Peak-Ready Precision: The October 2026 B2C Commerce Release

Time is money, especially during the holiday shopping season when every second matters for your brand’s bottom line. When merchandisers spend hours clicking through catalog hierarchies, or developers burn an entire afternoon building custom workarounds for sandbox connections, retail operations slow down right when they need to accelerate. Shoppers expect real-time personalization, instant checkout, and consistent pricing across every channel. Meeting those expectations during peak season shouldn’t require manual heroics from your ecommerce team. That’s why our October 2026 release for B2C Commerce focuses on speed, automation, and unified commerce. Here’s a closer look at how new features help your team prepare for retail’s busiest season. Integration with the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is now live Merchants can now turn on UCP-powered checkout on Google to enable shoppers to seamlessly discover and buy products directly on surfaces like the Gemini app and Google Search, including AI Mode — while staying the merchant of record. Key benefits for your ecommerce teams 1. Move faster with agentic AI built directly into merchandising Merchandisers run the engine of your storefront, yet manual catalog setup often slows them down. This release integrates agentic capabilities straight into Business Manager so teams can build and refine product catalogs in minutes rather than days. Conversational Catalog Search: Instead of constructing complex, multi-field filters by hand, merchandisers can type what they want in plain English. The Merchandising Agent will automatically build the corresponding filter logic. Automated Product Categorization: Let AI analyze your existing catalog and suggest category assignments for base products, while a new dashboard insight flags uncategorized items instantly. 2. Grow revenue by guiding customers to the right products Customers increasingly search for products using natural language and they expect your website to support their queries. With Agentic Commerce Search (ACS) and our new Shopper Agent, Carter, it’s easier than ever to guide customers to the right products. Here’s what’s new for Agentic Commerce Search and Shopper Agent this month: Support for Shop the Store with Agentic Search: Shoppers can now ask for what they want in natural language, like “rain jackets in stock near me”, and see results filtered by what’s available at their local store. Your existing B2C Commerce store inventory carries over to Agentic Commerce Search, so you can bring local availability into AI-powered search without extra setup. Global Discovery with Agentic Commerce Search: Agentic Commerce Search now understands shopper queries in any language, removing the language barrier from natural language search for merchants selling across international markets. Page Awareness for Shopper Agent: Carter knows exactly what you’re looking at. By reading page context in real time — product, category, or cart — Carter gives relevant answers instead of generic chat replies. Agentic Commerce Search is available as an add-on for B2C Commerce customers, as well as for customers on other ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, Adobe Commerce, or homegrown solutions. Shopper Agent is available as an add-on for B2C Commerce customers. 3. Customize and navigate Business Manager with speed and ease Business Manager is packed with enterprise-grade features to run global storefronts and multiple brands. This year, we’ve focused on making it easy to find what you need and customize the workspace to your needs. Here are some highlights from this release: Maximize your workspace with Collapsible Navigation: Work more easily and efficiently in Business Manager by collapsing and expanding the left navigation pane with a toggle in the Utility Bar. You can also customize your navigation to more easily find what you need. Quickly find the Products you Need: The Product List search bar now supports searching for up to 1000 product IDs at a time, enabling you to easily locate large groups of products. Work on up to 1,000 Locales and Languages: Broaden your global reach and easily launch localized experiences with support for up to 1,000 languages and locales in Business Manager. Compare Revenue by External Traffic Source: Along with Business Manager updates, we’ve also made it easier to use the Traffic Sources dashboard on the Traffic tab in Reports & Dashboards. You can now easily compare revenue, orders, and conversion for shoppers who reach your storefront from Search, Social, Email, and Chatbot sources. 4. Connect B2C Commerce to your Salesforce Ecosystem without friction Siloed customer profiles and complex licensing slow down digital transformation. This release strips away technical hurdles between B2C Commerce and the core Salesforce platform, giving you a shared operational view. Zero-Friction Connections: You no longer need a Data 360 license to establish the trusted connection between B2C Commerce and your Salesforce org. This immediately unlocks agentic capabilities like Shopper Agent and Merchandising Agent. Self-Service Unpairing: This new feature provides admins with a self-service capability to safely disconnect and reconnect trust pairings in the case of a Salesforce sandbox refresh, ensuring quick and stable dev/test environments without waiting on a support team. Flexible Sandboxes: Developers can now pair non-production B2C Commerce instances with any Salesforce sandbox type, dramatically cutting setup friction and environment costs. Instant Customer Profile Sync: Profile updates in B2C Commerce are now synchronized directly to connected Person Accounts in near real time. Customer service reps and Agentforce agents see updates, like phone number changes, made to customer profile in seconds. Accelerated Person Accounts creation in the Salesforce org for active users when they login to a storefront (except SFRA/SG). Partial POS Catalog Syncs: Stop waiting for full catalog sync jobs. Schedule delta syncs that push only modified pricing, translated details, and product updates straight to store registers to keep omnichannel pricing aligned. 5. Protect Your Margins and Uptime with Operational Agility Downtime, bot traffic, and inventory mismatches hit hardest during peak volume. We added self-service guardrails and targeted synchronization tools to keep your storefront secure and accurate. Direct SCAPI Security Controls: This allows you to manage rate limits, WAF rules, and cache purges directly in Business Manager or via API for your SCAPI zones, neutralizing bot attacks and credential stuffing without waiting on support tickets. Enterprise Eventing (GA): The B2C Commerce Event Framework is now generally available. Get notified when data or processing events occur, then trigger work in external systems without polling or custom batch jobs. Enable process-level replication, granular replication, shopper registered, and order placed events in Business Manager and route them to HTTP webhook connectors. This also includes support for: Custom Events : Publish events for the use cases that matter specific to your business. Declare the type in a cartridge, send it from script when your condition is met, and route it to the same webhook connectors, with the same headers, delivery, and Business Manager setup. sf.cc.order.placed Event Type : Know the moment a shopper places an order. B2C Commerce sends the notification as soon as the order is placed, so you can orchestrate whatever comes next on your other systems, from fulfillment and fraud checks to loyalty and marketing, without waiting on a batch job or a poll. 6. Enhance AI agent and developers productivity with the Agentic Developer Toolkit Following September’s B2C CLI 2.0 launch, this month’s toolkit updates focus on making AI agents and developers more effective day to day. More Built-In Knowledge: Agents and the B2C docs command now search more B2C Commerce guidance, including Solutions guides on bot