Documentation

Plan integrations

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.

If a customer record is mastered in another system, you will need a Customer in commercetools to be able to handle customer-related permissions, for assigning carts and orders, and personalized promotions. In addition to the Customer resource, you need to model Business Units and Associate Roles. A Business Unit requires a name, type, and key upon creation, but we recommend storing their physical addresses too as they determine shipping costs and taxes. For keeping a reference to the respective customer record in the other system, we recommend using the 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.

To connect to an OMS, you can choose an existing integration, or build an integration using the Composable Commerce APIs. For organizations without an OMS or an ERP system, commercetools can be the source of truth for orders.

You can use the Merchant Center to view and manage Orders:

  • 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

Product Catalog is mastered either in a product information management (PIM) system, in an ERP system, or in commercetools Composable Commerce. If you have a PIM or ERP system in use, we recommend managing the product catalog there and sync its data with commercetools. If commercetools Composable Commerce is your source of truth, you can use the Merchant Center to manage your 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.

Email

For sending out order confirmations and other customer communication, you can complete your solution with an external email service.