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 is for the various data types involved in the integrations.
Customer
The customer master record is the data type with the most variation across organizations, often because a customer profile can be created in several 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's 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.
Upon creation, a Customer requires only an email address as a unique identifier, and a Business Unit requires a name, type, and key. However, we recommend storing the physical addresses of Customers and Business Units as they determine shipping costs and taxes.
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, such as OMS or 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.
Tracking inventory in commercetools is optional. For instance, manufacturing companies might want to sell the goods they produce without tracking any inventory in commercetools.
Product Catalog
Pricing
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.
In a B2B context, any customer-specific prices, are more likely to be defined in the customer data platform (CDP). In such a case, the prices are consolidated in commercetools and serve as the data source for the storefront. Additionally, for organizations using a configure price quote (CPQ) system, the CPQ should also receive products and price data similarly to commercetools, but only to support the quotation flow, not the regular checkout flow. Organizations not using a CPQ system can also run the quotation flow natively out of commercetools.
Promotions
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.
In a B2B context, you can configure commercetools to handle net prices, with taxes calculated automatically. This allows B2B companies to purchase and sell based on net prices, while still maintaining the tax information needed for certain processes or services.
Payment
Search
Email
For sending out order confirmations and other customer communication, you can complete your solution with an external email service.