Staff Augmentation
Staff Augmentation adds OrderCloud, front end, and integration engineers to your commerce team when you need them.
What is Sitecore OrderCloud, and who is it for?
Sitecore OrderCloud is an API first, headless commerce platform that Sitecore runs as a hosted service. It manages buyers, users, catalogs, prices, carts, orders, and approvals through REST APIs. It doesn't come with a ready made production storefront. You build the front end, and OrderCloud runs the commerce engine behind it.
That design suits sellers whose selling is more complex than one online shop. Think manufacturers and distributors with account based pricing, buyers with approval chains, and marketplaces with several suppliers. A simple retail catalog can run on it. It just won't use most of what's there.
Before you look at features, check that your business maps cleanly onto the OrderCloud data model. Each build lives in a marketplace owned by the seller. Inside it sit buyer organizations, their users and user groups, and optional suppliers.
Catalogs and categories are assigned to buyers. Price schedules are assigned to products for specific buyers or groups. Orders carry approval rules where a buyer needs them. Most objects also accept extended properties, a JSON field for your own data.
Questions to ask about fit
- Can every customer account you sell to today be modeled as a buyer, with its own users and groups?
- Do your price lists turn into price schedules with quantity breaks and buyer assignments?
- Which data must live in OrderCloud, and which should stay in your ERP or PIM as the source of truth?
- How much of your logic would end up in extended properties, where it's flexible but not validated for you?
If those answers come easily, the fit is likely natural. If the team keeps saying it will work with some custom middleware, write that down. That middleware becomes yours to build and run.
What should you check before choosing OrderCloud?
Check five things. Your data, your integrations, your team, security, and the full cost. Your buyer structure and pricing must fit its model. Your ERP and tax systems must connect through its APIs and events. Someone has to build the storefront. Security papers and operating limits must meet your rules. And the cost must include the middleware you'll host.
We put these checks into the Contract to Cart Checklist. It's named for the path it follows, from a negotiated price to a placed order. Each stage has a question to ask and a thing to verify yourself.
Work through the stages in order. Each one depends on the answer before it. You can't prove pricing until the buyer tree exists, and the ERP trace needs both.
The seven stages of the Contract to Cart Checklist
- Map the buyer tree. Ask how parent accounts, regional branches, and cost centers will be modeled. Then load a few real customer accounts into a sandbox marketplace.
- Prove the pricing. Ask how contract prices, quantity breaks, and buyer specific catalogs work. Then test your three messiest price agreements, not the simplest one.
- Trace the order to the ERP. Ask which webhooks and integration events fire during checkout and after submission. Then check that a test order reaches your ERP with the right account, tax, and shipping data.
- Name the front end owner. Ask what starter code or examples exist. Then confirm your team or partner can build, host, and secure a storefront in your chosen framework.
- Read the security papers. Ask for current compliance reports and the shared responsibility model. Then check how payment data is handled, so card details stay with your payment provider.
- Check the operating limits. Ask about environments, API rate limits, and service levels. Then test them against your peak ordering hours.
- Count the whole cost. Ask what the subscription covers. Then add your own hosting for middleware, storefront, search, and monitoring.
Stages two and three usually take longest. That's normal. Contract pricing and order handoff are where B2B commerce earns or loses trust with buyers.
How should you run a Sitecore OrderCloud sandbox trial?
Use your own data, a fixed time box, and a short list of questions agreed before the first API call. A trial with a demo customer and one price list proves only that the APIs respond. A trial with your hardest accounts shows where the fit holds and where custom work begins.
Pick three or four real accounts with different shapes. Say, a single site buyer, a parent company with regional branches, and a buyer with an approval chain. Load their actual price agreements, place test orders as different users, and check the totals against what your current system would charge.
Bring sales operations and finance into the review, not only engineers. They know which pricing exceptions matter and which ones nobody has used in years. Their sign off on the sandbox results is what turns an evaluation into a decision.
Is headless commerce the right choice for every B2B seller?
The usual pitch for headless commerce B2B projects is flexibility. Go headless, the advice says, and you can build any experience you want. That's true. It's also the catch. Every screen, every integration, and every background job becomes yours to design, test, and run. A headless platform removes vendor limits and hands you the work those limits used to cover.
So don't ask whether headless is more flexible. Ask whether your company has a team that wants to own a storefront and a middleware layer for years. If yes, OrderCloud gives that team clean APIs and a solid B2B model. If not, a packaged platform with a built in storefront may serve you better, even if it feels less modern.
Two last checks help. Ask the vendor to walk through a real support case on an integration event that failed in production. And ask your developers to estimate the middleware before you sign. That number often surprises finance more than the license.
When is Sitecore OrderCloud a better fit than a suite?
OrderCloud fits better when your pricing, accounts, and approvals are complex. It also fits when you sell through several channels or suppliers and want your own front end and integration layer. A suite fits better when you want a storefront, admin tools, and integrations in one box, and you can live within the vendor's patterns.
Many Sitecore customers face this choice when they review the older Sitecore Commerce product, also called Sitecore Experience Commerce. It runs on .NET alongside the Sitecore Experience Platform. Ask Sitecore directly about its current support terms instead of relying on secondhand timelines.
The real difference shows up less in feature lists and more in who does the work after launch. Here's how a typical suite compares with OrderCloud on the points that change your team and budget.
Suite commerce and OrderCloud side by side
- Hosting. You often run an installed suite yourself. Sitecore hosts and updates OrderCloud.
- Storefront. A suite usually ships a storefront to customize. OrderCloud expects you to build one with any framework.
- Business logic. A suite extends through plugins inside the platform. OrderCloud extends through webhooks, integration events, and your own services.
- B2B depth. Many suites add B2B features on top of a retail core. OrderCloud models buyers, suppliers, and approvals from the start.
- Upgrades. Suite upgrades are projects you plan. OrderCloud changes arrive as service updates that you test against.
- Team needs. A suite needs platform specialists. OrderCloud needs strong API, front end, and integration engineers.
Neither column wins in general. A distributor with a small digital team and simple pricing may do well on a suite. A manufacturer with thousands of negotiated price agreements often outgrows one.
What does the OrderCloud middleware layer have to handle?
It handles everything OrderCloud leaves to you on purpose. In a B2B build, that means tax, shipping rates, payment authorization, ERP order export, and inbound syncs for prices, stock, and accounts. It's usually a small set of services. But it carries the business rules your buyers notice first.
Design it for failure from day one. An ERP that's down for maintenance shouldn't lose orders. So queue outbound order messages, retry with backoff, and make every handler safe to run twice for the same order. Log each order's journey with one ID, so support can say where an order is without reading code.
Ownership matters as much as design. Decide who gets paged when an order sync fails at night. Decide who updates the integration when the ERP team changes a field. And decide where secrets for the payment and tax providers live and how they're rotated.
How do you plan a move from Sitecore Commerce to OrderCloud?
Teams moving from Sitecore Commerce rarely carry code across, because the extension models differ. What moves is data and intent. Customer accounts become buyers and user groups. Price books become price schedules. Catalog structure is rebuilt as catalogs and categories with assignments. Custom pipeline logic gets rethought as middleware that reacts to webhooks and integration events.
Run both systems side by side for a set group of accounts before you switch everyone. B2B buyers notice when a contract price moves by a cent. So compare order totals between old and new systems for real orders, line by line, before you widen the rollout.
Marketing content usually stays in the Sitecore content platform, while Sitecore OrderCloud supplies product, price, and order data to the same front end. That split keeps marketers in tools they know and lets commerce changes ship on their own schedule.
Both teams need a seat in the migration plan. A Sitecore development agency that has worked on the content platform and OrderCloud can map which templates, components, and data feeds change. The storefront keeps its pages while the engine underneath is replaced.
Hire Sitecore OrderCloud Developers
Our developers model buyers, catalogs, and contract pricing in OrderCloud. They build the storefront and middleware around it and connect it to your ERP, tax, and payment systems, with a clear owner for each integration.
Build Operate Transfer
Build Operate Transfer sets up an OrderCloud delivery team, runs it through launch, and then hands it over to you.
Offshore Development Center
An Offshore Development Center gives you a dedicated team for OrderCloud storefronts, middleware, and testing.
Product Outsource Development
Product Outsource Development delivers a full OrderCloud build, from data model design to a live storefront.
Managed Services
Managed Services watch integrations, fix failed order syncs, and keep storefronts current with platform changes.
Global Capability Centre
A Global Capability Centre builds lasting in house skill in headless commerce, APIs, and B2B integration work.
Capabilities of Our Sitecore OrderCloud Team
Buyer, user group, and catalog models for complex B2B accounts
Contract pricing with price schedules and quantity breaks
Middleware for webhooks and checkout integration events
Headless storefronts linked to ERP, tax, and payment providers
Work with engineers who test your real accounts and price lists in a sandbox before any build starts.
Test OrderCloud Against Your Real Price Lists
Send us a few customer accounts and contract price lists. We'll model them in a sandbox and show where the fit is clean and where custom work starts.
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