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Higher Education Campus at Dusk
Case Study / Salesforce Implementation

Modernizing Higher Education Commerce with Salesforce

The Client

One of America's leading research universities operates one of the most complex commerce environments in higher education.

Its catalog spans physical merchandise, academic publications, digital downloads, continuing education courses (with CEU credits), and cooperative extension materials for agricultural professionals, 4-H families, and researchers across the country. It serves students buying university gear and academics purchasing scientific publications, sometimes in the same transaction.

The store supports in-store point-of-sale, campus mail delivery, UPS shipping, secure digital downloads, and institutional purchasing workflows, all within a single commerce operation. It serves students, faculty, alumni, researchers, extension agents, and county organizations through a highly diverse set of purchasing experiences.

The Challenge

The university's existing commerce platform was built on aging, fragmented infrastructure that could no longer support the scale and complexity of the business.

Product data, inventory, and orders were siloed across systems. Operations teams managed complex fulfillment workflows manually. In-store purchases relied on order-on-behalf-of workarounds that created a disconnected view of the business and made unified reporting difficult.

The university needed a platform capable of supporting one of higher education's most complex commerce operations while delivering a seamless experience for both customers and operational teams. Physical products, digital downloads, continuing education programs, institutional purchasing, and in-store retail all needed to operate through a single connected ecosystem.

Requirements that defined the architecture:

  • Support physical, digital, and educational products
  • Manage shipping, pickup, mail, and digital fulfillment
  • Enable institutional payment workflows
  • Unify Clover POS and online commerce
  • Authenticate users through university SSO
  • Centralize product and catalog management

The Solution

Red Van Workshop built a complete Salesforce Commerce platform from the ground up using Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC), Salesforce Order Management (SOM), and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

A custom translation layer connects all three platforms in real time, creating a unified commerce ecosystem that supports every product type, fulfillment workflow, and payment method used by the university.

Custom Product Information Management (PIM). The architectural centerpiece of the solution is a custom PIM tool that synchronizes product data, pricing, inventory, and category assignments across SFCC, SOM, and Salesforce Core. Without this capability, managing thousands of SKUs across multiple product types, pricing models, fulfillment methods, and extension program hierarchies would not have been feasible at scale.

Unified In-Store and Online Commerce. The Clover POS integration transformed how the university manages commerce operations. Prior to the implementation, in-store transactions were captured through manual order-on-behalf-of processes that existed separately from online orders. Clover transactions now flow directly into Salesforce Order Management alongside online purchases, providing the operations team with a single view of inventory, customers, fulfillment activity, and sales performance for the first time.

The resulting platform supports every major product type, fulfillment model, payment workflow, and customer experience requirement used by the university.

SFCC Storefront.  Product-type-specific display logic, Continuing Education Unit (CEU) eligibility filtering, customer group management tied to university identity, SSO integration, and WCAG accessibility remediation.

Salesforce Order Management.  Custom fulfillment workflows for physical products, digital delivery, and campus-mail orders; multi-label UPS shipping; automated packing slips; institutional order review processes; and support for multi-variant digital products.

Custom Payment Adapters.  Authorize.net, Cash, County Order, and institutional payment workflows with custom SOM processing, Marketing Cloud communications, and end-to-end order lifecycle support.

Marketing Cloud. Transactional communications, abandoned cart programs, back-in-stock notifications, and customer engagement workflows.

Azure Secure Delivery. Time-limited, signed download URLs for digital publications and eCourse materials, including download tracking and secure content access.

Services Provided

  • Discovery & Architecture
  • Salesforce Commerce Cloud Implementation
  • Salesforce Order Management Implementation
  • Salesforce Marketing Cloud Implementation
  • Custom PIM Development
  • Custom Integration Architecture & Translation Layer Development
  • Clover POS Integration
  • University SSO Integration
  • QA, Launch & Hypercare
  • Ongoing Managed Services & Platform Enhancements

Results

The university launched on Salesforce in June 2025 following a 15-month implementation that delivered more than 5,500 hours of development, architecture, design, and QA services.

Key outcomes include:

  • Unified physical, digital, educational, and institutional commerce on a single platform
  • Thousands of products centrally managed across physical, digital, and educational catalogs
  • Integrated Clover POS and online commerce operations
  • Secure digital delivery for publications and continuing education materials
  • Automated fulfillment workflows across shipping, campus mail, and digital delivery channels
  • Institutional purchasing support through custom payment and approval workflows
  • Centralized visibility across storefront, fulfillment, and point-of-sale operations
  • Scalable architecture supporting future growth and catalog expansion

Today, the university operates a connected commerce ecosystem that unifies physical merchandise, digital publications, continuing education programs, institutional purchasing, and in-store retail within a single Salesforce platform. What once required fragmented systems, manual workflows, and disconnected reporting now operates through a unified Salesforce architecture that provides greater visibility, operational efficiency, and scalability for future growth.