Getting started with development
Sitecore Experience Commerce™ (Sitecore XC) provides multiple layers of extensibility, depending on the needs of your solution.
Sitecore XC exposes the following areas of extensibility:
Commerce Engine
The Commerce Engine is an extensible commerce core framework, hosting commerce micro-services such as Cart, Order, Pricing, Promotions, Catalogs and Inventory. The Commerce Engine provides a pluggable framework for extending the engine to modify or add to existing functionality. The plugin framework enables separation of concerns and provides the greatest ability to extend the product, while retaining upgradeability. This layer is also structured to ensure individual extensions can be logically separated from each other.
The Commerce service plugins provide the layer that developers interact with to extend or modify existing functionality or to develop new commerce functionality. For information about the sample solution extension that you can use when creating or customizing a plugin, see Getting the Customer.Sample.Solution up and running.
Commerce Business Tools
The Commerce Business Tools are a set of rich business tools for merchandisers and customer service representatives. The business tools are built on the Angular framework.
You can extend the business tools using the pluggable framework, where the same separation of concerns approach as the Commerce Engine layer applies, and upgradeability can be retained. You do not modify business tools, but you can extend them using plugins. This approach allows you to update the out-of-the-box business tools to newer technologies in future releases without affecting or requiring refactoring of any existing plugin extensions.
When extending the business tools, you can leverage the Commerce Views service. The Commerce Views service provides a set of data-driven services that feed data to the business tools in a structured way. You can modify, add, or remove functionality from the existing business tools. Additionally, plugins provided by Sitecore’s partners or those downloaded from a NuGet feed can automatically wire-in and extend the business tools. This allows a rich extensibility framework comprising multiple sources, while minimizing the risk of limiting future upgrades.
SXA Storefront
The Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) Storefront is a sample storefront website that is integrated with the Commerce Engine. You can use SXA Storefront as a starting point for building a customized storefront.