Commerce Engine overview
The Commerce Engine is a thin ASP.NET Core application that serves as a host for a group of micro-services that enable commerce functionality. These services are loosely coupled with each other and, together, they provide a robust, extensible set of commerce-enabling services. The Commerce Engine exposes a plugin framework that allows you to create your own plugins to extend, customize or remove functionality to meet specific requirements.
The Commerce Engine also exposes services as OData/REST based APIs. This enables either direct REST calls to the services, or calls through a generated smart proxy, which examines OData metadata and generates a strongly typed experience for accessing the service.
Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC) provides an initial sample Commerce Engine solution as part of the Sitecore XC SDK. The Visual Studio solution, called the Customer.Sample.Solution
, is ready to compile. You can open the Customer.Sample.Solution in Visual Studio. In addition to the Commerce Engine project itself, the SDK contains sample plugins that demonstrate a typical extension of the solution, and that you can use as examples.
![Commerce Engine plugins architecture](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fresources.doc.sitecore.com%2Fassets%2Fimage%2Fuuid-a7b1b4ae-fa9a-923a-d42a-ac5e77232260.png&w=3840&q=75)