A Regulated B2B Commerce Portal on Experience Cloud for a Pharmaceutical Company

Business Problem

The company sold medical products B2B, and every order arrived by phone or email — transcribed by staff into internal systems, with all the delay and error that implies. Customers wanted to browse products, place orders, and track status themselves. But this is a regulated industry: not just anyone may register and order, customer data flows through validated systems like Veeva CRM, and every system change must be documented to audit standard. An off-the-shelf storefront couldn't satisfy any of that.

Technical Challenge

• Registration is a compliance decision. New customers had to self-register, but accounts could only activate after administrative approval — an approval-gated onboarding workflow with automated notifications at every state change, and an audit trail proving the gate was never bypassed.
• The order lifecycle spans systems. Orders placed in the portal had to flow through internal fulfillment while customer data stayed synchronized with Veeva CRM and campaign audiences in Marketing Cloud — three systems agreeing about the same customer at all times.
• Validated-environment documentation. The client's quality process required Design Configuration Specifications (DCS), Installation Qualification (IQ), and Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for the platform — engineering deliverables many development teams have never produced.
• Product-grade UX on a platform stack. Customers compare every portal to consumer e-commerce; "good for an enterprise portal" wasn't the bar.

Solution Architecture

• Experience Cloud portal with a categorized product catalog, customer profiles, order placement, order history, and status tracking — the storefront experience built on the platform already governing the data.
• Approval-gated registration workflow: self-registration submits into a Salesforce Approval Process; activation, rejection, and confirmation emails fire automatically; every decision is recorded. Compliance is enforced by architecture, not vigilance.
• Custom Lightning Web Components for the catalog, ordering, and account experiences — responsive, mobile-ready, and consistent with the company's brand.
• Order lifecycle engine built with Apex, Flows, Triggers, and Approval Processes, moving orders from placement through fulfillment states with validation checkpoints and bulk-safe processing throughout.
• Veeva CRM and Marketing Cloud integration synchronizing customer data for field operations and targeted campaigns — one customer record, coherent across sales, service, and marketing systems.
• Audit-ready documentation set: DCS, IQ, SOPs, ER diagrams, and per-story Confluence documentation, produced alongside the build rather than reconstructed after it.
• Google Analytics event instrumentation across the portal, feeding dashboards that show how customers actually use it — data the business used to prioritize the roadmap post-launch.

Business Impact

Customers now register, browse, order, and track entirely self-service, and staff time moved from transcribing orders to serving customers. The approval-gated registration means the compliance team can prove — not assert — that every active account passed review. Synchronized Veeva and Marketing Cloud data turned the portal into a growth channel, not just an order form: usage analytics inform campaigns, and campaigns drive portal orders. And because the documentation was delivered to validation standard, the platform passed quality review without rework — often the most expensive surprise in regulated delivery.