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As per documentations of commercetools, all the microservices(carts, order, shipping method etc) are independent of each other.

Calling the below API in POSTMAN : https://api.sphere.io/{{myproject-key}}/carts/{{cartId}}

Body part:

    {
      "version": 5,
      "actions": [{
        "action": "addLineItem",
        "productId": "6d22957d-7c42-4663-95c3-099c11016999",
        "variantId": 1
      }]
    }

The above yields me the correct response whenever I provide the productID from the commercetools platform catalog. But if I try to give my own product ID (from DB hosted at Localhost) I can't add items to the cart.

Instead it gives me the following error: Error Log: "The referenced object of type 'product' with identifier '6d22957d-7c42-4663-95c3-099c11016999' not found."

This means both the services i.e product catalog and cart are tightly coupled. Does this mean that the microservices cannot be used individually?

Question : Can I use commercetools individual services such as Cart, Shipping method, Order alone in my existing e-commerce site?

observer
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rhldonly1
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1 Answers1

2

Commercetools platform's services can be utilized in different scenarios such as

  1. architectures which core e-commerce services are provided by commercetools.
  2. microservice architectures which consist of several different services provided by different service providers - only one of them being commercetools.

Therefore commercetools services provide different concepts and actions that suit different levels of integration. For scenarios that are more like 1 it is just convenient that commercetools platform optionally performs validations or calculations in a highly integrated fashion. For scenarios that are more like 2 commercetools provides optional concepts that allow you to use all the services in a loosly coupled fashion.

Some examples:

Add a line item to cart

  • Cart's addLineItem action is meant to be used in combination with commercetools Products endpoint. If you use both, commercetools can automatically validate the product that you are adding to cart.
  • Cart's addCustomLineItem action is meant to be used with your products that are stored outside of commercetools or with dynamically generated lineItems, not necessarily being conventional products. Therefore it allows you to add you own products that commercetools does not need to know.

Calculate shippingCosts

  • If you use commercetools' cart and shippingMethods services commercetools setShippingMethod action can automatically calculate shipping costs based on zones, countries and shippingMethods and even on more complex rules.
  • If you want to use commercetools cart service but you want to use your own shippingRate service you can use commercetools Carts setCustomShippingMethod to provide your externally calculated shippingRates.

Create an Order

  • If you use commercetools' cart and order services commercetools automatically validates your carts before converting it to orders if you perform the createOrderFromCart action.
  • If you want to use commercetools orders but want to use your own cart services you can use commercetools orderImport service.

These are just three examples of different ways to use commercetools services in different scenarios. Usually whenever it makes sense you will find a way of loosely integrating commercetools services into your overall architecture.

There is an unofficial postman collection for the commercetools API that covers most of their endpoints and update actions (currently more then 400 actions).

Valentin Sauer
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