Another interesting story about Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud certification and how I nailed it!
Tags: salesforce, certification, commercecloud, b2c
Published: 2021-10-28 21:28:42

##Hello there!
It is been a while since my last story and there was an interesting change that has happened in my career as a developer.

I have heard of the Salesforce ecosystem many years ago and it is a particular niche in the IT market that I was interested but unfortunately, the entry barrier is high, specially the official courses and materials. 

The intention of this post, since there is not many information about this platform or the software SF develops and sells to many companies, is to reach as many people that are interested in this career path.

But I think I am going to get to the point (and the reason why you came here): If you want to achieve the Salesforce Commerce Cloud (B2C) certification, **you'll need a great amount of effort and dedication**.

In my particular case, I found a job opportunity, a paid traning program for front-end developers (I am more like...full-stack, but I applied anyway) with some experience in the field. After some interviews I was in.

I had ZERO experience and knowledge using Salesforce Commerce Cloud, just some approaches to their CRM but that is a different story.

The paid program consists in taking two official courses according to this website, which has the outline of what you need to achieve such certification:

[Salesforce Certified B2C Commerce Developer Outline](https://trailhead.salesforce.com/es-MX/help?article=Salesforce-Certified-B2C-Commerce-Developer-Exam-Guide)

It is a detailed explanation of everything you need and we'll get into that in a moment.

The official courses that I am talking about are:

[B2C Commerce Developer with SFRA (CCD102)](https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/academy/classes/ccd102-b2c-commerce-developer-with-sfra/)

[B2C Commerce Merchant (CCM101)](https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/academy/classes/ccm101-manage-and-merchandise-a-b2c-commerce-cloud-storefront/)

Both of these were paid by the company, quite expensive by the way but they were useful. The instructor (a SF Architect) really knew what he has talking about and the way he explained the topics were awesome. As far as I know, most of the instructors that teach the official courses are well trained, so kudos for that.

####B2C Commerce Merchant (CCM101)
The Merchant course (CCM101) is basically learn to operate the Commerce Cloud platform: Creating product catalogs, categories, navigation, products, inventory, prices, promotions, search results and many other topics. You will have the foundation on how become a merchant who operates the store in the front and back office.

The length of the course is a 4 hour lesson per day and it takes 5 days to complete it.


####B2C Commerce Developer with SFRA (CCD102)
The Developer course (CCD102) is, as you can guessed it, related to development stuff using the SFRA (Storefront Reference Architecture), which is kind of a framework to make stuff in B2C Commerce Cloud.
This course will teach you about the architecture, how the framework works (MVC), models, controllers, views, templating, page designer, testing, configuring your store and your dev environment using VS Code and many other topics.

This is a more complex and complete course, which is also 4 hours per day in a 2 week period.

For both courses, the training center provides a student guide (SG) and a exercise guide (EG) and also, each student has a Sandbox Environment in order to practice the exercises.

####Languages you need to know/learn
Mostly you will need javascript (ES5/ES6). According to some other devs, SFRA uses the language to code programs in the front and the back and using API's is a must which helps, for example, to use a pre-existing model to retrieve data in serializable JSON objects and the you can use it in your controller and well, if you are familiar with MVC, you know the rest.

**Once you complete these courses you are good to go in order to nail that exam...or maybe not**

###More resources!

####Trailhead
The official learning platform for all Salesforce related is here:
[Salesforce Trailhead](https://trailhead.salesforce.com/)

There are A LOT of content related to Commerce Cloud that is really useful to study for the exam. I really really recommend taking and understanding clearly the content.
During the official courses the instructor can tell you which one you can take to enhance the knowledge.
Also, in the provided outline link above there is a list of the recommended courses as well:

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/lix8fi6bai26bp6p12s3.png)
 

Sign up, set your account and start learning!

###SF Commerce Cloud Official Documentation
Of course, like any other languages or tools out there, the official documentation is your best friend.
It may seem that it need some work in the UI, but it is really effective, specially when searching for a specific topic. I really had to dig deeper to understand basic concepts.

[SF B2C Documentation - Check it out here!](https://documentation.b2c.commercecloud.salesforce.com/DOC1/index.jsp)

**Ok, now I am ready! Bring that exam..I'm gonna ace it, no problem!**

Hold your horses, let me give you the secret recipe...here we go.

###What did I do to pass the exam?

Since each one of us has a different learning method or studying techniques, I can tell you how this worked for me:

* We had a month of preparation, 3 weeks to take the courses just attend the four hours length and the you NEED to keep studying and practicing so basically I had days that I studied around 10+ hours, but not all the days, I had like a *"crunch time"* every 2-3 days.

* So the schedule was tight in order to comply with the compromise with the company so, yeah it was exciting!

* Take advantage of the Sandbox to practice! I use it a lot to practice and practice and practice where to do some operations within the Back office, for example, to import/export products. This works also when practicing the coding exercises over and over to completely understand what you are doing.

* This is really important, because the exam has a lot of questions that will ask you about code syntax, real world scenarios and how to solve the problem as a developer or merchant. These questions are really tricky.

And since they are tricky, one important way to answer them correctly is **having solid foundations of the concepts and theory of the SFRA architecture**.

* Read carefully the trailhead modules and learn from them. I have detected that some questions are based in the content of this modules as well. By the way, the quizzes of these modules are really easy, but do not expect the same kind of questions in the exam.

###During the exam

As the exam outline mentioned, there are 65 questions to answer in 105 minutes and 65% to pass. So my recommendations are:

* READ the questions CAREFULLY!
* Take your time to understand completely the question because sometimes the context is key to choose the right answer. Many questions could be two possible answers...tricky questions as I said before
* If you are taking the exam from home...DO NOT TRY TO CHEAT! There's someone else overseeing your movements, eye sight and if there is something suspicious they will stop you to check your desk or the room you are in.
* If you are hesitating, you can save those questions for later and focus on all the questions you are sure they are OK
* Despite the exam has more questions about development topics, take seriously the merchant topics. Many of these questions are easy and they could be the difference between passing or failing.

I learned this the hard way...because I failed my first attempt. It was a crushing defeat but I manage to suck it up and get back to study to achieve the certification in the second round.

All right folks, that's all I got for now. I hope this post can reach as many people that are interested in this career path. The e-com world is really expanding fast during the present times and there is a lot of opportunity to grow in this industry.

This won't be easy, so get ready!