Summer ’25 Release: Our Top Picks for Commerce, Order Mgmt, and Flow

From long-overdue compliance upgrades to exciting automation and usability improvements, the Summer ’25 release brings a blend of meaningful enhancements for both technical and business users. Below are the Saltbox Mgmt team’s top picks from this cycle—with perspective on what matters, what’s still TBD, and what could be a game-changer.

Commerce Cloud Highlights

1. Cookie Consent Component

Why It Matters: A native cookie consent feature has finally arrived—aimed at helping businesses manage compliance more easily.

What We Love: Ashley Wright, Team Lead, Technology, notes: “I’m excited to see they’re releasing a cookie consent component; there are still more details to be revealed about what it will allow you to control, but I am remaining cautiously optimistic

2. Featured/Recommended Products Enhancements

Why It Matters: These updates are intended to give merchandisers more control over how featured or recommended products are displayed.

What We Love: Ashley says: “Cool in theory—but we’ll have to see how much control this really gives us and whether it’s worth using over the custom components we already rely on.”

3. Email Sign-Up & Subscription Preferences

Why It Matters: The new Email Sign-Up Form Component makes it easier for users to subscribe to newsletters and control marketing preferences—something that’s been conspicuously absent natively.

What We Love: Ashley adds: “This is LONG overdue. I’m excited about the potential, though I’m not sure how seamlessly it’ll work with non-SFMC (Salesforce Marketing Cloud) solutions. That will really determine how useful it is for broader audiences.”

4. Buyer Group Assignment Extension Point

Why It Matters: This opens up new extensibility for how buyer groups are managed within B2B storefronts.

What We Love: Ashley reflects: “It seems neat—but I’m torn on whether it actually adds something meaningful yet. That said, there’s a possibility it could give us more flexibility to handle situations where a customer struggles to structure their pricing and entitlements in a way that fits neatly within the standard limits. That could make it easier to build a scalable solution even in those trickier scenarios that tend to consume a lot of time—both for our customers and for the Saltbox team trying to find workarounds.”

Order Management Highlights

5. Changes to Order Management Ingestion Setup

Why It Matters: Salesforce is moving the high-scale order toggle, which has implications for sandbox refreshes and order summary processing.

What We Love: Ashley calls this out as a need-to-know for internal teams: “Keep this in mind—since we’ve often had to toggle this on manually post-sandbox refreshes due to that bug where order summaries aren’t processed properly.”

Nathan Anderson, VP of Solutions & Consulting, adds: “This is one of those features that just kind of resolves a sandbox bug we’ve all been dealing with. It’s not a big value add to customers or anything—it’s just the removal of an annoyance to partners and implementors.”

Flow & Automation Highlights

6. Visual Flow Layout Customization

Why It Matters: This update gives admins and developers more control over how screen flows are visually structured—similar to layout flexibility in Experience Cloud.

What We Love: Rachel Hubel, Engagement Director, is enthusiastic: “Adjusting visual representation in flows is huge—it’s going to make screen design so much more intuitive for both creators and end users.”

7. Negative Test Case Support in Flow Debugging

Why It Matters: You can now build and run test flows that explicitly validate error scenarios.

What We Love: Rachel emphasizes: “Testing negative cases has always been difficult to do and even harder to explain. This is a fantastic improvement.”

CTO Shane Smyth also rounded up a few of his favorite Summer ’25 features—here’s a quick look at what stood out to him:

• Add Express Checkout in the Mini Cart for Faster Purchases 

  • Lets returning customers complete purchases faster with fewer clicks, helping reduce cart abandonment.

• Handle Split Payments with Custom Checkout

  • Enables buyers to use multiple payment methods in one order—ideal for complex or budget-split transactions.

• New and Changed Commerce LWR Store Components (Shane is very excited to finally have a page like this!)

  • Delivers faster, more flexible storefront customization for brands using headless or composable setups.

• Help Customers Find Relevant Products Faster with Prefix Matching

  • Improves product discoverability by showing smart search results from the first few characters typed.

• Assign Buyers to Buyer Groups by Using Apex Logic

  • Allows automatic buyer group assignment based on custom business rules to support tailored experiences.

Final Thoughts

The Summer ’25 release delivers several quality-of-life improvements that hint at Salesforce’s evolving focus on compliance, automation, and user experience. While some components still leave us waiting for documentation and testing to understand their full utility, others—like flow enhancements—are clear wins right out of the gate.

Ready to put these new features to work? Our team can help you apply them to your business strategy—let’s connect.