Platform overview

OrderCloud is a B2B, B2C, and B2X commerce and marketplace development platform built on a cloud-based, API-first, headless architecture. It provides the flexibility required to build and manage custom commerce solutions while supporting complex business models and integrations.

The platform allows organizations to design commerce experiences that align with their business structure and operational requirements.

Platform capabilities

OrderCloud is designed for organizations with large, complex, and distributed commerce operations. Instead of providing a traditional monolithic eCommerce platform, OrderCloud offers a flexible API foundation for building custom commerce applications.

Businesses can use OrderCloud to support multiple commerce models, including:

• B2C (Business to Consumer)
• B2B (Business to Business)
• B2B2X (Business to Business to Consumer or Partner)

Organizations can connect products, services, and operational data across different buyer types, suppliers, and channels.

OrderCloud mirrors your business structure, enabling you to customize functionality across buyers, sellers, suppliers, and marketplaces.

See Define your marketplace for more details.

Developer-friendly architecture

OrderCloud is API-first and language agnostic, meaning developers can interact with the platform using any programming language or development stack.

Developers can focus on building value. OrderCloud is extensible, allowing you to delegate to your own services or connect to other third-party systems, such as your ERP or other SaaS offerings. The JavaScript SDK is agnostic to your UI framework of choice, whether it is React, Angular, Vue, or Node on the server-side.

OrderCloud also provides an online developer portal to test and interact with the APIs with form-based inputs and validation to support non-developers. The API-first nature of OrderCloud also supports using versioned code and scripts to provision and manage all your applications of the platform.

Key features

OrderCloud supports complex commerce operations while allowing organizations to start with a minimal implementation and expand functionality over time.

Define your own marketplace

Organizations can design marketplace structures that match their business model.

• Complex buyer and user group setup
• 100% extensible model for business segmentation
• Anonymous shopping or secure behind a login
• Mirror your sales and CRM processes
• Custom properties to target different user personas
• Support customer service with impersonation
• Tiered approval rules
• Supplier management and workflows

See Define your marketplace for more details.

Personalized shopping

OrderCloud enables tailored shopping experiences for different buyer segments.

• Segmented, multi-supplier catalogs
• Faceted keyword search
• Buyer and buyer group product visibility
• Promotion configuration
• Product variants and specifications
• Customized price rules
• Price breaks based on quantity ordered

See Personalized shopping for more details.

Fulfillment automation

OrderCloud supports complex order processing and fulfillment workflows.

• Supplier order management
• Various order types (quote, CPQ)
• Advanced payment methods
• Email notifications
• OMS integration

See Fulfillment automation for more details.

Omni-channel integration

OrderCloud serves as the foundation for your commerce operations as an API-first, headless platform. You can build and connect any number of application experiences on top of OrderCloud, whether they are buyer shopping experiences, order administration from third-party tools, or supplier or franchise portals for order management.

There are two main concepts to manage and customize the use of OrderCloud by client systems and users which are API Clients and Experience-focused, Me Resources.

Connecting multiple applications

To support an ecosystem of applications and third-party systems accessing your marketplace on OrderCloud, OrderCloud provides API Clients, which represent an application client. You can set up any number of API Clients to secure access to data for your shopping website, supplier order management portal, or administrative tool. API Clients are also used for automated system-to-system integrations, so you can control what third-party systems have access to which parts of your OrderCloud instance.

If you offer unique branded experiences to different buyer organizations or franchises, you can set up an API Client per personalized site. This allows you to configure individual extensions (webhooks and integration events) to manage the unique needs of multiple application scenarios, while using one OrderCloud organization for your business.

Experience-focused resources

With OrderCloud, you can access and work with any resource directly. The platform also provides a set of APIs for 'Me', which represents an authenticated user. Your client applications can call the Me' endpoints to provide a personalized experience around product search, pricing, and order history based on the user's configuration.

This keeps your client applications simple and intuitive by not requiring them to handle organizational complexity or details. Whether it is a simple B2C-like setup or a complex B2B organization with different buyer configurations, the 'Me' APIs work the same way.

Lastly, the ‘Me’ resources provide access to administer things about themselves. This also keeps your user access model and permissions secure, while allowing you to selectively offer impersonation capabilities as the owner to support users of your marketplace.

See Me and My Stuff for more details.

Platform extensibility

Complex eCommerce applications require functionality outside the scope of OrderCloud's services. These actions may include publishing information to search engines or merchant services for product indexing, shipping estimation services, tax calculation services, content delivery networks for digital assets, and others. OrderCloud's integration layer allows third-party microservices to be integrated quickly, enabling you to use functionality you already have or build a suite of specialized functionality.

To facilitate extensibility, OrderCloud relies on a couple of key approaches:

• Webhooks - these are user-defined HTTP callbacks. You can register them for your entire organization or on an application-specific level, selectively configuring them for any API endpoint as a callback. When an API is called on OrderCloud, it calls your webhook with the same request body that was sent to OrderCloud, allowing you to modify or get a copy of each API call.

• Integration events - these are specific areas in OrderCloud where logic can be extended or delegated around business processes, such as determining shipping options. Not everything needs to be pre-configured or managed within OrderCloud, and these integration events provide a method to delegate externally.

Example scenarios include:

• Realtime pricing and inventory - instead of storing estimated inventory or loading a current price into OrderCloud, you can delegate to your ERP, WMS, or pricing system through middleware or a serverless function to mediate with your clients.

• Custom order notifications - while there are built-in messaging integrations, you can attach your own service listener to communicate with your customers about events or changes to their orders.

• Custom shipping and routing logic - OrderCloud offers an integration event specific to shipping logic. When an order goes through checkout, OrderCloud can call out to another HTTP service to securely handle generating shipping options relative to the products in the cart.

Enterprise readiness

With OrderCloud, both software development and delivery are exclusively cloud-native. OrderCloud is built to handle high performance and scales automatically to guarantee availability. It runs on Microsoft Azure - one of the most advanced, safe, and secure platforms available, in some of the most secure data centers around the world, so all data and processes maintain the highest levels of safety and security.

With the ability to scale up, diversify, and back up data across multiple facilities, Azure ensures that data remains protected and that the platform continues to deliver reliable performance.

World-class security

OrderCloud is annually audited for SOC 2 Type 2 and is compliant with GDPR and CCPA.

Multi-environment

With OrderCloud, you can request any number of sandbox instances to support parallel development, separate from production. In addition, a staging environment is managed with weekly data refreshes, which reduces time required for environment management.

Infrastructure as code

Because OrderCloud is API-first, all extension points and configuration is managed through APIs-- not just the data. This means you can set up your own scripts to refresh and manage various environments, security, and policies-- not just seeding data.

Headless architecture

With the front-end completely decoupled from the backend, you have flexibility to customize your ordering experiences without performance risk. Extend your ordering capabilities to new devices, channels, applications, and more, as your buyer preferences evolve over time.

Cloud-native

Infrastructure. Both software development and delivery are entirely cloud-based. Built for high performance, OrderCloud scales automatically. Unlike on-premise solutions, server infrastructure and data security are managed for you. Start small and scale up as your business usage grows.

Microservices

OrderCloud integrates well with other similarly architected services. The platform follows microservices architecture principles, where solutions are assembled from specialized components. OrderCloud provides B2B eCommerce and order management capabilities through a comprehensive and flexible model.