The future of digital commerce is collaborative, and successful partnerships are crucial to successful store operations. When operating a store, doubts often arise about the responsibilities of each player in the ecosystem.

This article outlines the main players' responsibilities in a digital commerce operation to optimize your store's operation and ensure efficient communication between the merchant and VTEX support. Check out the responsibilities in each scenario below:

• Back-office integrations (ERP/PIM/WMS)
• Payment provider integrations
• Implementation agencies
• Marketplace integrations

During the initial setup on VTEX, if your store uses external integrations with ERP/PIM/WMS, these systems should send your store's products, prices, and inventory to VTEX. Next, you must build a middleware to send and receive information from VTEX based on your store's routine events.

Once the initial product, price, and inventory integration has been set up and the middleware built, the information flow will be as shown in the diagram below.

During routine operations, responsibilities are divided as follows:

To process payments for orders in a VTEX store, the payment infrastructure responsibilities are divided as follows:

If inconsistencies or errors are detected during the order payment transaction, the merchant must:

1. Contact who is handling the transaction (payment and anti-fraud providers).
2. If the issue remains unresolved, contact VTEX Support providing details of the incident.

With native CMS solutions, merchants often rely on an implementation agency to customize the storefront's layout and customer experience.

VTEX offers the following native CMS options: Layout for Legacy CMS Portal stores, Site Editor for stores using the Store Framework, and Headless CMS for stores using FastStore. You can also integrate your external CMS with the VTEX APIs using a headless approach.

Issues related to how the content is being displayed to the end user should always be addressed initially with the agency's support. Some examples of these issues are:

• Incorrect or outdated images, titles, or banners.
• Products unavailable on the storefront.
• Blank pages.
• Incorrect or outdated category menu.
• Incorrect or incomplete search or collection results.
• Call-to-action buttons (e.g., Buy, Notify Me, Add to Cart) with unexpected behavior.
• Product prices or shipping rates inconsistent with the information stored on the platform.

If the agency identifies that the problem is with VTEX controls, apps, or native components, contact VTEX Support including all evidence from the agency's investigation.

VTEX has a native multi-seller architecture that allows VTEX stores to become marketplaces or sellers in other VTEX stores. The platform has native integrations with external marketplaces, allowing you to sell your products without having to write a single line of code. The marketplaces with native integrations can be found in the Marketplaces and Integrations tab.

Even so, there may be strategic partner stores for your business that operate outside this native collaborative network. In such cases, VTEX allows developing integrations with external marketplaces, where external connectors (hubs) establish the communication between a VTEX store and a non-native external marketplace.

For merchants operating in this scenario, it's important to understand the responsibilities of each player involved in the operation, as detailed below.

The following sections consider a store already integrated with an external marketplace via an external connector. Learn how to integrate your VTEX Catalog with an external connector for the first time, go to the Catalog Integration guide.

Below are the responsibilities involved in updating or sending new products and SKUs to external marketplaces:

See below the responsibilities involved in updating or creating orders based on the order flow.

1. The marketplace provides the products and the checkout for placing orders and notifies the connector when a new order is created.

2. The connector creates the order on VTEX.

3. VTEX replies to the connector with the order creation status: Success or Failure. In this step, contact the connector's support if an error occurs while creating the order on VTEX or if the order is created with the Canceled status.

4. Once the order is created on VTEX, the responsibility for updating its status in the OMS depends on the process stage:

   • If the order is being handled or invoiced, for example, the ERP notifies VTEX.
   • If the order was canceled in the marketplace, it is the connector's responsibility to update the status.

For more information on who is responsible for each step of the order flow in an external marketplace scenario, see Order flow and status - Seller flow.

To understand the right support to request in case of issues with updating the order status, follow the steps below:

1. In the VTEX Admin, go to Orders > All Orders.
2. Click the desired order to go to the order details page.
3. In the Order History section, click View Interactions (button illustrated below) and check for any error messages.

If the error message does not provide sufficient information, the merchant can contact VTEX Support, providing the interaction screen and order ID as evidence, and our team of experts will help identify the source of the issue.