Transitioning from Sitecore Experience Commerce to OrderCloud: Sellable Items To Products

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In this article, we will review and compare Sitecore Experience Commerce sellable items and OrderCloud products to facilitate developers looking to transition from XC to OrderCloud as well as identify a path for migration of existing XC solutions to OrderCloud.

We will look at a high-level comparison of architecture, functionality, and data models, with greater focus on transitioning from Sitecore Experience Commerce, meaning identifying a close path to parity in OrderCloud, using the Habitat catalog and SXA Storefront.

Conceptual Architecture and Features

Physical vs Digital Sellable Items

In XC, a sellable item is considered digital if it contains a tag that is also registered to the DigitalItemTagsPolicy. Digital products will not track inventory and will modify the delivery step of the checkout flow to collect information relevant to digital items, such as an email address and custom messaging, rather than a delivery address and shipping provider information, which is relevant for physical items.

As OrderCloud is impartial to the nature of the products, using existing platform functionality and extended properties xp, a solution can opt into tracking product types and apply custom behaviour the achieve bespoke business requirements. For example, to model products as digital as per XC, we can disable inventory tracking at the product level and copy the tags to the product’s extended properties. The middleware and storefront applications can then identify products with this information as representing digital items and provide custom behaviour throughout the storefront to match that of the SXA storefront.

{
  "Name": "MyDigitalProduct",
  "Inventory": {
    "Enabled": false
  },
  "xp": {
    "tags": "subscription"
  }
}

Sellable Items vs Products

In XC, sellable items can be represented as standalone products, which are sellable items without variations, or as a product family, which consists of a number of item variations each representing an individual product that share mostly similar properties to the other item variations.

OrderCloud can also represent products as both standalone product or a product with variants.

Item Variations vs Variants

In XC, the item variations are created within a sellable item entity, each representing its own unique product.

Variation properties are defined in the environment role configuration under VariationPropertyPolicy and sellable item families are expected to use a subset of these properties to create unique combinations.

In OrderCloud, the architecture of product families have the same intention, however there is enforcement around creating only unique variations using specs and spec options. A spec closely relates to the VariationPropertyPolicy in that it specifies the property that will break down the product into a variant, while the spec option specifies all of the values that will be assigned to the spec. A product can have multiple specs assigned, e.g. the first spec could represent colors while the second could represent sizes.

While specs can then be assigned to more than one product, there’s more control in creating specs that are unique to products even if they do represent the same property type, such as size, as this will reduce the long term maintenance.

OrderCloud then provides the endpoint, POST /products/{productID}/variants/generate, to generate variants from all possible combinations of the assigned specs. Referencing figure 3 it can be noted that when migrating sellable items from XC there will be instances where not all combinations are required, however any unwanted variants can be disabled.

Item Variation Corruption

While the SXA storefront and commerce data provider will utilise the VariationPropertyPolicy configuration for the item variation controls on the product details page in the storefront, there is no validation during item variation creation. This means that is is possible to corrupt sellable item families in the following ways:

1. Two or more varations share the same values across all of their variation properties. In figure 4, the product family utilises variation properties color and size, however item variations C and D are both configured with same color and size. In this instance, duplication may have been unintentional or a third variation property is missing that could make the variation unique. The Style property could be added in this instance to all item variations assuming the values between item variations C and D would be different.
2. The subset of variation properties are not all populated with values. In figure 4, the Color and Size properties are filled out for all item variations, except for item variation E which has a null value for Size.

In figure 4, the Style property is null for all item variations.

Static and Dynamic Bundles

XC has special product types called static bundles and dynamic bundles, which are configurations of sellable items that are sold together. These bundles can either represent a fixed group of sellable items or a list of sellable items with alternate sellable items, which can be substituted out by the user, and/or be an optional extra into the bundle.

OrderCloud currently does not currently support product bundling natively, however by leveraging the product’s xp it is possible to model product bundles and have functionality be controlled by middleware and buyer and seller applications.

Workshopping product bundle models and behaviour is outside of the scope of this analysis.

Extended Properties

In XC, a sellable item can have its properties extended via composer templates or programatically with custom components, while item variations only be extended programatically. These can be generally be translated over to OrderCloud using its eXtended Properties (xp), however considerations will be required around non-standard data types.

Images

XC leverages Sitecore’s media library for hosting images and stores the Sitecore Id of the image on the ImagesComponent of the sellable item or variant it’s associated to.

Over in OrderCloud, products don’t have an explicit property for images as it relies on external systems, such as DAMs or CDNs, to host imagery instead. In addition, the OrderCloud philosphy is that as there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to working with product images, so the absence of a dedicated property provides the flexibility of allowing a bespoke data model to be added to the product’s xp to best represent the client’s business requirements. Examples of potential requirements include, a single array of images (image urls), image sets representing different views or components of a product, image sets representing varying quaility or sizing for omni-channel optimisation. etc.

Relationship Definitions

XC has a concept of relationship definitions, which allows sellable items to have a relation to another sellable item with a given context. For example, the Habitat catalog relationship definitions for associated sellable items for installation, training, warranty, and most notably related sellable items.

The Commerce Engine and BizFx application provides an interface for creating these relationships and applies validation to ensure that the related products exist and are not duplicated. The Commerce Engine also includes smarts to filter out invalid sellable items for a given context, e.g. inactive sellable items, sellable items that are not associated to the current catalog, etc.

In OrderCloud, custom product to product assignments are not native in the platform, however a list of associated products can be added to the product’s xp, e.g. xp.RelatedProducts, to represent the relationship. To retrieve the products, a filtered product search, under the me resource, can be queried using the product’s IDs, which will automatically exclude products that don’t exist, are inactive, or are not assigned to the user, e.g. /me/products?ID=<Product B>|<Product C>|<Product D>.

Inventory and Pricing

The topics of inventory and pricing comparisons between XC and OrderCloud can be found in their dedicated article in Transitioning from Sitecore Experience Commerce to OrderCloud: Inventory and Pricing.

Other Considerations

Entity Versioning and Workflow

As OrderCloud has no concept of entity versioning, one approach towards migration is to only migrate the latest published versions of sellable items. In a similar manner the publishing workflow that applies to sellable items may see a project consider the latest entity version as the source of truth regardless of its published state. Considerations would need to be made on project by project basis, which may entail a level of data cleansing prior to migration.

Property Localisation

XC allows entity properties to be localisable for content that can be displayed in multiple languages. OrderCloud does not explicitly support property localisation, however localisation can be achieved by creating locale-specific entities as documented in How to Globalize your eCommerce.

Data Mapping

With the conceptual analysis above, we will now review what data mapping would look like for migration and from a comparison standpoint.

In the XC Entity/Component column, components are assumed to live on the primary XC entity being mapped.

OrderCloud IDs do not allow spaces. It is important that the IDs are parsed to remove/replace invalid characters consistently.

Products

OC Property	Data Type	Required	XC Entity/Component	XC Property	Data Type	Notes
OwnerID	string	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
DefaultPriceScheduleID	string	No	SellableItem	ListPrice	Money	PriceSchedule will be created from the SellableItem’s ListPrice, using the Product.ID as the Price Schedule’s ID.
AutoForward	bool	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
ID	string	No	SellableItem	FriendlyId	string
Name	string	Yes	SellableItem	DisplayName	string
Description	string	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
QuantityMultiplier	int	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
ShipWeight	float	No	[ItemSpecificationsComponent]	Weight	double
ShipHeight	float	No	[ItemSpecificationsComponent]	Height	double
ShipWidth	float	No	[ItemSpecificationsComponent]	Width	double
ShipLength	float	No	[ItemSpecificationsComponent]	Length	double
Active	boolean	No	SellableItem	Published	boolean	This assumes only the latest published entity version is being migrated.
ShipFromAddressID	string	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
Inventory.Enabled	boolean	No	N/A	N/A	N/A	Virtual products won’t have inventory in either XC or OrderCloud. This should be set to disabled if any of the XC tags contain a value representing an XC virtual product.
Inventory.NotificationPoint	int	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
Inventory.VariantLevelTracking	boolean	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
Inventory.OrderCanExceed	boolean	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
Inventory.QuantityAvailable	int	No	InventoryInformation	Quantity	int	If transitioning a single inventory set/ record per product.
DefaultSupplierID	string	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
AllSuppliersCanSell	boolean	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
xp	object	No	N/A	N/A	N/A	XC composer views and programatic components can be added to xp as needed.
xp.Brand	string	No	SellableItem	Brand	string
xp.Manufacturer	string	No	SellableItem	Manufacturer	string
xp.TypeOfGood	string	No	SellableItem	TypeOfGood	string
xp.Tags	list	No	SellableItem	Tags	list	Convert to list of string using name property only.
xp.ItemDefinitions	list	No	[CatalogsComponent].[CatalogComponent]	ItemDefinition	string	The ItemDefinition of each CatalogComponent should be added to the list, excluding duplicate values.
xp.RelatedProducts	list	No	Relationship (Commerce List)	Id	string	The relationships are stored in lists, not entities. All Ids will need to be parsed to their friendly ids.

Specs

OC Property	Data Type	Required	XC Entity/Component	XC Property	Data Type	Notes
ID	string	No	SellableItem ItemVariationComponent	FriendlyId <variation property>	string	Recommended using ‘{SellableItem.FriendlyId}_<variation property name>’ to create unique name.
ListOrder	integer	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
Name	string	Yes	ItemVariationComponent	<variation property>	string	The name of the variation property, not the value of the variation property.
DefaultValue	string	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
Required	boolean	No	N/A	N/A	N/A	Set to true.
AllowOpenText	boolean	No	N/A	N/A	N/A	false by default.
DefaultOptionID	string	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
DefinesVariant	boolean	No	N/A	N/A	N/A	Set to true.
xp	object	No	N/A	N/A	N/A

Spec Options

OC Property	Data Type	Required	XC Entity/Component	XC Property	Data Type	Notes
specID	string	Yes	SellableItem ItemVariationComponent	FriendlyId <variation property>	string	See Spec Data Mapping ID property.
ID	string	No	ItemVariationComponent	<variation property>	string	The value of the variation property.
Value	string	Yes	ItemVariationComponent	<variation property>	string	The value of the variation property.
ListOrder	integer	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
IsOpenText	boolean	No	N/A	N/A	N/A	false by default.
PriceMarkupType	string	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
PriceMarkup	number	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
xp	object	No	N/A	N/A	N/A

Spec Product Assignments

OC Property	Data Type	Required	XC Entity/Component	XC Property	Data Type	Notes
SpecID	string	Yes	SellableItem ItemVariationComponent	FriendlyId <variation property>	string	See Spec Data Mapping ID property.
ProductID	string	Yes	SellableItem	FriendlyId	string
DefaultValue	string	No	N/A	N/A	N/A
DefaultOptionID	string	No	N/A	N/A	N/A

Variants

OC Property	Data Type	Required	XC Entity/Component	XC Property	Data Type	Notes
productID	string	Yes	SellableItem	N/A	N/A
variantID	string	Yes	ItemVariationComponent	Id	string
ID	string	No	ItemVariationComponent	Id	string
Name	string	Yes	ItemVariationComponent	DisplayName	string
Description	string	No	ItemVariationComponent	N/A	N/A
Active	boolean	No	ItemVariationComponent	Disabled	boolean	Value to be inverted. Set to false if not a valid variant.
ShipWeight	float	No	[ItemSpecificationsComponent]	Weight	double
ShipHeight	float	No	[ItemSpecificationsComponent]	Height	double
ShipWidth	float	No	[ItemSpecificationsComponent]	Width	double
ShipLength	float	No	[ItemSpecificationsComponent]	Length	double
Inventory.QuantityAvailable	int	No	InventoryInformation	Quantity	int	If transitioning a single inventory set/ record per product.
xp	object	No	N/A	N/A	N/A	XC composer views and programatic components can be added to xp as needed.
xp.Tags	list	No	SellableItem	Tags	list	Convert to list of string using name property only.

References

• Sitecore: Merchandising
• Working with Digital Sellable Items
• Sitecore Experience Commerce: Configuring Variation Properties for the Storefront
• Sitecore: Bundling
• Sitecore: Relationship definitions
• OrderCloud: Working with Product Specs
• OrderCloud: How to Globalize your eCommerce

Continue the Series

1. Transitioning from Sitecore Experience Commerce to OrderCloud: Customers to Buyer Users
2. Transitioning from Sitecore Experience Commerce to OrderCloud: Customers and Buyers – API Access
3. Transitioning from Sitecore Experience Commerce to OrderCloud: Catalogs and Categories
4. Transitioning from Sitecore Experience Commerce to OrderCloud: Sellable Items To Products
5. Transitioning from Sitecore Experience Commerce to OrderCloud: Inventory and Pricing
6. Transitioning from Sitecore Experience Commerce to OrderCloud: Carts to Unsubmitted Orders and Carts
7. Transitioning from Sitecore Experience Commerce to OrderCloud: Fulfillments to Shipping
8. Transitioning from Sitecore Experience Commerce to OrderCloud: Tax and Payments
9. Transitioning from Sitecore Experience Commerce to OrderCloud: Orders
10. Transitioning from Sitecore Experience Commerce to OrderCloud: Order Workflow and Minions
11. Transitioning from Sitecore Experience Commerce to OrderCloud: Promotions