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E-commerce

Overview​

E-commerce is selling goods or services online: product catalogs, cart and checkout, payments, tax and shipping rules, order fulfillment, and customer support. Systems range from SaaS storefronts (Shopify) to custom stacks with headless commerce APIs.

Key concepts​

  • Catalog & inventory — SKUs, variants, stock levels, and oversell prevention.
  • Payments — PCI scope, tokenization, refunds, and fraud signals.
  • Checkout UX — Guest checkout, address validation, shipping options, trust cues.
  • Operations — OMS, returns, CS tools, and analytics (conversion funnels).
  • Compliance — Consumer protection, tax nexus, privacy (GDPR/CCPA where applicable).

Order fulfillment flow​

Sample: cart line item (conceptual JSON)​

{
  "sku": "TEE-BLK-M",
  "name": "T-shirt black / M",
  "quantity": 2,
  "unit_price_cents": 2499,
  "currency": "USD"
}

References​