commercetools provides you with a robust base to deliver exceptional commerce experiences. To complete your solution, additional components are needed. We’ll cover the main components you might need to complete your solution and discuss common setups that will help you decide what your "source of truth" for the various data types involved in those integrations is.
Customer
The customer master record is the type that has the most variation across organizations. The reason for this is because a customer profile is able to be created in a number of different ways. If an organization has a customer data platform (CDP), that’s the obvious place where customer records are mastered. If an organization doesn’t have a CDP, the most common approach is to have commercetools be the source of truth because that is where most of the accounts are created. The alternative is to have the customer master record live in the order management system (OMS) or the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This is more common with organizations not having a unified commerce solution for all markets, brands, or channels.
externalId field of the Customer resource. If you want to replicate data that does not have an equivalent field on the Customer or Business Unit resource, you can store those on Custom Fields.Order
Order management is essential for commerce applications. commercetools focuses on capturing orders, which are then typically passed on to other systems (OMS, ERP) for further handling.
The order master record generally lives in a downstream system from commercetools. This can either be an OMS or an ERP system. These systems are designed to be a centralized system for orders coming from all channels and provide robust reporting mechanisms.
- Create Orders: assign Line Items and Customer information to create Orders.
- Update/edit Orders: edit Order details if a customer requests a change.
- Order status workflow: create a custom Order workflow.
- Fulfill Orders or change status: handle Order fulfillment and manage custom Order statuses.
Inventory
Inventory generally comes from the system that has the order master record. This is because orders directly influence inventory, and a tight relationship must exist between them.
To avoid the overselling of items, we recommend establishing threshold levels for inventory tracked with commercetools. This allows the inventory to become depleted in commercetools without making a call to the inventory master for each order. Once the threshold is reached, commercetools makes a real-time call to the inventory master to confirm stock availability before the order is created.
For organizations where commercetools is the source of truth for orders, commercetools can also be the source of truth for inventory.
Product Catalog
Pricing and Promotions
The system for mastering product catalog data, such as a PIM, is also typically used as the source of truth for product catalog pricing, including MSRP, list, and base prices.
Promotions are most commonly mastered in commercetools. Composable Commerce provides a sophisticated promotion engine that uses customer, catalog, and order information to verify eligibility and apply discounts.
Tax
For businesses operating in the United States or Canada, adhering to complex tax regulations is essential. To ensure compliance, we recommend integrating a tax calculation service.
Payment
As commercetools only tracks the status of payments, you can integrate an external payment service provider (PSP) to offer payment methods for your customers.
Search
If you have an external search service in place for product discovery, you can integrate it with commercetools.
Email
For sending out order confirmations and other customer communication, you can complete your solution with an external email service.