Overview

Litium 8

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:

Areas
Backoffice
Accelerators
Add-ons

Areas

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: User management and personalization, 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

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

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

Customers

The Customers area handles users, organizations and permissions.

A Person is the user account for a user in Litium.
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, simple or contextual:
  - 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"
  - Contextual groups do not contain persons, and neither has it any connections to persons, like an ordinary group would have in Litium. Instead, conditions are defined for the contextual groups, and evaluated on request to be able to respond whether a person meet the criteria of the contextual group. The person is then still not added to the contextual group, but the response from Litium can be used to understand which organization the person is currently logged in to, and by doing so only grant the permission level for the current organization..

A Person may also be connected to one or more Organizations. An Organization (company) 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.
Customer roles are set as an attribute on the link between a Person and an Organization. A Person can for example be connected to an Organization with the role "Manager". Roles are used in Litium accelerator to handle the order approval flow.
Each Role has several operations. An operation defines the actions that a person with a certain role can perform. With this ability you will be able to define and use the following role operations using the Storefront API.
- Read organization
- Manage organization
- Read addresses
- Manage addresses
- Read persons
- Manage persons
- Place orders
- Approve orders

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.
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

Back office

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:

Accelerators

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:

Instant MVP, get a clean e-commerce website instantly and start work by adding value instead of boilerplate code.
Lower risk when you start projects on a tested, maintained and supported codebase.
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:

A website in the CMS containing created instances of required pages (checkout, order confirmation, navigation, cart, search, filtering, my page, order confirmation)
A product assortment in PIM with some sample categories and products
Templates and fields to create objects in all areas
Globalization artifacts:
- Channel
- Country
- Currency
- Domain name
- Market
- Tax class
Business rules such as validations and state transitions
The search engine Litium search

React accelerator

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 communicates to Litium with the .NET API and the Accelerator Web API.

Add-ons

Add-ons are packaged functionality that can be added to Litium installations to provide additional functionality, either in Litium itself or through integration with a third-party service. There are two ways to implement an add-on:

Litium Apps

A Litium App is a stand-alone application that communicates with Litium through our Litium Connect APIs. Litium Apps was introduced with Litium 8. This new architecture gives greater flexibility and scalability to the Litium platform. In Litium 8, all integrations to payment and shipment providers are implemented as apps. Litium Apps are run in Docker containers in the Litium Commerce Cloud.
Extensions

An extension is installed as a part of the Litium solution. Extensions are distributed either as:
- Compiled
  - Installed as NuGet packages
  - Run as part of the Litium application
- Source code
  - Source code is downloaded
  - Run as part of the Litium application
Be aware that extensions have a dependency to a certain Litium version. When a new version of Litium is released, some extensions might not be available for that version. Verify before project start that required extensions are available.

A some commonly used add-ons are:

Payment providers: Many supported such as Klarna, Svea, Briqpay and Adyen
Product Media Mapper: Automatically connects uploaded images to products (compiled extension)
Integration kit: A codebase used to develop file based integrations towards Litium (source code extensions)

See the full list of available Add-ons