Tech behind Marketing

Implementing an e-commerce store in OrderCloud may seem complex at first, but with a clear plan and a good understanding of each entity, the process becomes structured, reusable, and scalable. In this post, I’ll walk you through the steps I followed to build a store for bags using best practices, while highlighting key decisions and common pitfalls to avoid.

1. Catalog: The Starting Point

Before thinking about products or categories, you must create a catalog, as all categories, products, and their assignments depend on it.

Recommendations:

• Name your catalog clearly and generically if you plan to include multiple product lines (e.g., main-catalog).
• You can create multiple catalogs if you sell by channel (retail, wholesale, outlet), but one is enough to start.

2. Categories: A Thoughtful Hierarchical Structure

An organized store needs logical and hierarchical categories. I used a structure with depth (Depth) that reflects site navigation:

Depth 0: Bags

Depth 1: Purses, Clutches, Totes (under Bags) 

Depth 2: Shigra, Cobra, Maxi, etc.

Recommendations:

• Use Depth 0 for product lines.
• Avoid more than 3 levels deep to keep navigation clear.
• Set ParentID correctly so OrderCloud auto-calculates Depth.
• If your site is a small one like this will be fine to set ids by your own.

3. Products: Base Entities and Variants

Each product was created as a base entity (e.g., shigra-purse, cobra-clutch) with variants (SKUs) linked to color or other features.

Recommendations:

• Use xp to enrich products with custom attributes like material, size, or localized labels.
• Keep product ID and Name in English, and handle multilingual naming with xp.label.

4. Specs and SpecOptions: Dynamic Attributes

Once products were created, I defined specs to support customization and variants:

• strap_material: «Leather», «Metal»
• strap_length: «90cm», «120cm», «150cm»

Recommendations:

• Set DefinesVariant = true if the spec should generate variant combinations.
• Use multilingual Label fields to support international frontends.
• Don’t create one spec with subfields — split them as separate specs (e.g., strap_material, strap_length).

5. Assigning Specs to Products

To enable products to use those specs, I assigned them using:

POST /v1/products/{productID}/specs

Then I generated the variants automatically via:

POST /v1/products/{productID}/variants/generate

This created SKUs combining all valid spec options, like shigra-purse-Leather-90cm.

Recomendations:

• Forgetting to generate variants after assigning specs — this results in products without SKUs.
• Assigning unnecessary specs that define unused variants, leading to clutter.

Conclusion & Next Steps

With your catalog, categories, products, specs, and variants ready, you can move on to:

• Price assignment (PriceSchedules)
• Inventory tracking (InventoryRecords)
• Product-to-category assignments
• Frontend visualization based on specs and xp

OrderCloud is truly scalable and dynamic. You can even update the IDs as many times as you need.

Are you building a store with OrderCloud or migrating from another platform?

Let’s connect, I’d love to hear about your experience or help you improve your setup. 🚀