Overview of Configured Commerce + Content Cloud

Purpose

Using Configured Commerce with Content Cloud will serve existing and prospective Optimizely customers interested in a content-rich e-commerce storefront. Configured Commerce customers who want a more robust content management experience than the built-in Spire CMS provides. Configured Commerce customers could instead use Content Cloud to customize their storefront with blogs, industry case studies, customer forums and content and product recommendations. Alternatively, Content Cloud customers in manufacturing and distribution could begin selling products quickly using Configured Commerce's out of the box eCommerce functionality.

Key functionality and features

You will leverage functionality and features from both Configured Commerce and Content Cloud.

Product data

Content Cloud requests data from Configured Commerce when it serves a page. The Content Cloud CMS then calls the Configured Commerce API to pull products into Content Cloud pages as product detail content blocks. Administrators and editors can use this block to create pages that show product information and browse the catalog contained in Configured Commerce.

The Content Cloud CMS does not "pull" or "migrate" data from Configured Commerce into its own data storage out of the box, unlike if you use Commerce Cloud with Content Cloud.

Search functionality

Use Configured Commerce's native search indexing and faceting for products and Optimizely's Find to index other (non-product) content. These are two distinct search indices and mechanisms, and the Configured Commerce catalog does not index content into Optimizely's Find. However, site visitors have a single search experience where the search box queries both search engines and aggregates the results.

Headless architecture

Configured Commerce is natively headless and Content Cloud is one possible head a customer can use as a C# SDK that works with Configured Commerce APIs within Content Cloud's .NET 5 framework. There are other aspects of the package that are included in the starter kit, such as the Content Cloud search box behavior, but these are a minor part of the kit. This same C# API SDK serves as the basis for Optimizely's Configured Commerce Mobile App SDK, which leverages the cross-platform Xamarin framework to enable e-commerce clients to develop custom mobile apps as a front-end to the headless Configured Commerce Cloud solution.