Digital commerce

Xperience by Kentico digital commerce is an extensible framework for building content-driven online stores. Rather than providing a turnkey storefront, it gives your development team a set of composable services, data structures, and extension points that you assemble into a custom commerce solution.

This page provides a technical overview of the commerce architecture for solution architects and developers evaluating or planning an Xperience commerce implementation.

Framework philosophy

The commerce module follows a "provide the building blocks, not the building" approach. Xperience handles data persistence, service orchestration, and extensibility infrastructure. Your team builds the business-specific logic and user-facing experience on top.

This separation is deliberate – commerce requirements (payment providers, tax regulations, product structures, checkout flows) vary greatly between projects. Rather than imposing opinionated defaults that most teams would need to override, the framework provides a set of well-defined interfaces and services that you implement and compose to match your business needs.

What Xperience provides vs. what you build

Customer journey through the framework

The following diagram maps the customer journey to the Xperience services that handle each stage:

Browse products

1. Products are retrieved from the content hub or website channel using the content retriever API.
2. IPriceCalculationService computes display prices with catalog discounts.
3. The customer adds items to the cart. Your code serializes the cart data into ShoppingCartInfo.ShoppingCartData.

Checkout

1. IPriceCalculationService computes line totals, order discounts, and taxes.
2. The customer enters addresses, selects shipping and payment methods, and optionally applies coupon codes.
3. IPriceCalculationService produces the final total including shipping.

Confirm and pay

1. IOrderCreationService creates the order with all associated data (customer, items, addresses, promotions).
2. Your payment integration redirects the customer to the payment provider.
3. The payment callback updates the order status via IInfoProvider<OrderInfo>.
4. IOrderNotificationService sends customer and internal notifications.

Reference implementation

The sample Dancing Goat project provides a production-ready implementation of the digital commerce solution that demonstrates how to integrate all commerce features into a working online store. The sample site includes complete implementations of:

• Product catalog modeling and display
• Price calculation with tax logic
• Shipping and payment method handling
• Shopping cart functionality
• Checkout process with multiple steps
• Order management and status tracking
• Promotions and discounts implementation
• Customer account integration with membership

Documentation pages in this section often reference specific parts of the Dancing Goat implementation when describing features and providing code examples. We recommend examining the sample site's source code alongside this documentation to see how individual commerce components work together in a complete solution.

The Dancing Goat implementation serves as a practical reference for:

• Architecture patterns – See how to structure your commerce-related services, controllers, and view models.
• Best practices – Learn recommended approaches for error handling, validation, and data flow.
• Integration examples – Understand how commerce features integrate with Xperience's content management, membership, and other capabilities.
• Customization techniques – Explore examples of extending default behaviors to meet specific business requirements.

You can use the Dancing Goat implementation as a starting point for your own commerce solution, adapting its patterns and code to your specific needs.

Next steps

• Commerce architecture – read about the commerce solution architecture.
• Commerce setup – enable the feature.
• Product catalog – design your product content model.
• Price calculation – understand the price calculation pipeline.
• Checkout process – implement shopping cart and order creation.
• Promotions – set up catalog discounts, order discounts, and free shipping.
• Manage commerce stores – business user guide for day-to-day operations.