Sitecore OrderCloud – Insights Into a Highly Flexible E-commerce Platform

Markus HenkelMay 2024

In 2021, our partner Sitecore acquired the e-commerce platform OrderCloud from Four51, integrated it into their own portfolio as Sitecore OrderCloud and continued to enhance the highly flexible, specialised solution. Combined with additional Sitecore modules and tools by third-party providers, it also evolved into a composable enterprise suite. It is high time we introduced this cloud-based solution in detail.

The Sitecore OrderCloud relies on cutting-edge MACH architecture. MACH stands for microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native and headless. Companies profit from the flexibility of the solution, which adapts smoothly to requirements as they change over time. For instance, OrderCloud enables your company to start out with a ‘simple’ B2C shop and to later optimise it to also fulfil B2B, B2X or marketplace requirements.

Fast, flexible, future-proof – those are the greatest strengths of the OrderCloud. It enables complex commerce processes to be mapped and offers customer-friendly and contemporary shopping experiences in the shop.
Michael Fischer, Senior Account Executive at Unic

Larger companies planning a digital transformation of their business will profit in particular from the benefits of OrderCloud. Of course, as mentioned above, it can be adapted flexibly to different business models, be it B2B, B2C, B2X, D2C or a marketplace.

Sitecore OrderCloud – the Advantages

The MACH Architecture

Online retail is a fast-paced business today, so companies need built-in flexibility to keep up. This allows them to scale and expand their business model, which is usually as individual as the customers’ needs, always taking the current situation into account.

Philippe SurberJuly 2023

Sitecore Excellence in Business Impact Award 2023

The Excellence in Business Impact Award is presented annually by Sitecore, a leading provider of modular content management systems and a partner of Unic. The award goes to digital agencies that provide outstanding services with Sitecore technologies. This year, Unic was the only Swiss agency among the winners.

Sitecore Excellence in Business Impact Award 2023

It is the MACH architecture mentioned above in particular that provides the necessary flexibility. Along with being cloud-native, it is the headless approach and API-first commerce with all its advantages for micro-services that stand out.

Headless puts a focus on processes behind the scenes and making information and/or data available. Backend and frontend are separate entities and interfaces (APIs) enable communication between the two. Thanks to this decoupling, companies can create personalised, channel-specific experiences while simultaneously using and developing backend features. This means that the underlying commerce features are never impaired.
API-first commerce is an approach where the key focus is on the design and development of APIs as a basis for a shop platform. Sitecore is ideal here as it enables the seamless integration of third-party systems, high scalability and flexible expandability of its OrderCloud. This means that the integration of external and user-specific microservices such as direct mail selling, information, marketing and CMS features, catalogue management, order management and payment gateways can be easily achieved. The API-first approach also lets you distribute the workload to several different servers and services, leading to ideal system performance even during peak times.

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Sitecore OrderCloud – the Features (Selection)

Sitecore OrderCloud comes with a host of features beyond a simple shopping cart and payment options. Let us introduce you to the benefits of some key features.

Catalogue management:The OrderCloud provides robust catalogue management. Companies can use it to comfortably and efficiently manage their entire product range including attributes, categories and variants, product hierarchies, descriptions, images and specifications – similar to a PIM system. Another bonus: The system enables companies to display different catalogues with different product types and prices, tailored to suppliers and their target groups.
Inventory management: The OrderCloud inventory management includes not only the online inventory for product availability but also the offline inventory, if required. The system automatically checks for available items and items sold and can even group this information by channel. Should the inventory be less than expected or a product be out of stock, the system will notify the employees in charge.
Order management: With the integrated order management, companies can manage and monitor the entire order lifecycle – from the order generation to fulfilment and activities after purchase. This includes features such as inventory, tracking, status updates and returns management.
Pricing and promotion:Of course, the sales team has flexibility in its pricing and promotion in OrderCloud. This includes Dynamic pricing strategies, Discounts – price scales, volume discounts, Advertising campaigns and Customer-specific prices.
User management: Sitecore OrderCloud offers a resilient user management system for customer accounts and their user profiles, including safe authentication and individual user access.
Reporting, analytics: Employees have access to various reporting and analytics tools to track relevant channel-specific metrics. Possible KPIs include sales volumes and customer behaviour as well as optimisation measures for growth.

Sitecore OrderCloud in Summary

Sitecore OrderCloud offers a host of advantages, in particular in terms of speed and flexibility, which make it an attractive solution for companies looking to optimise their e-commerce and/or the technological platforms behind it.