Merchant Center Custom Applications
Learn how to extend Merchant Center by building Custom Applications that communicate with the Composable Commerce APIs.
After completing this page, you should be able to:
- Explain what Custom Applications are.
- Demonstrate how Custom Applications can extend the Merchant Center to meet your needs.
Custom Applications
The Merchant Center is an administration application for managing your Projects in Composable Commerce. It provides an extensive range of functionality from Order and Product management to Prices and Change History. However, you may still want to extend the Merchant Center functionality for some business-specific requirements.
Custom Applications enable you to extend the functionality of the Merchant Center by developing your UI applications and seamlessly integrating them into the Merchant Center. commercetools provides all the necessary development tools and many ready-to-use UI components to get up and running in a few steps.
Using Custom Applications enables merchants to:
- Extend the functionality of the Composable Commerce APIs and the Merchant Center.
- Tailor to specific business requirements and use cases.
- Integrate the Composable Commerce APIs and the Merchant Center with external services.
Developing Custom Applications
Developers can utilize existing tools and templates to build Custom Applications. This ensures that they can focus on implementing the right features instead of configuration. We recommend using the ready-to-use UI components, based on commercetools Design System, to facilitate the development of UI and business features and provide a seamless and consistent experience across all Merchant Center applications.
The Merchant Center provides an HTTP API that handles authentication and authorization to all Composable Commerce APIs according to the user's assigned permissions. You can think about it as an API Gateway that the Custom Applications use to request the Composable Commerce APIs without worrying about authentication.
Sometimes developing Custom Applications might require you to integrate with your APIs. For example, you might store sensitive credentials for third-party services or perform custom server logic.
You are responsible for deploying your Custom Applications to the hosting service of your choice. The documentation provides several examples to help you deploy your Custom Application to platforms like Netlify or Vercel.
Configuring and managing Custom Applications
After you have completed local development and deployed the application in your production environment, it's time to integrate it into the Merchant Center.
To get started, follow these steps:
Configure the Custom Application in your Composable Commerce Organization.
Install the Custom Application to any of your Organizations and configure the Projects access.
Grant access to Teams by configuring the Team's permissions for the Custom Application.