OrderCloud supports two different ways of handling products with Variations.  This article outlines some of the major differences and things to keep in mind when designing your product model.

Child Products vs. Generated Variants

If your organization uses Sitecore Cloud Portal, this article will share more about OrderCloud access using Sitecore Cloud Portal Organization Access and App Access.

App Access for OrderCloud when using Sitecore Cloud Portal

This article showcases different ways OrderCloud Bundles can be used to enhance the commerce experiences for your buyers.

Bundle Products for Enhanced Commerce Experiences

Things to consider when choosing a Marketplace Owner.

Marketplace Ownership

A brief overview of the new Product Bundles feature available from OrderCloud.

Introducing Product Bundles

Learn how Product Collections can help you achieve various experiences for your buyers.

The Possibilities of Product Collections

OrderCloud’s principle of flexibility over features is proven in supporting the management of loyalty reward programs for your e-commerce solutions.

Customer Loyalty Programs

OrderCloud introduces Product Sync for commerce solutions, offering the ability to synchronize product catalogs with external systems.

Product Synchronization

A brief overview on why we strongly caution against using the FullAccess role.

Why You Should Never Use FullAccess

OrderCloud introduces Delivery Configuration which is an integration mechanism that allows you define where certain events are to be published.

Delivery Configuration

Expansion of Product Collections to support more flexible use cases

Product Collection Enhancements

New feature enabling subscription ordering for buyer users. 

Subscriptions

OrderCloud introduces Tracking Events for commerce solutions, offering analytical insights and infrastructure for targeted systems. Coupled with Sitecore's Send & Discover products, it provides automation without being an analytics solution. It also allows for an external endpoint configuration to reduce development time and avoid browser restrictions.

Tracking Events

Introducing Child Products, a new feature set that enables developers to define a product as a Parent and subsequently create Child products.

Child Products

A new set of tools for troubleshooting search index issues

Introducing Search Index Tools for Portal

Introducing new enhancements to increase flexibility of OrderCloud Promotions.

Promotion Enhancements

You have a newly created marketplace, what's next? Let's configure data access for your users and applications.

Configuring User and Application Data Access

A product wishlist feature is one of the many permutations of the OrderCloud Product Collections resource.

Building a Wishlist Feature with Product Collections

New endpoints aimed at simplifying development of the shopping experience.

Introducing the Cart API

A complete end-to-end tutorial on implementing single sign-on via OpenIDConnect with Google as your identity provider

Implementing Single Sign On with Google IDP

Learn how to implement a strategy for handling calculations in your Order Returns solution.

Order Returns - Handling Calculations

Set-up customer returns, refunds, or credit scenarios for your business using OrderReturns and Seller Approval rules.

Using OrderReturns for Product Returns, Refunds, and Credits

Add products from an external system directly to an OrderCloud order

Ad-Hoc Products

Accelerate your development of checkout integrations in .NET by understanding OrderCloud's packages and starter projects.

Pre-built Checkout Integrations in .NET

New feature enabling buyer users to save lists of products.

Product Collections

Information about Order Cloud API servers for all supported regions and environments.

OrderCloud Supported Regions and Environments

OrderCloud's Premium Search on Orders gives you the ability to get a list of orders and line items with more flexibility.

Using Order Search to Suit Your Needs

Message Senders is a feature that helps to deliver event-driven notifications to users based on certain key commerce activities.

Message Senders

New set of features to enable all aspects of the Order Returns process.

Introducing Order Returns

Significant enhancements to querying orders and line items.

Premium Search for Orders

Overview of new feature to allow sale prices for products. Price schedules can be used to provide sale pricing while optionally using a date/time range to control the application of the sale price.

Sale Prices using Price Schedules

OrderCloud's InventoryRecords resource gives you flexibility to set-up product inventory in a way that meets your businesses’ fulfillment workflows.

Managing Inventory with OrderCloud

Overview of a new feature to allow tracking of product inventory across multiple locations.

Multi-Location Inventory

Working with Product Specs

In November, a new Locale feature was released to simplify globalization efforts for solutions where commerce spans across regions with different currencies and languages*. Review this guide for the use case that matches your business most, and look at the examples for recommendations on how to model your solution.

How to Globalize your eCommerce

With many ecommerce systems, what a customer pays for tax and shipping, or how their promotion discount is applied to their order can be difficult to determine at the time they’re checking out. The Order Checkout Integration Event was designed to make these calculations and estimations more customizable to better suit your business needs.

Order Checkout Integration Event

Overview of new features to enable configuration of multi-currency and multi-language Marketplaces.

Globalization for Marketplaces

New features to enable buyers to select which suppliers to view product pricing for and order directly from.

Products, Pricing, and Ordering in OrderCloud Marketplaces

The OrderCloud API supports user-defined HTTP callbacks, known as webhooks. You can choose exactly which OrderCloud API endpoints will trigger your hook, the roles to be passed onto the configured Base URL, and any additional configuration data OrderCloud may need to authenticate into 3rd party systems.

Using Webhooks

Marketplaces in OrderCloud

This guide is designed to be an overview of how we support tax calculation integration and management with some focus on a particular vendor we recommend highly, Avalara.

How to Calculate Tax with OrderCloud

Step by step instructions to stand up a hosted middleware using .NET Catalyst

Start .NET middleware from Scratch

As part of our ongoing commitment to security we have released an enhanced password security feature to give you greater control over password requirements for users of your applications.

Configuring Custom Password Security

Building teams of Portal Users enables streamlined control of your contributors and the data they can access.

Access Control Using Portal Teams

Regions The Portal supports managing marketplaces across multiple regions. As Sitecore OrderCloud continues to expand globally, the ability to quickly spin up a marketplace in a physical location near client operations will be critical.

OrderCloud Regions

The Portal allows users to access marketplaces from OrderCloud Sandbox, Staging, and Production in a single user interface.

OrderCloud Environments

Automatically apply specific promos/discount amounts to specific line items

Introducing Line Item-Level Promotions

Premium Search is now available on product admin endpoints, and introducing the new searchType parameter.

What's New for Premium Search

Premium Search is the next evolution in search technology offered by the OrderCloud platform, powered by Elasticsearch.

Introducing Premium Search

SSO (Single Sign On) allows your users to authenticate themselves to the OrderCloud API by logging into any identity provider you trust.

Single Sign On via OpenID Connect

The OrderCloud API supports this capability by allowing certain users to make API calls on behalf of a buyer user, which we refer to as impersonation.

Impersonating Users

Writing custom rule-base expressions for your order promotions may seem intimidating at first, but once you get the hang of it you'll realize there are virtually limitless possibilities which provide the flexibility to meet almost any business need.

Rules-Based Promotion Expressions

Price schedules are one of the critical factors related to product visibility and there are several ways that you can build relationships between products and price schedules.

Same Product, Multiple Price Schedules

You have many options to achieve product visibility, each with a unique purpose. The path you take depends on your business requirements. By the end of this guide you will be familiar enough with the available product visibility options to choose a method that works best for your marketplace.

Product Visibility Requirements

Learn about these powerful features aimed at simplifying catalog management.

Catalog Visibility Rules

Most OrderCloud resources have list endpoints that can return thousands, even hundreds of thousands of items. We understand that effectively querying this data is not only practical but necessary and have built an assortment of API tools to help pinpoint and extract the exact data you and your users need.

Advanced Querying

Security profiles are groups of roles (permissions), each of which grant users access to specific API endpoints and functionality. This lets you lock down access to your marketplace at the API level which is very powerful.

Understanding Security Profiles

We can't predict every column in every table that your hypothetical database might need. That's why we created our own schema-less solution with Extended Properties (XP) and exposed it on every API resource.

Leveraging Extended Properties in the Development of Custom eCommerce Apps

OrderCloud uses the term API Clients to identify various access points to your marketplace's data. These access points have properties that control what parties can use it, how they can gain access, and for how long that access remains valid.

Introduction to API Clients

Extend platform behavior using a system of rules similar to XP allowing you to extend the data model.

The Rules Engine Has Arrived

To update an existing resource, when should you use PUT and when should you use PATCH? Here are 4 reasons why you should stop using PUT for updates.

Four Reasons You Should Stop Using PUT For Updates

This is not intended to be an introductory post. It's less about learning something you don't know and more about un-learning something you think you know.

XP Best Practices

Removing constraints and broadening the possibilities of how the OrderCloud data model can be utilized allows you to leverage best-in-breed components.

Flexibility Over Features

The central concept within OrderCloud is not surprisingly the order. This is the object where buyers, sellers, products, payments, and almost everything come together to form a business transaction.

Understanding Orders

Anonymous Shopping, or Guest Checkout, is when a user is enabled to browse a catalog of products and/or checkout without registering themselves. Accomplishing this requires OrderCloud developers to pull together a lot of platform knowledge. We'll summarize that information here.

Anonymous Shopping

OrderCloud's authentication system is built on top of an open authorization standard called OAuth2 which is increasingly becoming an industry standard for security and permission-based application experiences.

Authentication

When you save an assignment you are creating a relationship between a party and an object (OrderCloud "thing" such as product, category, etc). For example you might assign a usergroup to a category, thereby granting a user in that group visibility to that category.

Understanding OrderCloud Assignments

The reality of all enterprise platforms is the need to customize the data model. To accommodate this, OrderCloud designed a property called Extended Properties (XP) to allow enterprise customization of the OrderCloud data model.

Using Extended Properties

OrderCloud provides the Me Resource whose job it is to flatten these assignments for the currently authenticated user and just "show me what I can see" regardless at which level these assignments are made.

Me and My Stuff

OrderCloud allows you to define a marketplace level delivery configuration which will delivery customer specific errors regarding asynchronous operations  to the custom delivery target of your choosing.  

Error Configuration

OrderCloud introduces Order Sync for commerce solutions, offering the ability to synchronize orders with external systems.

Order Synchronization

OrderCloud introduces the ability to publish base entities with to the destination of your choice.

Knowledge Base