Getting Started
Please make sure that you are referencing the appropriate documentation for your build. This document is correct if your Chord implementation is leveraging the Chord OMS. If you are instead using Shopify as an OMS, see the Getting Started (Shopify customers) document.
Welcome to Chord!
This document will help you understand the next steps following your provisioning and get you started in building and managing your site.
We're excited to have you build with Chord. By now you should have received an email that includes a list of all of the provisioned sites and relevant credentials.
💡 If you have not received access to any or some of these sites please reach out to help@chord.co or your relevant Slack Channel for help.
Whether you are building a brand-new store or importing your data from another site, your agency or development team will help with the migration. The Chord team will be available every step of the way to answer all questions.
Environments
Per Chord’s standard provisioning process, one platform environment has now been stood up specific for your implementation. Treat this environment as a staging/development environment to be used while your team builds. Each piece of the Chord platform (i.e. SDK, CMS, OMS, CDP etc.) supports multiple environments and the creation of additional environments for the CMS and SDK components (i.e. staging, production etc.) is encouraged and should be managed by your development team.
For the OMS, Chord will provision both a Staging and Production environment, you should have access to your staging instance. Your production OMS instance will be provisioned by the Chord team soon after your staging instance is created. Keep this in mind as you build and interact with the Chord OMS APIs.
For the CDP layer, Chord will provision and manage your different environments. The Chord team will let you know when your production data layer is ready.
Overview
The Chord platform consists of 4 key components:
- Front-End SDK
- Order Management System (OMS)
- Content Management System (CMS)
- CDP/Analytics
The following breakdown includes detailed information on each component, what it does, and how to interact with it.
Front End SDK
Your agency or development team should already have Github access to the relevant Chord starter kit SDKs.
💡 If you or your team have not received access to the relevant Chord repositories, please reach out to help@chord.co or your attributed Slack Channel for access.
During your sandbox period, you should have discussed the relevant flavor of starter kit you and your team need with your Sales Engineer (Next.js or Gatsby). This is the flavor that should have been used to stand up your sandbox environment and should be what was used to stand up your staging environment.
The Front-End SDK is the Github repo that serves as the underlying code for your site and this is where your agency or development team will spend the majority of its time.
As you saw in your sandbox and now in your staging environment, the SDK comes packaged with a basic sample UI (i.e. the “Chord Plant Store”) that provides a reference for standard functionality like authentication, subscriptions, product description pages etc. Everything your agency or development team can use to build off of to create a unique custom experience.
For reference, please review the SDK documentation pertaining to the relevant starter kit flavor here.
In addition, the SDK includes the infrastructure for fetching and displaying all of the base sample content that is seeded (i.e. provided by default) into your CMS during provisioning.
Order Management System (OMS)
The Order Management System (OMS) is the platform where you will manage the lifecycle of your orders placed by customers.
The OMS tracks all the information and processes, including order entry, inventory management, fulfillment, promotions and after-sales service.
The provided guides and tutorials will take you through each step of the way to setup your OMS.
Want more detailed training? Please schedule a training with our team!
💡 If you or your team have not received access to your unique OMS environment or have any questions please reach out to help@chord.co or your attributed Slack Channel.
Content Management System (CMS)
Your agency or development team will be responsible for creating and managing your store’s content using Contentful and should already have access to this unique CMS space.
💡 If you or your team have not received access to the relevant CMS space, please reach out to help@chord.co or your attributed Slack Channel for access.
The Chord team will provide a walk-through for your agency or development team on how to use the CMS before finalizing the handover - this document will provide you with details on how to create, edit and publish products in your CMS.
tThe CMS is your single source of truth for ALL of your site’s content, product and otherwise.
CDP/Analytics/Integrations
By default, your Back-End and Front-End staging environment will be integrated into the Chord CDP layer (via Segment) using Chord’s proprietary tracking plan
Your agency or development team will work with you on collecting a list of necessary integrations your team may need. The Chord Data Team will use this list to provision these integrations in the CDP layer.
Please refer to this documentation for currently supported integrations in Segment. Let the agency or development team know if an integration your team is looking for is not listed. The Chord Data Team is available for questions on custom integrations.
💡 If you or your team have any questions please reach out to help@chord.co or your attributed Slack Channel.
Data Reporting
“But where do I access this data?”
All of the behavioral data that is captured via the front-end along with the transactional data captured on the back-end is fed through Chord’s data modeling pipeline, is cleaned through and transformed and is exposed through the BI visualization tool, Looker.
By default, you will have access to 6-7 pre-built dashboards that include:
- Business Overview - The “Home Base” dashboard which features the most relevant data from each of the other dashboards. Data includes (but not limited to) sales figures, order metrics, visitor conversion and product breakdowns.
- Customer - The Customer dashboard features analytics on customer volume, customer retention and customer cohort analysis. This dashboard answers questions like, “what is my visitor conversion rate,” “what is my customer growth rate” and “which customer cohort is generating majority of my sales over time.”
- E-Commerce - The E-Commerce dashboard showcases data pertaining to user traffic and interaction on your site. Featuring metrics on visitor conversion, site traffic, engagement and channel traffic. This dashboard answers questions like “how many of my site visitors are making purchases,” “what is my customer’s average basket size” and “what proportion of my site visitors are starting checkout.”
- Marketing - The Marketing dashboard, similar to the E-Commerce dashboard, relies heavily on visitor traffic and channel data. That said, this dashboard dives deeper into channel attribution and engagement to give a better perspective on campaign success. This dashboard answers questions like, “what is the % breakdown of site traffic by channel,” “what is your highest traffic attribution category” and “what are the top referrers to your site.”
- Product - The Product dashboard, unlike the others, focuses exclusively on data pertaining to your product catalog. Metrics include: total items sold, unique products sold and top/bottom products by sale and quantity. This dashboard provides a wholistic overview of which of your products are performing the best and the worst on a per dollar and per unit basis.
- Subscription - As implied, the Subscription dashboard provides a breakdown of your business’s subscriber activity. This dashboard features metrics on subscriber growth rate, average sales per customer type, subscription activations vs. cancellations and subscription sales over time.
- Supply Chain - Last but not least is the Supply Chain Dashboard, which showcases relevant fulfillment metrics. This dashboard answers questions like, “what is the % breakdown of my number of fulfilled orders versus total orders,” “what is my average time to fulfillment” and “what is the breakdown of my orders by fulfillment state over time.”
In addition to the default dashboards, Looker makes it easy to visualize and build custom dashboards from scratch with an intuitive drag-and-drop UI. The Explorer feature gives you the ability to create a custom dashboard with any metric, field, filter or visualization to fit your need.
💡 If you or your team have not received access to the your unique Looker space, please reach out to help@chord.co or your attributed Slack Channel for access.
Hosting
The Chord platform prides itself on not being opinionated. And this includes hosting partners.
Your sandbox environment was deployed using Netlify. Your staging/production environment can be deployed using Netlify as well.
If you prefer another hosting partner, the Chord team will will work with your agency or development team on best practices, support and integrating the Chord platform.
Webhooks
“So wait, I have to manage ALL of these things now?”
No, you do not. This is why you chose Chord. And this is how we make this process seamless.
Through the power of webhooks, all of the different components of the Chord platform talk to one another and are in sync. As an example, this means that if you make a change to the name of a specific product in the CMS, this change will be reflected not only in the front-end but also in the OMS. Everything is in sync!
Your agency or development team will work with you on troubleshooting and testing webhook functionality.
💡 If you or your team have additional questions please reach out to help@chord.co or your attributed Slack Channel.
Ongoing Support
For any additional questions or support, please reach out to: