External prices
How to manage prices via external services
Last updated
How to manage prices via external services
Last updated
Sometimes, you can decide not to manage prices within Commerce Layer but use an external service instead. You may want to do that in order to support more dynamic pricing or just leverage an existing service that you want to keep as your system of records.
If you want to use the external prices feature in a , fill in the market's external_prices_url field with your external service endpoint and make sure your service is compliant with the specifications described below.
When you to an order, set the _external_price attribute to true if you want the line item price to be provided by your external service, instead of Commerce Layer:
Upon line item creation, Commerce Layer triggers a POST request to the specified external_prices_url endpoint, sending the line item payload (including the order) in the request body.
The request payload is a JSON:API-compliant object you can query to perform your own computation. Aside from the target resource — line_items in this specific case — some relationships are also included to avoid useless API roundtrips:
order
order.customer
order.customer.tags
order.line_items
order.market
item
In case the call to your external endpoint goes timeout, responds with an internal server error, or is blocked by the open circuit breaker, the API responds with a 422 status code by using the response error message. The circuit breaker internal counter (if closed) is incremented.
Your service response (or error) must match the format described in the example below.
The successful response must be a JSON object, returning the unit price computed by the external logic and the SKU code of the related product, along with some additional information and metadata:
If needed, you can specify in the response also the compare_at_amount_cents of the price, which should be greater than the unit_amount_cents. If not (i.e. if it's not specified or lower than the unit amount) it will be automatically set as equal to the unit_amount_cents.
When you fetch a list of SKUs with a sales channel, you only get those SKUs that have a price defined in the market's price list and at least a stock item in one of the market stock locations.
In case you manage prices externally, the price filter is not considered.
When you activate external prices, a shared secret is generated at the market level. We recommend verifying the callback authenticity by signing the payload with that shared secret and comparing the result with the callback signature header.
Once the external price trigger is set for a line item, any following computation on that line item's price will be performed invoking your external endpoint. If, for some reason, you want to stop using the external service for the price computation and use the price from the market (or ), you just need to PATCH the line item setting the _external_price trigger attribute to false.