headless surface Salesforce ships — years in production, a clear migration path, and a developer experience that keeps improving. This guide covers the pieces, who they fit, and how commerce connects to the broader Headless 360 vision.
Headless commerce on Salesforce means running your storefront's front end completely separately from the Salesforce B2C Commerce engine, with every shopper interaction — browsing, search, cart, checkout, account — flowing through the Salesforce Commerce API (SCAPI). Salesforce's opinionated path is the Composable Storefront: a React front end built with PWA Kit, deployed and hosted on Managed Runtime. Start with the Composable Storefront overview and the Trailhead Headless Commerce Basics module.
Headless commerce is an architecture where products, prices, content, and cart logic live in the commerce platform and are delivered through APIs, while the front-end experience is built and deployed separately. As Salesforce's Headless Commerce Basics module puts it: content is stored and delivered without a front-end layer attached.
On Salesforce, the "body" is B2C Commerce — the engine that manages catalogs, pricing, promotions, inventory, baskets, and orders. The "head" is whatever experience you build: a React web storefront, a mobile app, an in-store kiosk, or all of them at once against the same backend. Because the front end is decoupled, your team ships experience changes on its own release cadence, and one commerce engine serves every surface consistently — the same idea behind Headless 360, applied where Salesforce has the longest headless track record.
Three reasons make this a 2026 conversation rather than a someday one:
SCAPI — the Salesforce Commerce API, formally the B2C Commerce API — is a set of RESTful APIs for building storefronts, merchant tools, and integrations on B2C Commerce. Introduced in 2020 and built headless-first, it is stateless, designed for high-scale customer-facing traffic, and organized into two families:
| Shopper APIs | Admin APIs | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Customer-facing: browsing, search, cart, checkout | Merchant-facing: product, order, inventory management |
| Authentication | SLAS (OAuth 2.1) | Account Manager |
| Scale | High-scale, supports anonymous guest shoppers | Moderate usage |
| Access | Mostly read-only (exceptions: Baskets, Orders) | Read and write |
| Naming | API names start with "Shopper" | No naming convention |
commerce-sdk for Node.js, commerce-sdk-isomorphic for server and browser, and @salesforce/commerce-sdk-react for React hooks, plus a Postman collection.You can build a headless front end on SCAPI with any framework. Salesforce's opinionated, supported path is the Composable Storefront, and it has two halves:
PWA Kit is the front-end framework — an open-source, React-based toolkit for building progressive web app storefronts on SCAPI, with scaffolding, server-side rendering, and commerce-sdk-react hooks. The PWA Kit overview walks the architecture; the codebase lives on GitHub.
Managed Runtime (MRT) is the operations half — Salesforce-managed cloud infrastructure to deploy, host, and monitor your storefront, with dev, staging, and production environments; a Runtime Admin UI; and observability tooling like Log Center. See the Managed Runtime overview.
Together — PWA Kit for the front end, Managed Runtime for hosting, SCAPI for data and transactions — you get the Composable Storefront: a complete, supported headless stack with clear ownership boundaries.
The day-to-day workflow, outlined in the Composable Storefront overview, looks like this:
Salesforce publishes a storefront type comparison to help teams choose. The practical decision:
| Approach | Front end | Hosting | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| SFRA (Storefront Reference Architecture) | Server-rendered templates on the platform | B2C Commerce platform | Teams maintaining an existing site; no near-term headless need |
| Composable Storefront (PWA Kit + MRT) | React PWA you own | Managed Runtime | B2C teams wanting front-end agility with a supported, opinionated stack |
| Custom headless on SCAPI | Any framework, mobile app, kiosk, or channel | Your infrastructure | Teams with existing front-end platforms or non-web surfaces |
The decision rules of thumb: new B2C storefronts should start with the Composable Storefront, where Salesforce's investment and documentation are concentrated. Teams on SFRA with OCAPI integrations should plan a phased migration using SLAS hybrid auth, not a big-bang rebuild. And if your roadmap includes mobile or in-store experiences, headless stops being optional — one SCAPI backend can serve them all.
Headless 360, mapped in Part 1 of this series, is the platform-wide commitment to making every Salesforce capability available through APIs, MCP tools, and CLI commands. Commerce is where that pattern is most proven, and the connections keep tightening:
The series' customer proof points reinforce the pattern: Salesforce's own IT team runs employee-facing operations headlessly inside Slack (Salesforce on Salesforce), and Indeed's engineering team deploys production agents without opening a browser. Different surfaces, same principle — pick a bounded workflow, expose it through governed interfaces, expand from there.
Vantage Point helps commerce and digital teams make the headless decision with clear eyes: choosing between SFRA, Composable Storefront, and custom headless; scoping a phased OCAPI-to-SCAPI migration; and connecting storefront architecture to your broader Salesforce roadmap. Through our Salesforce implementation and advisory and system integration and data migration services, senior consultants design the architecture, identity model, and pilot plan so you build on solid ground. Senior consultants only — no junior handoffs; the experts you meet are the experts who deliver.
Whether you are evaluating a composable storefront, planning an OCAPI migration, or mapping commerce into your Headless 360 strategy ahead of Dreamforce, Vantage Point's senior consultants can help you move from evaluation to a concrete plan. Contact Vantage Point to schedule a headless commerce readiness session, or explore our Salesforce services to see how we support commerce teams end to end.
SCAPI — the Salesforce Commerce API, formally the B2C Commerce API — is a set of RESTful APIs for building storefronts, merchant tools, and integrations on Salesforce B2C Commerce. It is headless-first and stateless, split into high-scale Shopper APIs for customer-facing traffic and Admin APIs for merchant operations.
Yes. OCAPI was marked deprecated as of April 2026. It gets security updates for a limited window, but no new features, and Salesforce directs all new implementations to SCAPI. Existing OCAPI users should audit their usage and plan a phased migration, using SLAS hybrid authentication to bridge both API sets during the transition.
PWA Kit is the front-end framework — an open-source, React-based toolkit for building progressive web app storefronts on SCAPI. Managed Runtime is the hosting and operations layer — Salesforce-managed infrastructure for deploying, hosting, and monitoring those storefronts. Together they form Salesforce's Composable Storefront.
For the Composable Storefront path, yes — PWA Kit is React-based. The upside: React skills are widely available, so you are not hiring for a proprietary templating language. A fully custom headless build on SCAPI can use any framework your team already knows.
Yes, and that is the recommended pattern. SLAS hybrid authentication lets a single shopper session span legacy SFRA pages and modern PWA storefront pages, so you can move high-value routes incrementally without losing baskets or forcing a big-bang cutover.
No. It fits any B2C team that needs front-end agility, performance control, or experiences beyond a single web storefront. The real threshold is organizational: front-end development capacity plus a reason to move faster than a template-based storefront allows.
Headless 360 is Salesforce's platform-wide commitment to exposing every capability through APIs, MCP tools, and CLI commands. Headless commerce is its most mature expression, and it now connects back through MCP servers for AI-assisted development and Data Cloud engagement events for unified customer data.
Vantage Point is a boutique CRM consulting firm helping businesses transform with Salesforce, HubSpot, and AI — 150+ clients, 400+ engagements, and a 4.71/5 average engagement rating. Learn more at vantagepoint.io.