Extend Bold Checkout
Each merchant, especially those using a composable architecture, has a unique technology stack. While Bold Checkout strives to integrate as many other technologies as possible, there will always be those that we don't support out-of-the-box.
This page covers the mechanisms that are available to help you integrate payment gateways, ecommerce platforms, and other third party technologies into Bold Checkout.
In most cases, extending Bold Checkout requires a self-hosted checkout. Integrating a new technology or fully customizing the user experience is not possible with Bold-hosted checkout. To make small changes to your Bold-hosted checkout, consider using lightweight frontend experience elements or CSS customization.
Integrations
The most common way to extend Bold Checkout is through an integration. Bold makes available an extensive set of APIs that enable you to interact with products, orders, and customers. You can also register for webhooks to listen for notifications in your integration or perform overrides to bypass certain Bold functionality.
You can create two types of integrations — private and public:
| Integration Type | Best Used For | Authentication Method | Installation Method |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private Integrations | Creating a self-hosted checkout flow or a custom integration that you want to install on one or two stores. These are often specific to a merchant's business requirements. | API access token obtained via Bold Account Center. | Manually installed on each store. |
| Public Integrations | Creating a generally available integration that you anticipate being installed on many stores. These are often integrations into other popular products or services. | API access token obtained via an OAuth 2.0 flow. | Installed via the Integration Marketplace in Bold Account Center. |
Private integrations
Private integrations are most often created to integrate Bold Checkout into the tech stack of a single merchant. Many of the composable ecommerce technologies require the use of similar product, order and customer information. You can use the Bold Checkout APIs to access and use this information across different technologies.
The following are examples of private integrations:
- An agency partner integrates Bold Checkout with a merchant’s preferred external A/B testing tool.
- A merchant integrates Bold Checkout with their preferred payment gateway, which Bold doesn't already support.
- An agency partner integrates Bold Checkout with an AI search product and offers this manual installation of this integration to all of their clients.
To learn more about private integrations, refer to the following pages:
Public integrations
Public integrations are less common. Create a public integration when you want many stores to be able to use your integration without a developer manually installing the integration on each store.
If you create a public integration, you can publish it in the Bold Account Center Integration Marketplace, which enables a store owner to simply click a button to install your integration. You can choose to make your integration available to all merchants, or just certain merchants.
The following are some examples of public integrations:
- A marketing automation partner creates a public integration with Bold Checkout, enabling all their customers to easily use Bold Checkout.
- An agency partner integrates Bold Checkout with a discount provider, and makes this integration available to the public via the Integration Marketplace.
- A fraud prevention partner creates a public integration so that they have access to all Bold Checkout users as potential customers.
To learn more about public integrations, refer to the following pages:
Platform connectors
A platform connector is a specific kind of integration that enables a merchant to use Bold Checkout on a platform that Bold doesn’t support out of the box.
Creating a platform connector allows brands to integrate their existing solutions for customer, product, and order management while taking advantage of Bold’s powerful Checkout Experience Suite — without the need to replatform.
For more information about platform connectors, refer to the following pages:
- Overview
- Concepts
- Specifications
- How-to guides:
External payment gateways
An external payment gateway is any payment gateway not already supported by Bold. Stores can replace their default Bold Checkout payment gateway with an external payment gateway or add an external payment gateway in addition to their default gateway.
To communicate with Bold, the external payment gateway must send and receive data with specific endpoints. Bold calls these endpoints the external payment gateway connector. To implement a connector, use the Integrate an External Payment Gateway guide.
For more information about external payment gateways, refer to the following pages:
Plugins
Bold encourages developers to use integrations in order to extend Bold Checkout, instead of plugins.
You can extend the functionality of Bold Checkout by creating a plugin that listens to Checkout events and sends actions in return.
For more information about plugins, refer to the following pages: