Understand the systems behind modern commerce.
Practical guidance for product, strategy and engineering teams building commerce infrastructure inside financial institutions.
Guides
Start with the decision in front of you.
From the strategic case through architecture, implementation and deployment.
Strategic guide
The Guide to Commerce Banking
A practical guide to building the commerce layer for modern merchants.
For product and strategy leaders at financial institutions
Read the guide
Decision guide
Build vs Buy: Commerce Infrastructure
The decision institutions eventually have to make.
For technology and product leaders evaluating a commerce programme
Decision guide
Choosing Your Commerce Architecture
Four ways to use commerce infrastructure, and when each one is right.
For architects and engineering leaders
Technical guide
Building a Merchant Commerce Platform
Start with the primitives, not the dashboard.
For engineering teams designing a multi-tenant commerce system
Technical guide
Evaluating Self-Hosted Commerce
Control the environment without rebuilding the platform.
For platform and infrastructure teams
Reference
The words, and what they mean here.
Box uses a handful of ordinary words in a specific way. Use this as a quick reference while reading.
The deployment
- A box
- One deployment of Box: the engine, console and website render, running in one institution’s environment against one database.
- Deployment
- The formal name for a box. It is what a licence buys and what an institution operates. Merchants are tenants inside one.
- Self-hosted
- The engine and console run on the institution’s infrastructure, in the region it chose.
What is installed
- Package
- A unit of capability that ships as a module, such as catalogue, bookings or loyalty.
- Tier
- A named, strictly nested set of packages an institution licenses: Basic, Growth or Enterprise.
- Entitlement
- The install-time decision about which packages a deployment receives. Anything outside the tier is absent from the build.
The seams
- Port
- A named seam the engine depends on without knowing what fills it, such as payment, messaging or settlement.
- Adapter
- The provider implementation bound to a port: an acquirer, mailer or settlement bank.
- Live upgrade
- Moving a deployment to a newer package set while it keeps serving merchants.
The surfaces
- Merchant Console
- The admin where a merchant and their staff operate the business.
- Website
- The merchant’s shop on their own domain, rendered from the engine that owns their records.
- Retail Rails
- Android libraries an institution embeds in its own application so that application becomes a till.
The commercial words
- Commerce banking
- The institution that holds a merchant’s account also runs the commerce it pays for.
- Licence
- What an institution buys: a one-time install licence by tier, followed by annual access. Never a share of merchant sales.
- Institution
- The buyer: a bank, payment provider, mobile money operator, fintech or public body.