Onboarding tutorial

Sign up for free and place your first order in a snap

As soon as you sign up for free and your account is successfully confirmed, you will be prompted to follow a short onboarding tutorial that will show you how to place your first order from scratch, directly from the command line.

The tutorial is split into four steps:

1. Create an organization

2. Seed it with test data

3. Place a test order

4. Explore all the resources

Create an organization

To create your first sample organization all you need to do is choose a meaningful name for it and select the region where your data will be stored.

Once the organization is created, the chosen data storage location cannot be changed anymore.

If — for whatever reason — you need to delete one or more of the organizations you created, please ask the organization owner to reach out to our support team and send a specific request to [e-mail] specifying the list of the organization slug you want to be deleted.

Seed the organization with test data

You can now seed your newly created organization with some test data using the seeder plugin of the CLI.

Place a test order

Once your sample organization gets populated with everything you need to get started, you can place your first order in test mode. To do that you need to generate the checkout URL using the checkout plugin of the CLI and complete the process in the browser through Commerce Layer hosted checkout.

Congratulations! 🎉 You just placed your first order with Commerce Layer, and it took you less than 5 minutes. Cool, right?

Explore all the resources

As the last step of your first dive into Commerce Layer we suggest you install the resources plugin and get more familiar with the CLI by exploring your organization's test data:

Please note that a live documentation option is also available on the command line: just append --doc to any CLI command of the resources plugin to show the command in a specific language of your choice (cURL and Node currently available, more to come).

Example

CLI command

The following command fetches a collection of SKUs using the CLI, prompting you the options to select a format to show the command live documentation:

commercelayer list skus --doc

cURL

This is the corresponding cURL command to fetch a collection of SKUs:

curl -g -X GET \
  'https://your-organization.commercelayer.io/api/skus' \
  -H 'Accept: application/vnd.api+json' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/vnd.api+json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer your-access-token'

Node

This is the corresponding Node command to fetch a collection of SKUs:

import commercelayer from '@commercelayer/sdk'

const organization = 'your-organization'
const accessToken = 'your-access-token'

const cl = commercelayer({ organization, accessToken })

cl.skus.list().then(console.log)

Let's go deeper!

The onboarding tutorial just scratches the surface of what you can build and achieve with Commerce Layer. Now, you can take the time to explore the rest of this guide, check the API reference, have a look at our recipe-like how-tos, and become a pro!

Do you need to extract some kind of data information from your Commerce Layer's organization? Check our Metrics API and see how it can enable you to gather and aggregate useful data that you can leverage to measure the health and performance of your ecommerce business.

If you want to exercise greater control over your organizational structure and user roles and be able to manage provisioning tasks programmatically instead of manually, leverage our Provisioning API.

For everything else, join us on Slack and feel free to ask any questions to the team or get involved in the conversation with the rest of our developers' community.

If you want to dig deeper into how Commerce Layer's data model is structured, feel free to skip this tutorial by clicking on the related text in the upper right corner, create a new organization, and seed it manually, as explained in the following step-by-step guide.