Guide to Getting Started with Elastic Path Commerce Cloud

Introduction

Elastic Path Commerce Cloud is a Headless, SaaS, API-first, & Microservices-based commerce platform for brands with ambitious digital growth strategies. This guide was developed to provide tips for getting started with Elastic Path Commerce Cloud business user tooling called Commerce Manager. It covers an introduction to Commerce Manager, Product Content Management, and Data Model Extensions. It also provides information on managing customers, currency settings, and roles and permissions within Elastic Path Commerce Cloud. Note: active customers can find a more robust getting started guide in the Education Portal.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Commerce Manager

Commerce Manager, our business user tooling for Elastic Path Commerce Cloud, is the command center for your commerce merchandising, marketing, and administration teams. Commerce Manager helps you to easily manage your store without requiring technical knowledge of the APIs. This is an ideal solution for both business and technical users. It allows you to set up and manage one or multiple stores with ease; including the ability to:

• Import, enrich, and organize product data
• Create and easily manage unlimited catalogs
• Manage store settings, such as currency, payment method, etc.
• Manage inventory, payments and refunds
• Assign and manage promotions
• Add and manage Flows (custom data) and integrations

Here are a few key concepts that will help you to understand how to work within the Commerce Manager.

Here are some concepts and definitions that relate to the development or customization of the Commerce Manager in Elastic Path Commerce Cloud.

Chapter 2: Introduction to Product Content Management

We provide a product data and catalog management service for teams responsible for managing products, pricing, and catalogs at branded manufacturers that provides the flexibility to use your existing data structure to rapidly compose and continuously optimize products and pricing into unlimited, unique catalogs across all your routes-to-market such as multiple brands, accounts, geographies, touchpoints, business models, and loyalty tiers. Examples might include:

• Multiple Geographies: Display different catalogs in different regions with suitable pricing or combine product hierarchies from two different regions to display in a third region.
• Multiple Channels: Display different catalogs based on how a shopper accesses your store, such as through a mobile app or a web storefront.
• Multiple Business Models: Offer different products and prices for B2B customers versus retail customers.
• Preferred Customers: Offer special pricing to preferred customers while displaying a standard price catalog to all other shoppers.
• Reward Programs: Enable reward programs where catalog prices drop after a certain spending level is reached.

Play Video

Talk With an Expert on How to Make Headless Come to Life

Elastic Path is a Visionary in Headless Commerce by Gartner. Talk to an eCommerce Expert here at Elastic Path and see how we can help craft your Headless Commerce strategy.

Contact Sales

Chapter 3: Managing Customers in Elastic Path Commerce Cloud

When a customer is ready to purchase for the first time, the customer creates a profile. At a minimum, the customer provides personal contact information, such as full name, telephone numbers, and addresses. As a customer uses your store, you can enhance the customer profile with relationships to other information, such as payment methods, promotions, and order history.

Create a customer

If you are creating a new customer with the API, you can optionally submit a password along with that customer’s details.

You can use the Customer endpoint to store customer addresses and other information. The Customer endpoint allows you to generate JSON Web Tokens inside your client-side applications to authenticate requests to get all customer orders.

Delete a customer

Delete a customer from the dashboard. If you are using the API, use a customer id or customer token to delete a customer.

Customer authentication

After you create a password for a customer, it cannot be retrieved again. Any customers with passwords will have the value of true in the password field.

If you have an existing customer who does not have a password, you can add the password field using the customer_id.

Filtering customers

Customer filtering is useful for customer management. Filtering can help you determine whether to send a user to a sign up or log in function. If using the JavaScript SDK, make sure it’s version 3.3.0 or higher.

Customer tokens allow you to authenticate your customer’s identity by exchanging an email address and password for a customer token. On top of this functionality, we have the ability for those users to manage their addresses. This allows you to present them as part of your checkout process and avoids the need for authenticated users (as opposed to anonymous purchasers) to duplicate information that largely remains constant and static. Use customer token for a scenario in which you don’t have full read/write access to the API (implicit token type) and you want to authenticate your customers through email and password to access and manage their own details, such as address, orders, etc.

Use a customer token to:

• Authenticate your customer's identity (instead of using email & password).
• Get or update customer details.
• Get or update a customer address.
• Get customer orders.
• Provide your customer with implicit access to their details and orders.

Chapter 4: Data Model Extensions (formerly known as Flows)

You can define custom data fields for the resources that you use in your store, such as adding more fields to the customer resource. You can also create new resources, such as a wishlist resource to support wishlists in your store. With Data Model Extensions, you can apply Elastic Path Commerce Cloud to almost any use case.

The most common usage for flows is to extend existing resources, such as products, customers, and orders.

You can also create new resources to support product reviews, wish lists, blog articles, staff profile pages, and many more. These non-core Flows are referred to as custom Flows.

Chapter 5: Currency Settings in Elastic Path Commerce Cloud

In your store, you can display prices to customers in their local currency. It is best practice to configure currencies only for the locales in which you do business, and select one of the currencies to be the default currency. If a default currency is not selected, the store uses the United States Dollar (USD).

After a customer selects a locale, the product prices in the catalog, carts, and orders are displayed in the currency for that locale. Order totals and taxes are calculated in the same currency. You cannot have a cart or order where product prices are in mixed currencies.

Core elements of implementation have some common denominators. Among those using a Composable Commerce approach, the most common tools included are content management (40%), order management (39%) and digital asset management (39%), personalization (34%) and search (32%). Notably, content, order and digital asset management were frequently integrated with traditional commerce solutions prior to their availability as part of Composable Commerce solutions.

Chapter 6: Roles & Permissions in Elastic Path Commerce Cloud

Quickly and easily assign roles so that users can fulfill their responsibilities without disrupting other team’s workflows, ensuring brands can more effectively run their commerce business.

Elastic Path Commerce Cloud supports the following roles and permissions:

• Basic: User does not have any permission assigned.
• Seller admin: User has permissions to modify every aspect of the store
• Marketing/Sales: User has permissions to modify catalogue and flows, but cannot change the store settings or customers.
• Support: User has permission to modify customers and orders only.
• IT Developer: User can only modify store settings.

Chapter 7: Additional Resources

The Resource Center makes it easy to get the support you need while you are working in the Commerce Manager. Simply click on the question mark in the lower-right corner of Commerce Manager to connect to learning, support, and documentation.

From the Resource Center, go to “Help On The Dashboard” to get contextual help, see watch product demos and videos and access direct links to help for a specific topic, such as products, flows, promotions, and more.

Take note of recent announcements, search key concepts, how-to guides and API reference documentation. Interested in learning more about a specific topic? You can also access all of our training courses right from the Resource Center. If you can't find the help you need, you can always contact support from here too.

Our Status Page is a publicly available site where you can:

• View historic and current uptime, incident logs and postmortems.
• Subscribe to be notified in real time of any degradation or downtime that may occur.

Ready to chat with an Elastic Path expert? Setup an appointment or send us a message and we will get back to you ASAP!

Get in Touch Today