Features and functionality
Sitecore Commerce deploys with the features and functions described in this section.
The Sitecore Commerce Orders service is an end-to-end order management solution. The Sitecore Commerce Orders service is based on a multichannel framework that scales with the enterprise. It comprises a comprehensive workflow to automatically process customer orders based on defined actions. Functionality is added with plugins to inject components, policies, or commands. Some of the main Orders functions include:
Shopping Cart - A virtual web site container that holds the products and services for purchase.
Checkout - The ability to capture additional information.
Order capture and validation.
Preorders and Backorders - Follow-up monitoring and the automatic release of products when they become available.
Tax integration - Support for 3rd party tax integration, including basic tax calculation (for testing).
Payments - A selection of payment option, and support for 3rd party payment integration including a sample provider.
Fulfilments - A selection of fulfillment option, and support for 3rd party fulfillment integration, including basic fulfillment charging (for testing).
Inventory - Tracking of inventory, provided by a Commerce inventory system plugin, and support for third-party integration.
Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) and refunds.
Customer communications - Notifications. For example, with email integration.
Authoring service - Enables customer service representatives to actively manage orders.
The Sitecore Commerce Pricing service is an extensible service that actively calculates prices according to configured pricing models. Pricing is capable of running in a high-volume scaled environment. At the core of the Pricing service is the Price Book. The Price Book can apply to products in one or more Catalogs, and provides the container for a number of Price Cards.
A Price Card is a specialization of a policy that provides the facts needed to support dynamic pricing. For example, it provides the rules to modify a list price in real time. Price Cards also provide a mechanism to have common pricing behavior across multiple sellable items. The implementation of a calculation based on the rules in a Price Card produce a Price Snapshot for a product.
Through the implementation of Commerce plugins, the Sitecore Commerce Pricing service is extended to provide comprehensive services. For example:
Price authoring - Support for managing pricing from a Business Tool, or integration with external systems, by using an Odata service.
Price authoring - Support for managing pricing from a Business Tool, or integration with external systems, by using an Odata service.
Date based pricing - The ability to configure and dynamically select pricing based on date.
Tired pricing - The ability to configure and dynamically select pricing based on quantity of purchase.
Price transparency - The ability to validate price calculations in an automatable and auditable way.
Multiple purchase options - The ability to use alternate exchanges, such as loyalty points or Bitcoin.
The Sitecore Commerce Promotions service provides the underlying infrastructure and functionality for defining, evaluating and applying promotions to products, at defined levels of granularity. A Promotion is an artifact that defines a set of qualifications for awarding a benefit, or a collection of benefits. Promotions can be configured to apply in a number of forms. For example: percent off, amount off depending on the currency, free shipping, access to a service, and so on. Promotions can be applied to a product, or at the Cart level. When a Promotion is applied to the Cart, the Promotion can be calculated real time as part of the Cart calculation.
Promotions are organized into Promotion Books. A Promotion Book is an Entity that acts as a collection of individual Promotions, which enables promotions to be stacked. A Promotion Book can apply to products in one or more Catalogs, which enables Promotions to be expressed for particular customer segments.
Promotion authoring - Support for managing promotions from a Business Tool or integration with external systems, via an Odata service.
Customer targeted qualifications - For example, targeting customer profile or customer order history.
Environmental targeted qualifications - For example, targeting channel, date/time, shop, catalog, and so on.
Coupons - The Sitecore Commerce Coupons plugin provides coupon generation, tracking, and redemption. A coupon can qualify a promotion in a single use, such as a private coupon for a single customer, or multi-use, such as a public coupon.