Sitecore Commerce to OrderCloud: How to ensure a successful transition

September 21st 2023

For the last 5/6 years, most of my Sitecore customer implementations were on XP/XC.

Although Sitecore still supports the XP/XC Platform, the focus shifted heavily towards their new set of Composable/SaaS Products: XM Cloud, CDP/Personalize, Sitecore Search, Sitecore Send...and for Commerce OrderCloud.

Many customers started their journey to transition from XP/XC to XM (or XM Cloud) / OrderCloud.

With my customer, we are currently at the latest stages of that transition, and I thought it's a good time to share my journey and try to provide a high-level Guide with important steps and ingredients to ensure a successful transition. Knowing of course that each customer journey is different. I will be focusing on the eCommerce side of this transition: Experience Commerce to OrderCloud.

Familiarize yourself with OrderCloud platform and fundamentals.

As a first step, I suggest you familiarize yourself with OrderCloud. Sitecore offers a couple courses on its eLearning platform here. These can be great to get you started.

You can also find extensive documentation here. Another great thing about OrderCloud is that you can create a free Sandbox Environment with a few clicks and get started immediately.

Review your XC customizations and how they can be implemented in OrderCloud.

Now that you got familiar with OrderCloud, it's time to review the customizations you implemented with Sitecore Commerce, and how they fit in OrderCloud.

At this step you need to understand the key differences in how these 2 platforms allow you to add your customizations.

Sitecore Commerce is an open platform that allows you to override existing pipelines and flows and change the OOB behavior to accommodate your specific requirements.

OrderCloud on the other hand is a SaaS product, that remains a black box that cannot be altered or overridden. Instead it offers Webhooks and Integration Events, that allow you to attach your custom logic to specific events.

Determine your globalization design and architecture.

Single Currency? Multi-Currency? With or Without Guest Checkout?

This step decides how you will architect your whole solution. Based on your situation you can use one or multiple Buyers, Zero to Multiple User Groups and Locales...

Below is an example for a Multi-Currency solution with Guest Checkout:

You can find the different scenarios here.

Build and prepare your catalog and user Migration.

This is a crucial step as you need to migrate your catalog (Including Pricing and Inventory) and users from XC to OrderCloud to make sure your existing customers still can use your site after the migration. It's very important at this point to have designed your xp (Extended Properties) for the different objects (Catalogs, Categories, Products, Price Schedules, Inventory Records...)

If you are working with a Sitecore implementation partner, many of them have build reusable Migration tools. You can work with them to incorporate your specific requirements.

You can also take a look at this Catalog Migration plugin and Customers Migration plugin I shared in previous posts.

These are Open-Source Sitecore Commerce Plugins that you can fork and update to your needs.

Catalog, Pricing, Promotions and Inventory Management.

Sitecore Commerce is shipped with Bizfx, a UI tool that allows your catalog admin to manage catalogs, products, pricing, promotions and inventory. OrderCloud, being a SaaS API, doesn't include such a tool. So you need a way for your admin to manage these different entities in OrderCloud.

Some of the options you should consider:

• Integration with your existing PIM: Use OrderCloud APIs to push your changes from your existing PIM.

• Use OrderCloud Headstart: OrderCloud Headstart is an application built with .Net Core and Angular and includes a Seller Admin Application. The code is open source, so you can fork the repo and customize it to meet your needs.

• Build your own Admin Application: Build your own application tailored to your own specifications.

Proof of Concept

Once you have your Sandbox environment set up, I highly suggest you start with a quick End to End POC including:

• A draft PDP page that displays some of your product details with a Add To Cart button.

• A draft Shopping Cart Page when your can see your line items and cart summary

• A draft Checkout Page where you can select shipping information and submit payment.

• A draft order confirmation page to display your order details.

This POC will allow you to streamline your process, determine any webhooks that you need to implement in your middleware as well as how to use Checkout Integration Events to Estimate Shipping, Calculate and Validate Order, Accept and Validate the Payment and any post-order submission steps you need to perform (Syncing with CRM for example).

After a successful Proof of Concept, you should now have a complete understanding of your solution. How all the pieces interact with each other and you set yourself up for success in your development cycle.

It's also very important to not try to build your solution the same way it was built with Sitecore Commerce. These are very different products and transitioning from XC to OrderCloud constitutes a Paradigm Shift. You need to adopt OrderCloud and SaaS/Headless patterns to ensure a successful transition.