General Concepts of Emporix

Get an overview of Emporix's main characteristics and features.

The Commerce Orchestration Platform enables you to digitalize your sales end-to-end. It embraces Commerce Engine and Orchestration Engine that together can help you revolutionize the ways you sell your goods and operate more efficiently within your company. If you're interested in these products, contact the Sales Team.

To learn more about Commerce Engine, continue with this documentation, and for more information about Orchestration Engine, see OE documentation.

Emporix Commerce Engine is a modern digital commerce platform tailored for B2B businesses and sophisticated B2C, leveraging a composable architecture to enhance flexibility and scalability. Built on MACH principles (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless), it offers a robust infrastructure for various business needs. For B2B commerce, Emporix provides a suite of features tailored to enhance business operations and customer experience. These features include:

• Customer-Specific Pricing: Manage individual pricing agreements and frame contracts.

• Bulk Pricing and Discounts: Support volume-based pricing and discount algorithms.

• Rebate Schemes: Create custom rebate programs.

• Advanced Quoting and Approval Workflows: Streamline quoting processes and compliance workflows.

• Flexible Invoicing and Payment Options: Provide detailed invoicing and support various payment methods.

• Customer-Specific Catalogs: Manage tailored catalogs for different customer groups.

Additional Services:

• Authorization

• Artificial Intelligence

• Configuration

• Catalog, Product, and Price

• Users and Permissions

• Company and Customers

• Delivery and Shipping

• Rewards and Promotions

• Quote Management

• Checkout

• Order and Order Fulfillment

• Utilities

• Media Management

• Webhooks

• Integrations

For more details, visit Getting Started with Emporix API.

Further, CE is integrated with OE to support a wide range of commerce-driven business processes.

Multi-tenancy

Site

The Emporix Commerce Engine ensures a seamless and integrated digital commerce experience, supporting various front-end interfaces and delivering high performance, scalability, and future-proofing. The headless commerce architecture allows businesses to choose their front-end presentation layers, providing flexibility in how they engage with customers. Additionally, the cloud-native design ensures high availability and dynamic scalability, allowing businesses to focus on innovation and growth without worrying about underlying infrastructure.

To learn more about sites in the Emporix e-commerce system, check out the Sites guide.

Tenants

Emporix is a multi-tenant SaaS solution. All tenants share the same hardware and software infrastructure. They are virtually separated by tenant IDs and access tokens.

To learn more about how to create a new tenant, follow the Creating your first tenant guide.

API Settings

Regions

Emporix is hosted on Google Cloud in Europe, Amsterdam.

API Base URL

https://api.emporix.io

We strongly advise you to use the host and domain names in your applications instead of hardcoding any IP address of the API hosts. IP addresses can change any time without prior notice.

Authorization

All requests sent to the Emporix API require authorization with a valid access token. To obtain an access token, you need to know your Emporix API keys. The keys are automatically generated when you create a tenant.

To learn more about access tokens in Emporix API, check out the Authorization and scopes guide.

JSON

The majority of the HTTP API endpoints consume and produce standard application/json payloads. To ensure that payloads are encoded correctly, use Content-type: application/json in your HTTP header when sending POST requests. When consuming a JSON response, ignore any unrecognized fields in JSON objects of responses, or deal with them such that it does not cause the client application to crash. The API assumes clients behave properly and considers the addition of new fields to be backward-compatible for existing clients. In addition, client applications should not rely on the presence of undocumented fields. Fields returned by an undocumented endpoint can be renamed or removed at any time without prior notice.

Identifiers

Some resources contain a field named id that uniquely identifies a resource. The id value is generated by Emporix when a resource is created. Some resources contain an additional field named code that also uniquely identifies a resource. However, the code field needs to be specified in the request body when creating a resource.

Update guarantees

Different kinds of requests in the Emporix API offer one of two update guarantees as described below.

Strong consistency (read-after-write consistency)

Whenever a resource is successfully updated or created, it is guaranteed that in a subsequent read (called read-after-write), the returned resource contains all the values from the latest successful update.

This type of consistency is usually available for all CRUD endpoints that do not require complex background processing. For example an update to the Customer.firstName field will be accessible across the Emporix API immediately.

Eventual consistency

Eventual consistency guarantee applies to all APIs that require background processing that is conducted in a non-blocking manner, usually through event-based processing or batching. In this scenario, it is guaranteed that all successful updates are processed and reflected by the system as soon as possible (or according to a particular API's detailed specification). However, a read subsequent to a successful write may result in returning non-updated values. An example of eventual consistency is the Product search API that requires indexing of Product data. As this is a costly operation that leverages an integration, the indexing is run asynchronously and may last longer than a subsequent read to a successful write.

Customer audit logs

You can request customer audit logs from Emporix by reaching out to our Support Team and sending the email request. The logs are kept for 2 years. You can retrieve information about create, update or delete operations. The records contain information about the tenant, timestamp and the person who performed the actions.

Free trial

You can try out the Emporix e-commerce features completely free of charge for 14 days. With our free trial, you get full access to the production-ready e-commerce system, together with our storefront B2B Showcase and data importer so you can test all of functionalities before you decide to become our partner.

What are the differences between a free trial and a paid plan?

Apart from the free trial being time-limited, there are no differences between free trials and paid plans — both operate in production environments. This approach brings the following benefits:

• Full experience of the Emporix e-commerce system during the free trial.

• Easy migration from a free trial to a paid plan (your data remains in the system).

When your free trial ends, the Emporix sales team will contact you to hear about your experience with our products.