How to Delete a Site in B2C Commerce

Deleting sites on the Primary Instance Group is a very delicate process, and as such, this can only be initiated by Salesforce Commerce Cloud Support. Please review the following steps completely before proceeding:

1. The first step is to delete all orders and customers from the site that you would like to delete. This should be done during non-peak hours. The following documentation will walk you through the process on how to delete orders and customer manually:

Delete Orders
Delete Customers

If there is a large number of orders, you will  need to update the Order Retention Settings to "1" to begin deleting all order older than 1 day.  The system clean up job will delete 50K orders per run, and runs once per day, so please take this into account when planning your site deletion.

The following documentation explains how to set order retention settings:

Order Preferences

2. Check all items that would be replicated by the "Sites" replication group, which will need to be replicated as part of this process. Review the Data Replication Tasks for B2C Commerce topic on what is included in this replication group. Ensure that it will be safe to replicate to the target instance. Be sure to check for any changes that were made directly in Production and make sure that the changes exist in Staging as well. Also check for any changes in Staging that may be problematic if replicated to Production.

3. Submit a Support case indicating the site to remove. Salesforce Commerce Cloud Support will remove the site from Staging only. Please add a screen shot from the staging BM (Administration > Sites > Manage Sites) where the BM URL is visible and highlight the sites you want to have deleted

4. The rest of the process will require multiple replications, it's recommended that you find a time to do this when the online sites have low utilization, and a time that is away from any scheduled replications. Alternatively, you can disable or reschedule any pending scheduled replications. An unexpected replication during step 5 could potentially have disastrous results.
 
5. Perform a data replication to Development, selecting only the Sites replication group. This will remove the site from Business Manager and the Storefront, however, the Site's data will still remain in the UNDO replication functionality.
 
6. CRITICAL: Thoroughly review Development to make sure there are no issues as a result of this replication. If there are any issues, undo the replication by following the steps in Undo a Data Replication Process in B2C Commerce.
 
7. Once the replication is deemed successful, repeat the data replication to Development of the Sites replication group. This will wipe out the previous UNDO data; there is no turning back once you complete this step. This step is necessary to fully remove the site's data from Development.
 
8. If everything went well on Development, you may repeat steps 4-6 with Production as the target.

Exercise caution during Step 5 by diligently ensuring that the second replication, responsible for removing the UNDO data, doesn't create any issues for your Production site. Specifically, verify that your Custom Site preferences in the staging environment align with those in the production environment (update these settings in staging using the "production" instance type field). The second replication to Production encompasses all the database-related tasks and might take as long as 72 hours to finish. Therefore, it's crucial to schedule this task during a non-critical time window.

In order to minimize replication time please delete in advance as much data as possible via BM this should include but is not limited to order, customer, wishlist, pricelist, coupon, inventory and so on.  Please note that any subsequent Sites replication, following the initial one aimed at site deletion, will make an effort to finalize the deletion process, regardless of its relevance to the site. Scheduling must be carefully done so that the 1st and 2nd replications happen right after each other.