Introduction to OrderCloud

Following on from the acquisition of Four51 by Sitecore, this is the first part of a series of posts where I'll walk you through the OrderCloud platform.

So what is Four51 OrderCloud?

Four51 is a B2B-first ecommerce company headquartered in Minneapolis that was founded in 1999 and was recently acquired by Sitecore. The OrderCloud platform is Four51’s MACH certified, fully hosted, cloud-native SaaS headless commerce solution. Being built as a B2B first platform has allowed for a very extensible data model and feature set that can cater to multiple strategies including B2C, B2B marketplaces, and B2X.

Why headless commerce?

Enterprise commerce platforms have been evolving over the years and as businesses become more agile in responding to customer needs, traditional monolithic commerce platforms are being replaced by modern API-first, headless platforms such as OrderCloud. A headless architecture decouples the frontend (UI) from the backend where the core commerce functionality sits. This API-first approach allows business to provide omnichannel experiences seamlessly by providing a unified commerce platform across all channels.

How does it scale?

OrderCloud is a mature, scalable and high performant platform. It powers some of the world's most well known brands with over 20M transactions and over $5B in revenue processed annually with an uptime of  99.99%.

Hopefully, that gives you a basic idea about the platform. In future posts, I will dig deeper into MACH architecture and OrderCloud platform architecture and supported functionality.