Scenario 03: UrbanNest Home Goods

Work in Progress

This content is currently being reviewed for accuracy and will be updated soon.

Scenario Snapshot

Field	Detail
Start here	This question page
Difficulty	Beginner
Industry	Retail and E-commerce
Heavy domains	Solution Architecture and Integration
Recommended prep window	150 minutes total: 90 min preparation + 30 min presentation + 30 min Q&A
Coverage available	Question + Solution
Study flow	Attempt this page first, then review the sibling solution page after your own attempt.

Recommended Approach

Print this scenario. Read it twice using the Two-Pass Reading Method once for understanding and once for implicit requirements. Then build your architecture within a focused 150-minute practice window (90 min prep + 30 min present + 30 min Q&A).

Project Overview

UrbanNest Home Goods is a growing direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand selling premium home furnishings and decor through its Shopify Plus store and five physical retail locations across the US Pacific Coast. The company has built a loyal customer base around curated product collections and strong visual brand identity.

Having hit $22M in annual online revenue and with a pipeline of 40 independent interior design studios and boutique home goods retailers ready to place wholesale orders, the executive team is moving to launch a B2B wholesale channel by Q3 of this year. The COO has chartered “Project Expand” to establish the B2B channel, decide the long-term platform strategy, and integrate the systems that currently operate in silos.

Budget: $600K for the initial phase, 8-month delivery window.

Attribute	Detail
Employees	95 total (25 store staff across 5 locations, 12 warehouse, 20 marketing/brand, 10 tech, 28 admin/ops)
Physical stores	5 (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Diego)
Online revenue	$22M annual (Shopify Plus)
B2B pipeline	40 prospective wholesale accounts (LOIs signed for 18)
Active SKUs	1,400 (mix of furniture, textiles, lighting, decor accessories)
Order volume	~280 online orders/day; spikes to ~1,100/day during seasonal events (2 per year)
B2B forecast	$4M incremental revenue in year 1, $12M by year 3

The CEO: “We cannot lose the Shopify experience our DTC customers already love. But we also need a proper way to manage wholesale accounts, pricing, and relationships — and right now we are doing all of that in email threads and spreadsheets.”

Stakeholder Quotes

CEO, Priya Nandakumar: “Our DTC brand is what we built. Shopify works for our customers, and I do not want to disrupt that to satisfy a channel that is still unproven. Whatever we build for B2B has to coexist with what already works.”

VP of Sales, Marcus Thorne: “We have 18 signed LOIs and another 22 in negotiation. Every month we delay the wholesale portal is a month those retailers can choose someone else. We need tiered pricing, account hierarchies for buyers who manage multiple store locations, and self-service order placement. This has to launch before the holiday planning window opens in August.”

Head of E-commerce, Sofia Reyes: “We have spent three years tuning our Shopify storefront — the product discovery flow, our seasonal lookbook promotions, abandoned cart sequences, the bundle pricing engine. These are not out-of-the-box features. If we move to a different platform just because someone wants B2B, we lose all of that. I need a strong technical argument before I will support a migration.”

Current Systems and Pain Points

E-Commerce (Shopify Plus)

UrbanNest’s primary revenue channel. Handles ~280 orders/day at an average order value of $215, rising to ~1,100 orders/day during seasonal sale events (one in spring, one in fall). The storefront has been in place for 4 years with significant customization: a “Room Builder” product bundle tool, a seasonal lookbook feature tied to collections, a dynamic discount engine supporting percentage, BOGO, and bundle pricing, and a loyalty points app (third-party). The Head of E-commerce estimates 18 months of development effort is embedded in the current theme and app stack.

Shopify Plus connects to the rest of the business through manual exports and limited point-to-point syncs. Inventory levels in Shopify are updated once per day from a warehouse spreadsheet, which has resulted in 3 oversell incidents in the past year (most recently during a spring sale).

Shopify REST Admin API is available for order, customer, inventory, and product data. Shopify webhook support covers order creation, order updates, and inventory level changes.

Warehouse and Fulfillment System (FulfillEdge)

A mid-market SaaS WMS used by the warehouse team to manage receiving, putaway, pick/pack, and shipping across one distribution center (Los Angeles). FulfillEdge tracks ~1,400 active SKUs, current stock levels, and outbound shipment tracking. It exposes a documented REST API (v2.4) supporting inventory queries, shipment status webhooks, and inbound receipt events.

Current pain points: inventory data in Shopify is 24 hours stale at best. B2B orders are handled entirely outside FulfillEdge — the warehouse receives a forwarded email from the ops team and creates orders manually. There is no system connection between a wholesale quote, a confirmed PO, and the pick/pack workflow.

B2B Ordering (Spreadsheets + Email)

UrbanNest’s current “system” for wholesale: a shared Google Sheet tracking 18 active wholesale accounts, their pricing tiers, open orders, and payment status. Sales reps exchange order confirmations over email and copy the ops team to arrange fulfillment. Invoices are generated in Google Docs and emailed as PDFs. There is no portal, no self-service, and no visibility for the buyer beyond what the sales rep communicates manually.

This approach cannot scale past ~25 accounts without significant operational overhead. The VP of Sales estimates each new account requires 3-5 hours of setup effort in the current process.

Business Requirements

Platform Strategy (Build vs Buy)

1. Evaluate whether to keep Shopify Plus as the DTC e-commerce platform or migrate to Salesforce Commerce Cloud (B2C). The decision must account for the existing 4-year Shopify investment, current customizations, and the 8-month project timeline.
2. Select a dedicated Salesforce product for the B2B wholesale channel rather than building a custom portal from scratch. The platform must support account hierarchies, contract-based pricing, and self-service order placement.
3. The platform strategy must support both the DTC and B2B channels from a single Salesforce org, with a shared customer and product data layer.
4. Any platform selected for B2B must support phased rollout: launch with 18 accounts in phase 1, scale to 60+ accounts by end of year 2 without re-architecture.
5. The architecture must preserve the existing Shopify customizations (bundle tool, lookbook, discount engine, loyalty app) during phase 1. A Shopify migration, if recommended at all, must be sequenced as a later phase with a defined business case.

B2B Commerce

6. Wholesale buyers access a self-service portal to browse the UrbanNest product catalog, place orders, view order status, and download invoices.
7. Each wholesale account has a tiered pricing structure: Tier 1 (40% off MSRP for accounts ordering $5K+/month), Tier 2 (30% off for $2K-$5K/month), and Tier 3 (20% off for under $2K/month). Pricing tiers are reviewed and adjusted quarterly.
8. Wholesale accounts include buyers who manage multiple physical store locations. The system must support a parent account (the buying organization) with child accounts (individual store locations) that can each place independent orders.
9. Wholesale buyers can submit purchase orders with a net payment term of 30 days. Finance needs to track open AR balances per account and flag overdue invoices.
10. New wholesale accounts go through an onboarding approval workflow: sales rep submits, credit review step (manual, 1-3 days), then account activation with pricing tier assignment.
11. The B2B portal must show each buyer only their own account, orders, invoices, and pricing — no visibility into other accounts or internal data.
12. Sales reps need a CRM view of wholesale pipeline, account health, open orders, YTD revenue, and renewal/expansion opportunities alongside standard opportunity management.

Integration

13. Shopify order data (line items, customer, shipping address, payment status, tracking number) must flow to Salesforce within 10 minutes of order creation or status change, for service visibility.
14. Shopify inventory levels must be updated from FulfillEdge within 30 minutes of any warehouse stock movement to prevent oversells.
15. When a B2B order is confirmed in Salesforce, it must create a fulfillment order in FulfillEdge within 5 minutes so the warehouse can begin pick/pack without manual handoff.
16. Shipment tracking updates from FulfillEdge (carrier, tracking number, estimated delivery, delivery confirmation) must reflect in the B2B buyer portal and in the CRM service view within 15 minutes of the event.
17. Both integrations (Shopify and FulfillEdge) must include error handling: failed events must be logged, visible to the ops team, and retriable without data loss.
18. The integration architecture must accommodate one or two additional system connections in the next 12 months (for example, an accounting package or a returns management tool) without re-architecting the existing integrations.

Customer Management

19. Service agents need a unified view of a customer’s DTC order history (from Shopify) and, where applicable, their wholesale account status, open orders, and recent interactions — in a single Salesforce record.
20. Wholesale account contacts who also shop via the DTC storefront must be linked to a single person record, not duplicated as separate contact and lead records.
21. Marketing needs visibility into wholesale account engagement (last order date, average order value, tier status) to support account-based outreach without requiring a separate CRM export.
22. Customer service must be able to look up any Shopify order by order number and see current fulfillment status without switching to Shopify or FulfillEdge.

Reporting

23. The VP of Sales needs a weekly wholesale pipeline report: accounts by stage, open order value, overdue AR, and tier distribution.
24. The COO needs a monthly revenue summary combining DTC (pulled from Shopify) and B2B wholesale, with channel-level gross margin tracking.
25. Store managers need a simple weekly view of which online orders were placed for in-store pickup (BOPIS), their fulfillment status, and any items that could not be fulfilled from store stock.

Constraints

• Total budget is $600K for phase 1. Any platform licensing costs must be factored into the architecture recommendation.
• The B2B portal must be live and accepting orders from the 18 signed LOI accounts by August (approximately 8 months from project start). This is a contractual commitment.
• The existing Shopify storefront cannot be taken offline or significantly degraded at any point during the project. The spring seasonal sale event is 3 months into the project timeline.
• The internal tech team is 3 people (1 Salesforce admin, 1 developer, 1 IT ops). A systems integrator will be engaged for the implementation but the internal team must be able to operate the platform after go-live.
• UrbanNest does not currently have a middleware or integration platform. Any integration tooling selected must be operable by a 1-2 person team post-launch.
• Data volumes are modest and are not a primary constraint: 280 orders/day DTC, 1,400 SKUs, and a B2B book of fewer than 100 accounts in year 1.

Implicit Requirements

Pay attention to: the spring seasonal sale event falling mid-project and its impact on freeze windows and integration go-live timing; the 3-person internal team and their ability to maintain whatever is built; what “unified customer view” means when DTC customers exist in Shopify and wholesale contacts exist in Salesforce; the Head of E-commerce’s strong objection and how your architecture addresses it; and whether the B2B platform selected natively handles account hierarchies and contract pricing or requires significant custom build.

Deliverables Checklist

When practicing this scenario, aim to produce the following before checking the solution:

• Platform recommendation: keep Shopify or migrate to Commerce Cloud, with rationale
• B2B platform selection (e.g., Salesforce B2B Commerce, Experience Cloud portal) with justification
• Integration architecture diagram showing Shopify, Salesforce, and FulfillEdge connections with data flow direction, trigger type (event/batch), and latency targets
• Data model sketch: Account hierarchy (parent/child), Order and OrderItem, Contact/Person Account relationship, and product/pricebook structure
• Security model: how buyer portal access is scoped to their account only
• Key build vs buy decisions called out explicitly with rationale
• At least one risk or trade-off acknowledged (e.g., Shopify customization risk, integration complexity, team capacity)

Time Management: 150-Minute Practice Session

Prep , first 30 min: Read twice using the two-pass method. Note implicit requirements and flag the stakeholder tensions (Head of E-commerce’s objection, B2B timeline pressure).

Prep , middle 30 min: Design your architecture. Settle the platform strategy (keep Shopify or migrate), the B2B platform selection, and the integration patterns for Shopify and FulfillEdge.

Prep , final 30 min: Build your artifacts. Prioritize the integration architecture diagram, data model sketch, and build-vs-buy decision summary , these are the most likely presentation targets.

Presentation (30 min): Lead with your platform recommendation. Then cover the B2B portal design, integration architecture, data model, and security model.

Q&A (30 min): Expect probing on the Shopify-vs-Commerce Cloud decision, how you handle the spring sale freeze window mid-project, and how the unified customer view works across DTC and B2B.

Ready to Check?

When you have completed your own solution, compare with the reference solution.

Related Topics

• Two-Pass Reading Method
• 9 Essential Artifacts
• Mini-Scenario Library
• Build vs Buy
• Declarative vs Code
• Integration Patterns
• API Landscape

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This content is study material for CTA exam preparation. Content compiled and presented with AI assistance. Not affiliated with Salesforce.