- Institution
- Unity Environmental University, New Gloucester, Maine
- Unit
- Distance Education
- Storefront
- learn.unity.edu, public and live
- Built on
- Salesforce Commerce and Education Cloud
- Timeline
- Kickoff December 2024, live March 2025
- Sells
- A-la-carte online courses and bundles
Unity Environmental University runs its enterprise on Salesforce Education Cloud. When its Distance Education unit wanted to sell individual online courses and bundles to the public, ElevateActual built learn.unity.edu, a Salesforce Commerce storefront connected to the Education Cloud learner record, in about three months from kickoff to go-live.
Who Unity Is
Unity Environmental University is a private nonprofit university in Maine with a large distance education operation and a Sustainable Education Business Unit. Unity made Education Cloud the center of its enterprise early, and the institution now expects new capabilities to arrive on that platform rather than beside it.
This page covers the storefront. Unity's broader Salesforce estate involves several partners over several years, and we describe only the work we delivered.
What They Needed
Distance Education wanted to sell courses the way learners already buy online: one course at a time, by card, without an application. The catalog needed related courses, bundles, and a clean path from purchase to a learner record that the rest of the university could see. The constraint was time. Kickoff was in early December 2024, with a holiday blackout in the middle of the schedule, and the unit wanted to be selling by early spring.
What We Built
| Layer | What learn.unity.edu runs | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Storefront | Salesforce Commerce on an LWR Experience Cloud site at learn.unity.edu | Public catalog, related courses, bundles, and cart |
| Checkout | Screen-flow cart and checkout with a payment gateway | No application required to buy a course |
| Post-purchase automation | Flow creates the Person Account, a lightweight application, an opportunity, the enrollment, and the ledger entry | Every purchase lands on the same learner record the university uses elsewhere |
| Learner portal | A portal for non-degree students | Learners see what they bought and what comes next |
| Delivery | Kickoff, UAT, production build, training, go-live | About three months, with a holiday blackout inside it |
The Design Decisions That Mattered
- Sell first, apply later. A public buyer should not fill out an application to take one course. The storefront creates the records the university needs after the purchase, quietly, in Flow. Our article on how a course becomes a product walks through the same chain.
- One learner record. A storefront purchase and a degree application create the same kind of Person Account, so a noncredit learner who later applies to a program is already known. That is the point of building commerce on Education Cloud rather than on a separate registration tool.
- Bundles and related courses from the start. The catalog was modeled so a bundle is a product that resolves to its component courses at enrollment, which keeps reporting honest.
- Standard objects. The learning model is Education Cloud's own. Unity's team maintains the catalog from Salesforce without a developer.
What Went Sideways
A three-month storefront with a two-week holiday blackout leaves no slack. The schedule held because the scope was fixed in the statement of work and the unit made decisions quickly during UAT, but we would not promise that timeline to an institution that cannot staff daily decisions during the build. The lesson shaped our Commerce Accelerator: a fixed scope, a named decision-maker on the institution's side, and a two-month calendar that assumes both.
What Is Next
Unity is building internal Salesforce capacity and runs the storefront day to day. We support it under a maintenance arrangement and help when the unit wants to add something new, such as online giving in the same cart. The storefront is public, so you can see it yourself at learn.unity.edu.
Questions We Hear
Is learn.unity.edu really a Salesforce storefront?
Yes. It is a Salesforce Commerce storefront on an LWR Experience Cloud site, connected to Unity's Education Cloud org. The catalog, cart, checkout, and learner records are all Salesforce.
Did ElevateActual implement Unity's whole Salesforce platform?
No. Unity's Education Cloud estate was built over several years with more than one partner. ElevateActual built the learn.unity.edu storefront and has delivered other work for the university that we describe without naming it.
Why three months instead of two?
The storefront predates our fixed-scope accelerator and included a holiday blackout plus a non-degree learner portal. The accelerator we offer today packages the same pattern in about two months.
Do learners need an account to buy?
They check out through a guided cart. The university receives a complete learner record after the purchase either way, created by Flow rather than by the learner filling in forms.
Can we see a similar store without visiting a client's site?
Yes. ElevateActual University, our demonstration institution, sells fifty programs in seven categories through one cart at demo.elevateactual.com/eau.