Welcome to Commerce Layer

How to get started with Commerce Layer and set up your first organization

Commerce Layer is a transactional commerce API for international brands. It lets you make any digital experience shoppable, anywhere. You can build a multi-language website with Contentful, DatoCMS, Sanity, WordPress, or any other CMS you already love. Then, add Commerce Layer for multi-currency prices, distributed inventory, localized payment gateways, promotions, orders, subscriptions, and more.

Commerce Layer is free for developers, and it will be forever. So the best way to get started is to create an account and try the API. Once you signed up, you have two options to configure your environment:

• Leverage the setup wizard available in the Dashboard UI. This is the fastest way to add a minimum viable configuration to your environment and be ready to place your first order in a short time.

• Manually create all the required resources in the correct order (based on their mutual relationships) and configure your organization step-by-step. This could take a while longer, but it's a good opportunity to dig deeper into how Commerce Layer works, learn more about how its data model is structured, and get to grip with a powerful tool like the Commerce Layer CLI that will enable you to complete the whole process without leaving the command line.

Take your pick, and let's get started!

Ready for agentic commerce

As a unified commerce engine that powers any transaction, anywhere, built API-first since day one, Commerce Layer is ready by design to be the enabler of a new era of interactions — agentic commerce.

Commerce Layer docs follow close behind, offering some features you can leverage out of the box to ensure that AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and Copilot can retrieve and provide accurate, contextual responses about Commerce Layer APIs.

LLM-friendly

Large Language Models are becoming increasingly important for information retrieval and knowledge assistance. To make Commerce Layer Core API documentation content available in text-based formats that are easier for LLMs to process, ingest, and work with, you can leverage the following llms.txt files.

• Index — contains an index of all the page URLs and titles of the Core API docs site, providing a comprehensive list of all available markdown-formatted pages:

https://docs.commercelayer.io/core/llms.txt

• Full content — contains the full content of the Core API docs site in one file that can be passed to LLMs as context:

https://docs.commercelayer.io/core/llms-full.txt

Following a clear separation of concerns, each Commerce Layer API has its own LLM files . The ones above index information about Core API only (Getting started, API reference, and How-tos). Check also: Metrics API, Provisioning API, Rules Engine.

MCP server

Model Context Protocol gives AI tools a structured way to discover and retrieve your docs as resources — no scraping required. To allow AI assistants to access Commerce Layer Core API's documentation content directly, making it easy for tools like Claude Desktop, Cursor, and VS Code extensions to answer questions using the docs, we expose via HTTP an MCP server at the following URL:

https://docs.commercelayer.io/core/~gitbook/mcp

Visiting the URL above in your browser will result in an error. Instead, you can share this with tools that can make HTTP requests, like LLMs or IDEs.

Following a clear separation of concerns, each Commerce Layer API has its own MCP server so that you can connect, activate, and deactivate them based on your needs. The one above is related to Core API only (Getting started, API reference, and How-tos). Check also: Metrics API, Provisioning API, Rules Engine.