Let’s walk through a typical purchase and checkout process to see how different components of the commercetools solution work together.
Walk through a typical purchase and checkout process
The Customer browses and searches the website until they find the product they’re interested in, and then clicks Add to Cart.
commercetools Frontend - Experience layer sends the customer’s action to commercetools Frontend - Orchestration layer for processing.
commercetools Frontend - Orchestration layer collects the necessary information (context such as country or store, customer information, and product ID and quantity) and calls the Composable Commerce Carts API to create a new cart if none exists for the current session, or update the current cart, adding the item to the cart.
Composable Commerce returns the updated cart to commercetools Frontend - Orchestration layer, which returns the cart to commercetools Frontend - Experience layer, which displays the cart to the Customer.
Satisfied with the items in their cart, the Customer begins the checkout process. Most checkout flows typically begin by having the customer choose or enter their shipping address, which provides sufficient information to calculate taxes. When Composable Commerce has the shipping address information, it uses a Tax integration hosted in Connect to call an external Tax calculation service to calculate the cart’s taxes.
For payment in a Blueprint for B2C Retail solution, the Customer enters their credit card information directly into a secure form managed by Checkout, which then accesses a Payment gateway to authorize the card.
In a Blueprint for B2B Manufacturing solution, for a buy-now-pay-later payment, the customer enters their purchase order number during checkout. For other payment methods, an integrated Payment gateway can perform various authorizations such as credit card authorization.
The authorization code, but none of the other credit card information, is passed to Composable Commerce to ensure the security of the transaction.
With shipping and payment details completed, the order is submitted, and the Seller can view or review the order in the Merchant Center. Additional integrations, hosted within Connect, will send the order to the seller’s Order management system for fulfillment.
B2C Retail system interactions
B2B Manufacturing system interactions
