What's Sitecore OrderCloud: Ordering Clouds to Your Doorstep

To stay ahead of the curve, Sitecore has been acquiring software companies and platforms, including its headless commerce platform, Sitecore OrderCloud. As a result, Sitecore now offers a MACH-certified, fully hosted, and cloud-native SaaS headless commerce solution.

Originally designed as a B2B-first platform, OrderCloud’s extensible nature now allows e-commerce stores to cater to multiple verticals beyond B2B. This includes B2C and B2X, offering nearly limitless customizations and endless growth opportunities. Before the acquisition, Sitecore’s e-commerce offering consisted of Sitecore Commerce.

So, what sets OrderCloud apart from Sitecore Commerce? Well, OrderCloud’s headless commerce architecture allows for greater flexibility and customization. This means that store owners can create unique and personalized shopping experiences for their customers, tailored to their specific needs and preferences.

Sitecore Commerce: What is it?

Since Sitecore acquired Commerceserve in 2014, the Commerce platform has undergone substantial changes, especially with version 9, which helped sunset older technologies and integrate the management experience into Sitecore XP.

Sitecore XC allows cutting-edge e-commerce stores to build next-generation shopping experiences by offering marketing automation, segmentation, A/B testing, and personalization capabilities.

Sitecore Commerce offers a range of powerful features

Sitecore Commerce offers a range of powerful features designed to help businesses optimize their e-commerce operations. Some of these key features include:

• Multilingual and multi-currency support, enabling businesses to serve customers around the world and in different languages.
• Inventory and order management, providing businesses with a streamlined and efficient way to manage their inventory and fulfill customer orders.
• Out-of-the-box integration with third-party software makes it easy to connect with other tools and systems used by your business.
• Post-purchase customer support and order management, allow businesses to provide top-notch customer service and manage orders after they've been placed.
• Personalization based on learned and earned customer data, enabling businesses to provide personalized shopping experiences tailored to individual customers.
• Email automation for cart abandonment and order confirmation, helping businesses increase sales and improve customer engagement through automated email campaigns.
• Analytics that provide a single view of commerce prospects, giving businesses valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences.
• Connectivity to back-office systems via Commerce Connect and Sitecore API, allowing businesses to integrate their e-commerce operations with other key systems and tools.

While Sitecore Experience Commerce is a powerful e-commerce platform, Sitecore is moving towards composability. This means that businesses using Sitecore Commerce should prepare to transition to the new OrderCloud commerce platform in the future. This shift will usher in a new era of composable, API-first commerce services that will provide even more flexibility and customization options for businesses.

How does Sitecore OrderCloud work?

There are several advantages and differences between OrderCloud and Sitecore Experience Commerce. This is primarily due to OrderCloud being headless, cloud-native, and API-first.

A headless architecture allows developers to use the frontend frameworks and technologies of their choice, such as React, Angular, or Vue.

Using familiar tooling to build shopping experiences is possible thanks to the headless architecture. In addition, API calls allow them to connect with the backend, separate content from presentation, and reuse components, as well as use different databases. Using pre-configured components, OrderCloud offers store starters so global brands can launch digital experiences quickly.

Why Are Enterprises Turning to OrderCloud?

Enterprises are turning to OrderCloud for a variety of reasons. Firstly, OrderCloud's HeadStart provides a range of pre-configured components that enable users to get started quickly and easily. With commerce management, buyer and supplier experiences, and development tools, HeadStart provides a comprehensive platform that can be customized to meet the unique needs of any business.

Moreover, OrderCloud offers a fully hosted SaaS platform that can be integrated with other third-party solutions to create a best-of-breed headless commerce platform. Unlike other SaaS commerce platforms, OrderCloud follows the principles of the MACH architecture and does not sacrifice customizability for ease of use.

Another key advantage of OrderCloud is its product orchestration capabilities. Integrating with third-party suppliers can be a complex and time-consuming process, but OrderCloud has a supplier-specific logic layer that synchronizes and orchestrates supplier product information and order information, bridging the gaps between the marketplace, the supplier, and your store. This ensures that businesses can make informed decisions based on accurate and up-to-date data.

Finally, OrderCloud is part of Sitecore's composable future. Sitecore has been making a number of acquisitions and developing a range of composable options to cater to the growing market. As such, businesses looking to adopt a composable architecture in the future may find that OrderCloud is the ideal platform to fulfill their e-commerce management needs.

OrderCloud solves what problems?

The OrderCloud platform also addresses several issues that traditional commerce platforms encounter. Here are some of these issues and how OrderCloud tackles them:

• With OrderCloud's API-first architecture, global brands can create custom storefront experiences by creating omnichannel shopping experiences. Suite-based commerce platforms are often less flexible than headless ones.
• Lack of Scalability: Monolithic e-commerce platforms aren't really good at scaling beyond a certain point. For businesses seeking to expand globally, this is not enough. In order to scale almost infinitely, you need a headless, composable architecture where components can be swapped as they reach their limits.
• There are security concerns with monolithic commerce platforms because they offer too many surfaces for the attacker to access. It can be even easier for hackers to gain access to most stores due to their coupled nature. In addition to PCI, SOC2 Type 2, GDPR, and CCPA compliance, OrderCloud's robust architecture protects your multi-site stores against hackers.
• With hundreds of employees scattered across hundreds of locations, brands without the right e-commerce platform will fall into disarray. Lack of visibility over store processes can cost global brands millions of dollars. Brands can set analytics that track every step of the supply chain quickly using OrderCloud's preconfigured components.

Sitecore helps Sound United kickstart their e-commerce project

A global commerce platform with multiple brands, QEdge helps Sound United provide unique shopping experiences for a wide range of customers. Sitecore Commerce's editor interface enabled Sound United to leverage geotargeted personalization, multilingual content, and flexible search. As a result, its capabilities can be extended by integrating with other third-party platforms and tools.

As an experienced certified Sitecore agency, we can assist you in implementing Sitecore Experience Commerce or Sitecore OrderCloud, depending on the needs of your brand. Our team of Sitecore experts helps companies maximize the value of their marketing efforts by implementing Sitecore. We are a certified Sitecore Partner equipped with all the tools and expertise global brands need to maximize their eCommerce.