Running a Store

This page collects what an operator needs to run the commerce modules in production: which features make up each kind of store, what runs in the background, what to back up, what changes on several nodes, and which permissions to give store staff.

Features for each kind of store

Store	Features	Sample recipe
Goods you ship	Products, Product Listing, Carts, Orders, Customers, Inventory, Shipping, Checkout, a payment provider; optionally Taxation, Product Reviews and Reports	Product listing: online store sample
Files to download	Products, Product Listing, Carts, Orders, Customers, Digital Downloads, Checkout, a payment provider	Digital downloads sample
Both	Both sets	The online store sample, then the digital downloads sample

Customers matters for a digital store: its contact step asks a guest for the email the download links go to. Without it, a guest's order has no email.

The samples turn on no payment provider. Test payments (CrestApps.OrchardCore.Checkout.TestProvider) confirms every payment without moving money. It registers only in the Development environment unless CrestApps:Checkout:TestProvider:AllowOutsideDevelopment is true, so it can't be left on in production by accident.

Background tasks

Each runs per tenant, on the schedule shown, while its feature is on.

Task	Feature	Schedule	What it does
Checkout Payment Reconciliation	Checkout	Every 5 minutes	Asks the provider about payment attempts still pending, so a payment whose webhook never arrived is still confirmed or failed.
Expired Carts Cleanup	Carts	Hourly	Deletes carts nobody changed within their lifetime.
Abandoned orders	Orders	Every 15 minutes	Cancels unpaid orders whose checkout was canceled, failed, expired or never started,
Expired stock holds	Inventory	Every 5 minutes	Releases stock held for orders not paid before the hold expired.
Customer data retention	Customers	Daily at 03:30	Erases inactive guests' personal data and anonymizes old guest orders, per Settings > Commerce > Customers.
Product Search Indexing	Products	Every minute	Rebuilds the product search records when product types or their attributes change.
Pay Later Renewals	Pay Later	Every 30 minutes	Creates the next balance for recurring Pay Later commitments.
Transaction Payment Reminders	Transactions	Every 6 hours	Sends reminders for outstanding balances.

They can be paused, rescheduled or run under Configuration > Tasks (feature OrchardCore.BackgroundTasks).

What to back up

• The tenant's database. Orders, carts, customers, coupons and their uses, stock and its movements, shipments, download rights and reviews are all documents in it.
• The digital files. Digital Downloads keeps files outside the database and the media library, in App_Data/Sites/{tenant}/DigitalFiles/{fileId}/{fileName}. A restored database without this folder has download rights to files that are gone.
• The data protection keys. Download links and guest order links are signed with the tenant's data protection keys, not stored. With new keys, every link already emailed stops working. Resending an order's confirmation from its page sends links that work again.

Several nodes

On a web farm, every node must see the same locks, cache, files and keys:

• Turn on the Redis features (OrchardCore.Redis, OrchardCore.Redis.Lock, OrchardCore.Redis.Cache, OrchardCore.Redis.Bus). Checkout finalization, webhook handling, coupon uses, order numbers and download counts are all decided under IDistributedLock. Without a shared lock, two nodes can both take a coupon's last use or a file's last download.
• Share the DigitalFiles folder, for example with a network share mounted at App_Data, or every node only serves the files uploaded through it.
• Share the data protection keys (for example with OrchardCore.Redis.DataProtection or the Azure data protection feature), or a link signed on one node fails on the others.

Throttling

What	Limit	Where it is counted
Cart forms (POST cart/add, cart/update, cart/remove)	The Cart group of Orchard Core's Rate Limits feature	Its configuration
Starting a payment and checking its status	20 attempts per 5 minutes per client address and checkout (PaymentRateLimitOptions)	The distributed cache, per tenant
Entering coupon codes	The same limit, per client address	The distributed cache, per tenant
Looking up a guest order	The same limit, per client address and per email	The distributed cache, per tenant

Counts are kept per tenant, so a busy tenant never throttles another, even with a shared cache.

Tenant isolation

Every commerce record is a document in the tenant's own database, and digital files sit in the tenant's own folder. A coupon used up on one tenant is still available on another, a download link signed by one tenant names nothing on another, and throttling counts never cross tenants.

Permissions for store staff

Permission	Feature	For
Manage orders	Orders	Seeing every order, and refunding, canceling, annotating and resending them
View own orders	Orders	Customers, for My Orders
Ship orders and update their shipments	Shipping	Warehouse staff
Manage shipping zones, methods and settings	Shipping	Whoever sets shipping prices
Manage inventory / View inventory	Inventory	Receiving and counting stock / looking it up
Manage customers / View customers	Customers	Customer service
Manage own customer profile and addresses	Customers	Customers
Manage coupons	Checkout	Marketing
Manage digital files and downloads	Digital Downloads	Uploading files, and taking back or giving back downloads
Moderate product reviews	Product Reviews	Approving reviews
Review products bought	Product Reviews	Customers (signed-in users have it)
Manage taxation	Taxation	Whoever sets tax rates and the store's origin

Related

• Commerce overview
• Carts and orders
• Digital Downloads
• Payments, for webhooks and multi-instance payment hosting