When you’re seeking to digitize a massive inventory across diverse market segments—from high-volume corporate printing to Japan’s complex and passionate self-publishing doujin scene—standard e-commerce solutions often fail. That was the challenge facing the client, a printing company with nearly a century of history. It set out with the ambitious goal of unifying its separate storefronts into a single, scalable platform tightly integrated with Salesforce for centralized management.
The stakes were high: the sheer volume of SKUs (tens of thousands), combined with printing-specific customization needs, rendered previous solutions inadequate and put the entire project at risk. The team needed a platform that could handle this complexity, maintain robust Salesforce integration, and accelerate development, which led them to consult with TAO Drive, a firm that had previously participated in the company’s core systems RFP.
Launching scalable e-commerce on Heroku while solving the complexity
The client initially explored other solutions, but the sheer number of SKUs, combined with printing-specific functionality requirements, made other platforms inadequate. After determining that current options weren’t viable, additional time was needed to identify an alternative that could maintain Salesforce integration while addressing these challenges. The delays caused by this search put the entire digital transformation at risk.
Rather than wasting time on further evaluation or infrastructure setup, TAO Drive chose to build the new platform on Heroku. It proposed Heroku based on its proven track record of combining Salesforce with Heroku to meet requirements that other tools couldn’t achieve. Heroku’s flexibility allowed TAO Drive to adopt Medusa.js, an open-source e-commerce framework, and customize it specifically to handle the client’s complex industry requirements. The stack utilized Node.js, with the e-commerce back end relying on Heroku Postgres for content and inventory data management.
We were particularly drawn to the openness and resources accessible through Heroku. Based on our proven experience combining Salesforce with Heroku in past projects, we proposed Heroku as the best-fit solution for the client.
Heroku AppLink: Secure integration for Salesforce e-commerce
A core requirement for the project was seamless, secure integration with Salesforce. TAO Drive leveraged Heroku AppLink and Salesforce Customer Identity to manage this bridge. AppLink enabled various e-commerce master data to be registered from Salesforce and synchronized with the store, ensuring clean integration between front-end customer experiences and back-end operations.
By leveraging Customer Identity, TAO Drive delegated record-level security to Salesforce itself. This integration provided greater flexibility in handling schema mismatches directly in the Heroku application code, resulting in a significant reduction in development effort.
When combined with Customer Identity, the solution leveraged Salesforce external users and delegated record-level security to Salesforce itself. In some cases, this even allowed TAO Drive to omit a separate back-end app, further reducing the team’s workload.
In this project, we were among the first to put AppLink into practical use. What stood out most was how well it balanced two critical factors for Salesforce-based customer web systems: robust security and high development efficiency.
TAO Drive modernizing workflows: Heroku drives productivity and ownership
The adoption of Heroku served as more than just a technical solution; it became a driver of change management on the client side. Previously, source code had been bottlenecked by file-sharing-based workflows. By moving both Heroku application code and Salesforce metadata to Git-based version control, the team streamlined configuration management and dramatically improved development efficiency.
With Git-based workflows and centralized version control, developers could work in parallel with greater transparency, reducing miscommunication and duplicated effort. The collaborative environment using GitHub, together with Heroku’s simple deployment process, even allowed TAO Drive to involve the client’s staff directly in storefront development after minimal training. This self-service capability not only reduced development costs but also instilled a stronger sense of ownership over the new digital platform, representing a “quantum leap” in engagement for the client.
Heroku’s exceptional support, even across time zones
TAO Drive consistently received strong support from experienced engineers and members of the Heroku team. The responsiveness and expertise made the TAO Drive team feel fully supported regardless of distance or time zone. The team even had the opportunity to work directly with the AppLink product manager and request improvements to the functionality after general availability, which had a significant positive impact on the client’s project. TAO Drive also found Heroku’s extensive documentation and publicly available source code on GitHub to be valuable resources for navigating technical challenges.
For companies evaluating Salesforce-based e-commerce solutions, TAO Drive believes its approach serves as a strong reference model. The combination of Heroku’s openness with Salesforce’s enterprise capabilities creates possibilities that neither platform could achieve alone.
For customers already adopting Salesforce, adding Heroku to the architecture significantly expands what is possible. Simply by including Heroku, advanced use cases become achievable, which is why we view it as an indispensable component of the Salesforce platform.
What’s next for TAO Drive?
For TAO Drive, adding Heroku to the architecture significantly expands what is possible. In areas with rapidly growing demands around AI, Heroku broadens the scope of what can be achieved with Agentforce. For example, it enables scenarios like combining specialized cloud-based LLMs for Japanese call transcription or integrating local LLMs for highly confidential OCR tasks. The foundation built on Heroku ensures TAO Drive can continue leveraging the platform to expand the scope of what is possible with the Salesforce ecosystem.
Launch your next project with Heroku
How TAO Drive did it
- Heroku Platform for developing the client’s online storefront and back end
- Heroku Dynos for running the store’s front end and back end
- Heroku AppLink for secure, streamlined integration with Salesforce Customer Identity and centralized data management
- Heroku Postgres for database management with Medusa.js
- Service Mesh for safely routing requests from Salesforce to the app
- Salesforce Customer Identity for authentication and record-level security
- Next.js for the storefront front end
- Medusa.js for the store back end
- JavaScript and TypeScript for application development
- GitHub integration for version control and collaborative development
