01
Context
Cummins sells through a global dealer and distributor network. The Salesforce programme supporting that network had several moving parts — identity, order management, and a customer-facing commerce storefront — and the marketplace was the end of it a buyer actually touched.
CloudCraze is Salesforce's B2B commerce technology, built natively on the Lightning Platform — so the catalogue, cart, checkout and account pages come with it, already wired into the same platform as the rest of the programme. What also comes with it, and is easy to underestimate, is a complete set of default visual and interaction decisions, made for no brand in particular.
“Native to the platform is not the same as native to the brand.”
02
The gap between platform default and brand
Cummins had corporate UI standards, and a dealer buying a part had no reason to experience a different product than the rest of the estate. The work was reconciling a configurable commerce layer with a brand system it had never been designed against.
- —Component styling that had to read as Cummins rather than as CloudCraze's defaults.
- —Typography and spacing conventions carried over from the corporate standards.
- —Layout patterns adjusted for how dealers actually order — repeat, by part number, in volume — rather than for consumer retail.
- —Brand implementation specifications defined once, so the same decisions held as the programme grew.
03
Design and build in one pair of hands
I led the design and did the UI development myself, on the Lightning Platform. On a customisation job that division matters more than usual: the constraint is not what you can draw, it is what the platform will let you change without fighting it on every release.
Why it mattered here
Specification and implementation never had to be reconciled, because they were not separate people. A design that the platform would have resisted got caught while it was still a decision, not after it had been handed over.
The customisation ran about six months, delivered by an in-house team rather than contracted out — which is part of why the design and the build could stay in the same hands at all.
04
One programme, four surfaces
The marketplace was not standalone. I led design and UI development across the Salesforce work as a whole — CloudCraze for commerce, IAM for identity, the Marketplace itself, and OMS for orders. A dealer moving between signing in, browsing, buying and tracking should not be able to feel the seams between four systems.
Holding all four meant those seams were one person's problem rather than nobody's.