As a Salesforce Commerce Cloud developer, I’m often at the center of a classic developer’s dilemma: the “build vs. buy” decision. Nowhere is this more common than with product ratings and reviews. Stakeholders see the feature on every major retail site and want it, but then they see the price tag and recurring license fees for third-party services. For clients with tight budgets or unrated products, the cost can be a non-starter.
But what if you could deliver a robust, performant, and fully-integrated review system without the hefty subscription fee?
You can. By leveraging the core features of the SFCC platform, we can build a powerful, custom product review cartridge. It’s a solution that is not only budget-friendly but also gives you complete control over the user experience and your own data. This post is a developer’s blueprint for building that exact solution, designed to be compelling for project managers and clients who are looking for smart, cost-effective alternatives.
Why Build When You Can Buy?
When planning an implementation, there are an endless number of off-the-shelf solutions that achieve any sort of problem you can think of. For the architect, you need to consider several factors when weighing whether to leverage and integrate with these 3rd party off-the-shelf (OTS) solutions vs. building on your own. Often it makes the most sense to offer a blend of OTS and custom built.
In doing so, you are typically trying to weigh feature-sets, licensing fees, ease of integration, and upkeep effort/costs, amongst other things. For many businesses, and in many situations, a custom solution to a specific problem isn’t just a cheaper option; it’s a smarter one. Here’s a breakdown of the key advantages of building your own review system on the SFCC platform.
- Lower TCO
Eliminate recurring license fees. A custom solution has a one-time development cost, offering significant savings over multi-year subscriptions to third-party services.
- Complete Control
Achieve perfect brand integration. You control the UX, data model, and workflow without vendor limitations or awkward iframes, ensuring a seamless customer experience.
- Superior Performance
Natively stored data and smart caching strategies often result in faster page loads than solutions relying on external API calls, protecting your site’s speed.
- Integrated Simplicity
Reduce complexity by avoiding another integration point. Merchants can manage reviews directly within the Business Manager they already use every day.
The Architecture Blueprint
For our particular scenario, we were building out our own Ateko swag store on Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) B2C, and the designs called for product ratings. There are plenty of off-the-shelf solutions available that can plug into SFCC to offer this sort of functionality. In our particular case, these options were not only expensive but also offered a suite of features that went far beyond our immediate needs.
Instead, we analyzed what it would take to develop a custom cartridge that allows customers to rate products and leave reviews. The result is a solution built on four pillars, leveraging core SFCC features for a robust and scalable system. Each component below plays a key role in the architecture.
- Data Foundation
The system’s backbone is native SFCC metadata. A `ProductReviews` Custom Object stores each review submission, while a single `reviewStatistics` custom attribute on the Product object holds pre-calculated JSON data for high-speed access on category pages.
- Performance Engine
A scheduled job (`calculateReviewStatistics.js`) runs periodically (e.g., every 30 minutes) to solve the N+1 query problem on listing pages. It calculates the average rating and counts for all products at once, saving the results to the `reviewStatistics` attribute for instant retrieval.
- Smart Model
Overriding the base `ratings.js` decorator is the most elegant part of the solution. It reads the pre-calculated stats for all contexts (in our case, PLP). Crucially, it’s “context-aware”—when passed a `pdp` context from the controller, it makes an additional real-time query to fetch the full review text for display only on the product detail page.
The front-end is seamless. An AJAX-powered form, defined using the SFCC Form Framework, allows users to submit reviews without a page reload. On success, JavaScript instantly prepends the new review to the list and updates the total count, providing excellent user feedback.
See It In Action
Below are some mockups demonstrating how the feature appears on a Product Listing Page (PLP) and a Product Detail Page (PDP).
PLP / Product Tiles
PDP / Product Page
The Business Case: A Fair TCO Comparison
The biggest win is financial. However, a true Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comparison must be fair. While a custom build avoids license fees, it requires ongoing maintenance(Eg: SFRA updates.). Likewise, third-party services often have initial setup costs.Below is a sample calculation to see the potential 3-year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comparison, factoring in implementation and maintenance costs.
The Trade-Offs:
- Custom Build: Delivers core features without bloat, but lacks advanced options like photo/video uploads or Q&A sections.
- Third-Party Service: Offers a rich feature set out-of-the-box but comes with recurring costs and less control over the user experience.
Crucial Next Step: Content Moderation
A review system is not complete without a moderation workflow. While our current cartridge posts reviews instantly, the essential next step is to implement an approval process. This involves adding a ‘status’ field (e.g., ‘Pending’, ‘Approved’) to the ProductReviews Custom Object. This simple addition empowers merchants to review all submissions in Business Manager before they go live, protecting brand safety and ensuring the quality of on-site content. It’s a non-negotiable feature for any production-ready implementation.
A Smarter Investment in Your Platform
Is a third-party review service always the right choice? For many businesses, especially those looking for core functionality without a hefty annual subscription?
The “build vs. buy” decision is about smart investment. Instead of renting a solution with recurring fees, you can build a permanent asset that you own outright. A custom SFCC cartridge delivers the features you actually need, without the bloat or high cost of an enterprise subscription. It provides:
- Complete control over a perfectly branded user experience.
- Superior performance by using the native platform.
- Full ownership of your most valuable asset: your customer data.
By leveraging the powerful tools within Commerce Cloud, we can build solutions that offer a strong ROI. The next time you’re faced with this choice, don’t be afraid to champion the build. You might just build something better.
If you’re working on an Salesforce Commerce Cloud project and need a lean, high-performance reviews solution, feel free to reach out. We’d love to chat!
