Defining your Marketplace

Initial model

OrderCloud initially focused on enabling merchants to establish online stores and process orders from multiple buyer organizations. In this model, a single merchant:

• Controls all aspects of the marketplace
• Manages product catalogs
• Oversees buyer organizations
• Configures API clients and webhooks
• Processes and fulfills all orders

This structure effectively supports both B2B scenarios with multiple buyers and B2C scenarios where a single buyer organization contains consumer users.

Supplier addition

The platform evolved to support merchants that focus on sales without direct fulfillment responsibilities. These organizations:

• Maintain customer relationships
• Provide eCommerce services
• Delegate fulfillment to supplier organizations

Suppliers gained the ability to:

• Own products and catalogs
• Receive purchase orders
• Process line items from buyer sales orders

Modern marketplace

The current model supports networks with:

• Sales organizations
• Multiple buyers
• Multiple suppliers
• Direct buyer-supplier relationships

This structure enables:

• Amazon-style centralized fulfillment
• Direct buyer-to-merchant ordering
• Transparent fulfillment relationships

Building blocks

OrderCloud has a very robust model for supporting the most complex organizations. Unlike an overly basic eCommerce platform with only one catalog and a single definition of a user, OrderCloud is ready to mirror the organizational makeup you actually need.

• Marketplace - at the center of any solution is a single Marketplace. It consists directly of users, groups, and addresses (used mainly for shipping calculations), which should be established ahead of product catalogs, buyers, and suppliers.

• Buyers - buyers represent real-world legal entities to which the Seller offers Product Catalogs and from which the Seller receives Orders. Buyers can be set up with their own addresses, users, catalogs, and much more, including Cost Centers, Spending Accounts, and Approval Rules.

• Users - users can be part of the seller, buyer, or supplier setup. They allow you to set up extensive flexibility in setting up a marketplace and coordinating commerce. Additionally, you can set up User Groups that allow you to assign catalogs, permissions, addresses, or other properties.

• Product catalogs - OrderCloud supports publishing any number of variations of your product catalog to buyers and users. Whether you need to offer customized products for sub-segments of your market, or centrally manage catalogs that mirror your global supply chain.

• Suppliers - suppliers are a third, optional type of organization used in indirect supply chain scenarios. Like the Seller, they contain Users and Groups. Once established, Products can be configured to auto-forward to Suppliers when ordered. This will automatically create a new PO, notify the Supplier, and track costs and profit margins if configured.

See OrderCloud building blocks for more details.

Commerce strategies

OrderCloud has a very robust model for supporting the most complex organizations. Unlike an overly basic eCommerce platform with only one catalog and a single definition of a user, OrderCloud is ready to mirror the organizational makeup you actually need.

B2B marketplaces

For organizations that differentiate with a unique value proposition to individual buyer organizations where they expect not only enhanced features over traditional online ordering, but also custom catalog offerings, unique pricing, and a relational model of different user and buyer groups that you and your sales team support.

Key capabilities

• Manage any number of buyers, buyer groups, and user organizations
• Extensible properties allow you to segment and integrate personalization
• Configure catalogs per buyer, with custom category taxonomies
• Manage multiple suppliers, automatically forwarding orders for fulfillment
• Setup personalized pricing depending on the buyer or user group that is ordering
• Extensible payment options for credit cards, purchasing accounts, or B2B credit services
• Optionally extend into B2C on the same marketplace setup

Retail / franchise

While targeting consumers with traditional, B2C shopping experiences is expected, managing the needs of complex retail and franchise operations can require a solution more akin to OrderCloud. Some organizations first tried a simplified, B2C platform and found it difficult to customize their needs for centralized control over all their store operations, requiring customized portals and fully extensible business logic that OrderCloud offers.

Key capabilities

• Unified catalog across different store inventories
• Customized shipment and fulfillment options
• Centralized user and store management for marketing
• Power multiple brands and individual store content off one platform
• Integrate into other social and consumer marketplaces for revenue
• A single view of commerce operations at the corporate level

Direct to consumer

While there may be different motivations for going direct to consumers, depending on if you are a manufacturer, B2B business, or a supplier looking to differentiate from basic online ordering, OrderCloud can provide you with a platform to grow your business through digital channels.

Key capabilities

• Anonymous shopping experience
• Configure unique product variations and specifications
• Erp and 3rd party solution connectivity
• Cloud-scale to integrate with other channels for new business
• Unify B2B and B2C operations into one platform
• Established additional portals to automate operations and reduce costs

Combining strategies with OrderCloud

OrderCloud provides flexibility, allowing you to start with one market strategy and pivot to another within the same OrderCloud instance for your marketplace. Consider the example of a B2B company opening up to other resellers or direct to consumers.

With OrderCloud for B2B, you can set up and control unique Buyers with separate catalogs and pricing, and expose that to users on your B2B commerce experience. You can take one of those Buyer setups and expose the catalog and pricing data to other channels, which can be integrated into other commerce experiences or marketplaces.

All of this can be set up and managed within one OrderCloud instance for your organization with multiple catalogs, buyers, pricing strategies, user groups, suppliers, and custom commerce experiences.

Market segmentation

Effective targeting requires specificity in what and how you target product information and experiences as part of your commerce strategy. You may already have a segmentation strategy and persona library, which you can map to OrderCloud configuration.

• Segments are dividing your customer base into heterogeneous groups, based on submarkets, geographies, or their operational needs to drive how you sell, brand, and market to them.
• Personas are a way to define the types of users you serve within your segments. personas help define the goals, communication style, and workflows required by users of your digital properties.

OrderCloud is highly extensible. The table below describes high-level concepts you can use, but with all of these concepts, you can assign any number of custom properties to support your segmentation and persona strategy that is specific to your business.

Most all of OrderCloud's APIs allow you to query by any segmentation or persona property you assign. This handles use cases such as finding all buyers tied to a sales region or triggering different content or promotions during shopping depending on properties on the logged-in user and their associated buyer account.

{
 "ID": "4304943",
 "Name": "Sunrise Senior Living",
 "DefaultCatalogID": "LONGTERM_CARE",
 "xp": {
 "MyClassOfTrade": "Elderly Care",
 "MySalesRegion": "USNW"
 }
}

GET https://sandboxapi.ordercloud.io/buyers?filters=xp.MySalesRegion=USNW HTTP/1.1

Authorization: Bearer eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9...

Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8

Bridging headless technology

Being able to unify your segmentation and persona strategy across headless technology is extremely important. It also simplifies the way you manage personalized campaigns across systems.

An example might be targeting a population of 10,000 shoppers who fit the demographic of '65 and older' and 'Resides in the Midwest'. Coordinating multiple, headless systems with 10,000 individual rules or assignments to run that campaign is not scalable or efficient, but simply coordinating over two fields in your segmentation is much more manageable. OrderCloud supports this in any capacity you choose.

Multi-supplier growth

Depending on your marketplace strategy, you may have multiple suppliers who fulfill directly as part of your OrderCloud implementation. Some organizations start with just one supplier, being their own distribution engine, and may start to layer in products from another supplier in the future.

In OrderCloud, a supplier is any system or third-party organization that can fulfill all or part of an order placed by your customers. You can set OrderCloud to route all orders to your ERP or order management system, and that system handles routing to other suppliers (drop ship or non-stock). Alternatively, you can set up suppliers to receive and manage their orders on OrderCloud directly, like a marketplace.

You can use a hybrid approach of managing all orders within your ERP, while also offering suppliers direct access to OrderCloud through a supplier portal to manage supplemental product data entry or capabilities that your existing ERP systems may not offer.

Expand your product offering

By integrating other suppliers directly to OrderCloud, you can expand your product offering to buyers, where they can create a single order which includes products you distribute and ship, alongside products shipped directly from another supplier.

Supplier ordering overview

Orders can be routed to a supplier in two ways:

1. Set SupplierID as ToCompanyID on Order create:

   • Only writable on POST or initial PUT
   • Defaults to Marketplace owner if not specified
   • Requires Supplier.AllBuyersCanOrder to be true without explicit buyer-supplier relationship
   • Relationship must remain active until order submission

2. Forward the order to the Supplier after Submit:

   • Currently only available if Supplier is the DefaultSupplierID on the Product

To add a line item for supplier fulfillment, one of these conditions must be met:

• Supplier is the Product.DefaultSupplierID
• Supplier owns the product
• Marketplace Owner owns the product and opted-in the Supplier
• Marketplace Owner owns the product with AllSuppliersCanSell true and Supplier opted-in

When AllSuppliersCanSell is true, suppliers can opt-in by:

1. Creating an explicit product assignment via POST v1/products/assignments for custom pricing
2. Using PUT v1/products/{productID}/suppliers/{supplierID} with optional defaultPriceScheduleID

For explicit Marketplace Owner-Supplier product relationships, pricing can be set by:

1. Creating an explicit Product Assignment:

   • Marketplace Owner assignments: PriceSchedule owned by MPO or Supplier
   • Supplier assignments: PriceSchedule must be Supplier-owned

2. Setting Default Pricing:

   • Marketplace Owner calls: PriceSchedule owned by MPO or Supplier
   • Supplier calls: PriceSchedule must be Supplier-owned

Marketplace resource ownership

Marketplace owners can manage all marketplace resources, including those owned by others. The OwnerID property is writable only on POST or initial PUT.

Suppliers can now own:

• Catalogs
  • Direct buyer assignment capability
  • Can include MPO-owned products they sell
• PriceSchedules
  • Must use own PriceSchedules for pricing
• Promotions
  • Only valid when Order.ToCompanyID matches Promotion.OwnerID
• Products
• Shipments
• Specs

Marketplace pricing

Key features:

• Multiple ProductAssignments per Product/Party with different PriceScheduleIDs (unique SellerID required)
• Supplier-specific pricing via SellerID parameter
• LineItem pricing based on Order.ToCompanyID

Pricing precedence for supplier requests:

1. Explicit ProductAssignment (SellerID = SupplierID)
   • Group level, then Buyer level
2. Supplier's DefaultPriceSchedule
3. Explicit ProductAssignment (SellerID = Marketplace Owner)
   • Group level, then Buyer level
4. Product's DefaultPriceScheduleID

New properties

Supplier.AllBuyersCanOrder:

• Marketplace Owner writable only
• False restricts ToCompanyID to MPO or related suppliers

Product.AllSuppliersCanSell:

• MPO writable on owned products only
• Enables supplier opt-in for selling

PriceSchedule.SellerID:

• MPO writable on POST/initial PUT
• Required for MPO ProductAssignment management

New endpoints

GET v1/orders/all:

• MPO: All marketplace orders
• Buyer users: Outgoing orders
• Supplier users: Incoming orders

Buyer-Supplier relationship endpoints:

• GET v1/suppliers/{supplierID}/buyers
• PUT v1/suppliers/{supplierID}/buyers/{buyerID}
• DELETE v1/suppliers/{supplierID}/buyers/{buyerID}

Seller listing endpoint:

• GET v1/me/sellers
  • Shows MPO and available suppliers
  • IDs valid for Order.ToCompanyID and product queries

Product view endpoints with seller-specific pricing:

• GET v1/me/products?sellerID={sellerID}
• GET v1/me/product/{productID}?sellerID={sellerID}

Supplier pricing endpoint:

• PUT v1/products/{productID}/suppliers/{supplierID}?DefaultPriceScheduleID={id}