Guided setup
Sign up for free and set up your organization
As soon as you sign up for free and your account is successfully confirmed, you will be prompted to create your first organization. To begin receiving orders and making sales through Commerce Layer, you need to configure it so that it meets some minimum requirements. A simple wizard on the Dashboard UI will guide you through the necessary steps to configure it.
The wizard is split into three main sections:
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.
Create a market
For starters, you need a market where to sell your products. To create a market you must first define your business model by setting up:
A merchant — the seller or owner of each market in your organization. You need to provide a name and your company address.
A stock location — the physical (or virtual) warehouse from where to ship your products and/or to where to return them. You need to provide a name, an address, and an optional code. From here you can also choose the shipping label format.
An inventory model — from here you can choose the inventory strategy, set up some parameters related to stock reservations and stock transfers, and specify how you want to manage the stock (e.g. manually).
A price list — a container for all the prices of your products in a specific currency. Here is where you also need to specify whether the prices in the price lists will include taxes (e.g. B2C VAT) or not (e.g. B2B VAT, sales taxes).
The setup wizard will guide you through all the necessary steps to create all the resources above and your progress will be displayed in the Dashboard UI:
Now you can use those resources to create your first market. You can optionally specify a market code and, at a later time, connect other optional resources such as:
A customer group — to make the market private
A subscription model — to manage order subscriptions.
A tax calculator — to calculate taxes for the market's orders
A geocoder — to automatically geocode addresses
From here you can also manage some market-specific features (e.g. prices or order validation) using an external service.
Set up shipping and payments
Shipping
To be able to ship your product to your customers, you need to configure one or more shipping methods. To create a shipping method you must first set up:
A shipping category — you need to provide the category name and an optional code.
A shipping zone — you need to provide a name for the zone and country code / state code / ZIP code based RegEx that defines it.
The setup wizard will guide you through all the necessary steps to create all the resources above and your progress will be displayed in the Dashboard UI:
Now you can create a shipping method and optionally restrict it to the previously created market or to a specific currency. Here you can also:
Decide how to manage the cost of the shipping method (it can be a fixed cost for all the shipments, a tiered cost based on the shipment weight, or a custom cost calculated using an external logic).
Offer free shipping if the order total or subtotal is over a certain amount.
Make the shipping method available for the previously created shipping zone, shipping category, stock location, or interval of shipment's weight.
Payments
To be able to receive payments from your customers, you need to configure one or more payment methods. To create a payment method you must first set up:
A payment gateway — Commerce Layer is currently integrated out-of-the-box with some of the most used payment providers. Manual payments (e.g. cash on delivery, wire transfers) and the option to integrate any other external payment service are also available.
Now you can create a payment method, associate it with the previously created market and payment gateway, and set the cost (if any) that will be charged when customers select it. Here you can also manage some specific options related to the transactions associated with the orders processed via this payment method, such as:
Auto-place — to automatically place orders upon receiving a successful webhook from the payment gateway.
Auto-capture — to automatically capture payments upon authorization.
Delayed capture — to fulfill orders without requiring payment capture and manually capture them when ready to ship.
Add some products
You're almost there! What you're still missing to start selling is some product variants with the related availability and prices for the previously created market:
SKUs — specific product variations that are being sold. You need to provide the unique SKU code and you can add a name, a description, and an image URL to be used internally. Here you can also associate the previously created shipping category, specify the item's weight, and indicate if the SKU refers to a digital product that doesn't involve shipments (do not ship) or to items with virtually unlimited stock (do not track).
Stock — the SKU's inventory in a specific stock location. Here you need to select the SKU, associate the previously created stock location, and specify the quantity of available units.
Prices — the defined cost of an SKU associated with a currency and price list. Here you need to select the SKU, associate the previously created price list, and specify the value in the selected currency. You can also set an original price to be displayed with a strikethrough and/or enable a tiered pricing policy based on volume or frequency.
The setup wizard will guide you through all the necessary steps to create all the resources above and your progress will be displayed in the Dashboard UI, until completion:
Authenticate with your API credentials
At the moment of the creation of the organization, a couple of API credentials (one of type integration and one of type sales channel) are also automatically created:
You can now use them to authenticate and start using the APIs.
AuthenticationAPI credentialsFor example, you can try to create an order using the Orders app directly from the Dashboard and leverage our Checkout MFE to place it!
Let's go deeper!
This guided setup is intended to help you put together a basic configuration for your organization but just scratches the surface of what you can build and achieve with Commerce Layer.
Take your 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.
Would you like to benefit from a DSL that enables you to define promotional rules? If you're an enterprise customer, you can ask to test our Rules Engine and start setting up almost any kind of promotions to boost your sales, from the simplest to the most complex.
For everything else, join us on Discord 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 initial wizard by clicking on the related text in the upper right corner and seed your organization manually, as explained in the following step-by-step guide.
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