Experience Commerce data flows

Current version: 9.1

A customer and a merchandiser initiate different data flows to complete online shopping and order handling. The customer shops using a Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) Storefront, and the merchandiser manages catalog items and orders using the BizFX role.

You can get a good understanding of the data flows and processes of Experience Commerce (XC) by considering the following four main XC scenarios:

  • Shopping

  • Checkout

  • Customer registration

  • Commerce management

These scenarios use the following four XC roles:

  • The Shops role serves traffic for customers on one or more SXA Storefronts.

  • The Authoring role serves traffic for the Commerce Business Tools.

  • The Minions role runs independently and performs asynchronous processing.

  • The BizFX role serves the complete merchandiser interface.

The Shops, Authoring, and Minions roles are instances of Sitecore Commerce Engine (CE).

Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) Storefront

The XC data flows and processes documentation assumes that your webshop is constructed with Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) Storefront, which is provided with Sitecore Experience Commerce.

SXA Storefront is the default way of building Sitecore webshops quickly and easily. You can customize SXA Storefront and Sitecore Commerce Engine to fit your business needs, and because of that, some of the data flows and processes might work slightly differently for you.

All SXA storefronts (webshops, apps, or other channels) communicate with their respective Shops roles in both single- and multi-tenancy scenarios, and the Shops roles are usually installed in close proximity to the Content Delivery (CD) role. The communication between the CD role and the Shops role goes through a data provider.

SXA Storefront also retrieves cached product details from the Product index, which is part of Sitecore Commerce Connect.

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