Step by Step to create orders by consuming SAP Commerce Cloud Restful API

Recently Jerry is working on an integration project about creating orders in Wechat platform by consuming SAP Commerce Cloud Restful API.

Consultants who didn’t touch SAP Commerce before(such as Jerry ) might get confused once they saw the search result by key word “commerce” in https://help.sap.com:

Several products with similar name are listed in search result.

There is a nice blog in medium comparing both:

Back to my task, it’s helpful if we play around in Commerce Cloud storefront UI to create a order manually to get ourselves familar with the process.

Log in to storefront and browse the site:

And identify a favourite product and add it to cart by pressing button “ADD TO CART”:

Press CHECK OUT to proceed:

Now we get a cart ID:

Maintain shipping address:

Maintain payment details:

Once Place Order button is clicked, the order is successfully created with an automatically populated order ID:

In summary, the process of order manual creation in SAP Commerce Cloud consists of five steps:

(1) create a Shopping Cart

(2) add products into the cart

(3) maintain shipping address to the cart

(4) maintain payment details to the cart

(5) execution place order action on the cart to get order created

Now we should figure out for each step, what exactly APIs should be called.

Go to https://api.sap.com, search by keyword “Commerce Cloud”, and it’s easy to find the supported API list there.

Jerry has written a simple nodejs application to demonstrate how to consume such APIs to create orders in SAP Commerce Cloud. The whole source code is uploaded to my github.

Execute the application, and we can observe the successflly created order with its ID in callback function in line 20:

Search the ID in Commerce Cloud backoffice UI to check the details of created order.

As introduced before, it’s necessary to go through five steps to have an order generated. And in Jerry’s project there are totally seven “step.js” implementation files, why?

For the additional two step.js, one is for access token retrieve and the other for cart delivery mode set operation. Access token will be appended to the header fields of all the subsequent API calls for authorization purpose. And the cart delivery mode will be set implicitly if performed in storefront UI via browser whereas an explicit API call is necessary in our case. As a result totally seven HTTP roundtrip is needed in API consumption case.

The access token fetch is implemented by following OAuth protocol: send the OAuth Client ID and secret to SAP Commerce Cloud OAuth endpoint to get the issued access token.

First we have to create a new OAuth Client in SAP Commerce Cloud backoffice:

Then in file “step1_get_token.js”, send a HTTP POST to Commerce Cloud Authentication endpoint to request access token: