Litium Connect

Litium Connect Business Domain Driven APIs

• Channels: Business channels through which merchants presents themselves to their customers. For example, ECommerce websites are the online channels, and physical stores can be offline channels. Market places such as EBay, Amazon are online sales channels. Product feeds to google, price comparison engines such as pricerunner also falls into this business domain area.
• Customers & Personalization: Analysis of buyers, their buying patterns and improving sales with recommendations based on buying patterns. Typical integrations are to systems that identify buyers online behaviour such as Nosto, and marketing automation such as Voyado.
• Payments: Connecting to Payment service providers such as Klarna, Dibs, PayPal, etc, to authorize payments, capture, cancel and refund.
• Logistics: Connecting to Warehousing and logistics such as Unifaun.
• ERP: Connecting to Enterprice resource planning systems such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP, etc, for order fulfilment and return management.
• BI : Business Intelligence.

Key Benefits

Litium Connect delivers following advantages and benefits when integrating Litium with external systems

Reduced deployment, upgrade and maintenance costs

Litium Connect reduces deployment, upgrade and maintenance costs for merchants.

• Easy deployment and upgrade: In Litium Connect an Integration Application has its own runtime life cycle, which means the Litium e-commerce websites (Litium installation) does not need to be stopped or taken down for installation or upgrade of Connect Integration Applications. This reduces the costs of deployment and upgrade.
• Ease of maintenance: Updates of the Integration Applications would be less frequent as they would be more resilient and can be developed with backward compatibility. This means, as the Litium version is updated, there would be less compatibility issues with existing integration applications that are already in use, and vise-versa. This reduces the maintenance costs.

Applications as SaaS and Web API connectivity

Litium connect exposes web APIs that allows Integration Applications to be build against those web APIs. This allows following benefits:

1. Integration Applications may run on a separate process or on a remote machine (away from Litium application, “software as a service” paradigm), allowing them:
   • To be maintained and updated without having to take down Litium website.
   • To support multiple Litium instances, even be multi-tenant.
   • To scale independent of Litium server instances: for example, an Integration Application may need only one application instance while Litium may need to be deployed in multiple servers to improve website performance.
2. Integration Applications can be made using different technologies (e.g. Java vs .net)
3. Can build Integration Applications towards a remote instance of Litium, i.e. Litium need not be installed in the developer machine.

Build Integration Applications to Litium that are Litium version agnostic

Integration Applications build for Litium Connect work across multiple Litium versions. This reduces maintenance and upgrade costs, as a single Integration Application can support multiple Litium versions. This also means only one version of an Integration Application need be maintained across multiple Litium versions.

Hubs: Build Integration Applications towards standard business domain contracts

Litium Connect facilatates "domain driven design" and "business process driven development" and exposes standard business domain contracts, i.e. programming artifacts such as entities, operations and events (exposed through web API endpoints and web-hooks). These contracts are generic to respective business domains (in contrast to being specific to a Litium instance). Litium connect calls these business domains as “Hubs”.