Transforming Social Thinking’s digital commerce with Commerce Layer.
About Social Thinking
Social Thinking empowers individuals to navigate the complexities of social interactions and foster meaningful relationships through innovative tools and educational resources. Their offerings serve schools, clinics, and families worldwide, targeting individuals aged 4 through adulthood. With a focus on physical and digital resources—including workbooks, online coursework, and events—Social Thinking is a vital resource for educators and institutions.
Primarily catering to the U.S. market, Social Thinking extends its reach internationally through marketplaces and book sellers.
Transforming limitations into opportunities with a modern commerce solution
Social Thinking’s existing digital platform, built on a monolithic Sitecore system, struggled to meet modern performance and usability expectations. Challenges included:
- Slow checkout process
Frustrating for users and a barrier to conversions. - Inefficient purchase order handling
A cumbersome manual process for institutional customers. - Limited storytelling capabilities
Restrictive systems hindered the ability to showcase content central to their mission. - Global shipping limitations
Required more robust integrations for international fulfillment.
With a growing customer base, Social Thinking needed a modern commerce solution that could:
- Provide a stateless cart to facilitate cart sharing and collaborative purchases.
- Support purchase order payments with document uploads.
- Improve checkout performance and efficiency.
- Enable advanced features like subscriptions, gift certificates, and promotional bundles.
A tailored commerce transformation for seamless experiences
Social Thinking partnered with Commerce Layer to overhaul its digital commerce infrastructure. The project, that launched within eight months after a thorough discovery phase, involved a complete backend replacement while retaining the existing frontend.
Key objectives
- Enhanced performance
Deliver faster and more efficient checkout experiences. - B2B optimization
Implement robust support for purchase orders, enabling PDF uploads linked to orders and seamless invoice management. - Global reach
Integrate external shipping calculations and Avalara for streamlined tax compliance. - Advanced capabilities
Add features like bundling (e.g., combining online training with physical products), subscriptions, and support for promotions. - Payment flexibility
Support diverse payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, and manual invoice handling.
Implementation highlights
- Stateless cart
Designed for educators to easily build and share carts with administrators or customer service teams. - Purchase order support
A dedicated workflow for institutional customers to upload and manage POs, simplifying their buying process. - Checkout fork
A custom checkout solution tailored to Social Thinking’s unique needs. - Third-party integrations
For payment, tax and shipping processes. - Bundles and promotions
Enhanced marketing capabilities to drive sales.
Driving growth and efficiency through a scalable, future-ready commerce platform with Commerce Layer
With Commerce Layer’s flexible headless architecture, Social Thinking achieved:
- Significant performance gains: faster load and checkout times, improving the user experience
The move to a headless, API-first architecture immediately resulted in a noticeably faster and more responsive experience for end users. While exact benchmarks are still being collected, early feedback from both internal QA teams and customers has confirmed checkout speed improvements (the decoupling of frontend and backend processes reduced lag time between cart updates and order submission) and page load consistency (with fewer third-party dependencies and lighter API payloads, key pages such as the cart, product detail, and checkout now load significantly faster—even during peak traffic). - Streamlined B2B operations
Simplified PO handling and invoicing for institutional customers. - Enhanced scalability: a future-proof platform ready for international expansion and feature growth
Commerce Layer’s headless, API-first architecture provides Social Thinking with a robust foundation for future growth. The platform’s composable design enables seamless integration of new features, geographies, and services without requiring a complete system overhaul.
A key enabler of this scalability is Commerce Layer’s App Elements, which allowed Social Thinking to embed prebuilt components—such as customer address forms, orders app, and customer apps—directly into their custom frontend. These components not only accelerated development timelines but also gave full administrative control to internal teams. This means customer service can more efficiently manage and assist customers in real time, enhancing both the backend experience and end-user satisfaction.
Additionally, the flexibility to customize and extend these components ensures that the platform continues to evolve alongside business needs. For example, flex promotions powered by their new Rules Engine, one of Commerce Layer’s most recent innovations, introduces highly customizable and granular promotional logic. This empowered Social Thinking to replace external promotion services, resulting in further performance improvements by reducing third-party dependencies and API calls during checkout. Flex promotions also allow for dynamic, targeted pricing strategies—essential for launching region-specific campaigns or adapting to seasonal trends.
Because Commerce Layer separates frontend and backend concerns, scaling to new regions or adding capabilities like multi-currency support, localized content, or marketplace integrations becomes a straightforward and low-risk process. This ensures that Social Thinking is well-positioned to meet the needs of educators and families worldwide as it expands its mission globally.
The MVP’s successful delivery established a foundation for future enhancements, including improved storytelling capabilities to better align with Social Thinking’s mission of fostering social learning globally.
Conclusion
Commerce Layer’s integration empowered Social Thinking to modernize its digital commerce platform, delivering improved performance, user experiences, and operational efficiencies. The transition marked a pivotal step in Social Thinking’s journey to better serve educators, families, and clinicians worldwide.