Overview
Litium is an e-commerce platform with an integrated PIM and CMS. It is built with .NET technologies and customizable by you as a developer.
This page will give you an overview of the platform, its ingoing areas and surronding products:
The Litium platform has six areas:
- Sales - Order and campaign management
- Products - The product information management system (PIM)
- Websites - The content management system (CMS)
- Globalization - Defines setups of markets, countries, sales channels, currencies, languages and taxes
- Customers: Personalization and user management, manage all users from administrators to external customers
- Media: Manage uploads of files and media (pdf, images, videos etc.)
Sales
The Sales area contains all orders that has been placed in all websites and channels in the Litium installation.
This is also where you manage campaigns and discounts.
Products (PIM)
Products can be created in Litium PIM but more often there is an integration to an ERP where products are first created and then sent to Litium to be enriched and published. By using workflows in Litium PIM it is possible to set rules for who should be doing what and provide useful instructions on what needs to be done at all times.
A product in Litium PIM always has a single baseproduct and one or many variants.
The variant:
- Is the physical SKU
- Has price and inventory information
- Is the sellable item, variants are added to the shoppingcart
- Cannot exist without a baseproduct
The baseproduct:
- Is a container for variants
- Not a physical or sellable item
- Should hold all information that is common to all its variants, like Brand and Description
The product page in Litium will likely display information from both the baseproduct and the variant. In the image below the Brand and Description are fields on the baseproduct. Images, Color, Size, Price and Quantity in stock are set on the variant. By selecting values for Color and Size a unique variant can be identified and will be added to cart when the add-button is clicked.
Read about products data modeling
Related products and categories
Products and categories can be connected using relations. Common use cases are to present lists of accessories, similar products or others also bought on the product page.
Workflows
Workflows are tasks that need to be completed in Litium PIM. You can create workflows to find products that need to be updated with translations, images, price, category or any other missing information.
Workflow tasks
A workflow is made up of tasks, a task is basically a stored product search to identify products that need be processed, a task to "Add product images" is just a search to "Find all products that does not have a connected image":
The task can also have an instruction with more deails on what needs to be done and it can be assigned to individual users or groups.
Websites
The website area in Litium is a CMS built specifically for e-commerce.
- Create pages and publish them though globalization channels into one or more markets
- Blocks are page sections that can be individually published and permission managed for simple personalization of a website
- Blocks allow editors to easily change the page structure without developer involvement
- A Block can be Global making it reusable in multiple places on the website while still managed in a single location
- Blocks are rendered on site as view components
- Both Pages and Blocks support drafts allowing a pending edit to be reviewed before making it public
- Both Pages and Blocks have the full field framework
Read more:
Globalization
Globalization is a general area that manage access to Litium data through channels. When visitors looks at a Litium website they always view it through a channel that acts as an information filter, the visitors only see the data configured for that specific channel:
- Only pages enabled on the channel are visible
- Only products enabled on the channel are visible
- Only payment methods enabled on the channel are visible
- Only shipment methods enabled on the channel are visible
- Only currencies methods enabled on the channel are visible
- etc...
The same website in Litium CMS can be exposed through multiple different channel, all different content depending on configuration. Setting up a new channel is simple and does not require additions to the Litium license.
Entities of the globalization-area are:
- Domain name
- Has settings for
robots.txt and https
- TaxClass
- A tax class is only a name, the tax class gets its value when linked to a country, the link will hold the percentage for the tax class in that specific country
- Language
- Currency
- Country
- Has setting for currency, price lists and inventory that will be used for the country when connected to a channel
- Channel (has the field framework)
- May belong to a market (but only one)
- May be connected to a website (but does not have to be)
- May have one or many countries connected (normally a channel will only have a single country)
- Defines among other things: language, domain name and payment methods
- Market (has the field framework)
- A market is a group of channels
- Products are sold in a market through channels
- A market can contain multiple channels but a channel can only belong to a single market
Read more about globalization configuration scenarios for markets and channels
Customers
The Customers area handles users and permissions.
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A Person is the user account for a user in Litium.
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A Person may be added to one or more Groups:
- Permissions are always set on Groups (they cannot be given directly to a Person)
- A Group in Litium can be smart or simple:
- In simple groups you manually add or remove members when needed.
- Smart groups instead define a set of search criteria and all Persons with attributes that match the criteria are automatically added (or removed) based on this, as an example a group called Litium staff could be configured to automatically include all Persons with an email that contain "@litium.com"
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Target groups are behavior defined groups used for personalization.
- The difference between Smart groups and Target groups is that Smart groups identify logged in Persons based on data stored on that Person, but Target groups only identify Sessions (for both logged in and anonymous visitors) based on behavior.
- Examples of behavior that can be identified in Target groups are "Has a specific product in cart" or "Has visited a specific page".
- Behavior information is stored in cookie and not in database.
- Read more about target groups.
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A Person may also be connected to one or more Organizations. An Organization is (usually) the customer entity in B2B scenarios and customer information (like delivery address, billing address, customer number etc.) added to the order is fetched from the Organization of the current Person. In B2C the Person is usually also the customer, and customer information is then fetched from the Person-object to the order.
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As an attribute on the link between a Person and an Organization it is possible to set one or more Roles. A Person can for example be connected to an Organization with the role "Manager". Roles are also used in Litium Accelerator to handle the order approval flow.
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To comply with GDPR, Litium supports exporting and removing user information. Extra audit information is also stored when a user with access to customers or orders logs in. Read more about GDPR.
Read about customers data modeling
Media
The Media area handles files in a folder structure. It contains file uploads for all areas, such as products images and website content.
Read about media data modeling
Litium backoffice is the administration UI of the platform and is accessed by adding /litium to your website URL (the Litium db-tool can be used to create a new administrator account after installation).
Litium backoffice is a SPA built with Angular. Extensions added by developers are built as Angular components. There are several extension points available in backoffice where developers can add custom UI and functionality:
An accelerator is a storefront starter site to speed up your development and give customers faster time to market and lower risk.
It has a set up of standard best practices for business logic and UX components.
Litium accelerators are provided as source code making it fully customizable, everything that comes included can be removed or modified. The accelerators have their own release notes.
Benefits include:
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Instant MVP, get a clean e-commerce website instantly and start work by adding value instead of boilerplate code.
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Lower risk when you start projects on a tested, maintained and supported codebase.
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Having all projects start with the same codebase also makes it easier for developers to move between different projects and work with multiple Litium customers.
Accelerator content
Litium accelerators are a fully functional e-commerce website, some of the things included are:
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A website in the CMS containing created instances of required pages (checkout, order confirmation, navigation, cart, search, filtering, my page, order confirmation)
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A product assortment in PIM with some sample categories and products
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Templates and fields to create objects in all areas
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Globalization artifacts:
- Channel
- Country
- Currency
- Domain name
- Market
- Tax class
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Business rules such as validations and state transitions
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The search engine Litium search
React accelerator (beta)
The React accelerator is a Single Page Application built on React and Next.JS. It communicates with Litium using the Storefront API.
MVC accelerator
The MVC accelererator is based on Microsoft .NET MVC and commnicates to Litium with the .NET API and the Accelerator web API.
Read more about Litium accelerators
Add-ons are packaged functionality that can be added to Litium installations, some commonly used ones are:
See the full list of available Add-ons
Distribution
Add-ons are distributed either as:
Be aware that when a new version of Litium is released some add-ons might not be available for that version. Verify before project start that required add-ons are available.
Read more about building add-ons