An animated GIF showing a slideshow of example SuiteCommerce sites

Welcome, new developer, to SuiteCommerce and SuiteCommerce Advanced.

Prerequisites

Before you can build or customize a SuiteCommerce or SuiteCommerce Advanced site, you must:

  • Have a NetSuite account
  • Have SuiteCommerce or SuiteCommerce Advanced and its associated bundles provisioned to your account
  • Have a strong understanding of web development technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Additionally, we recommend that you should:

  • Understand nuances of modern web development technologies such as model-view libraries (Backbone), TypeScript, ECMAScript 5+, REST APIs and AJAX, HTML5, Sass, Node and NPM, and more
  • Be prepared to develop your knowledge of NetSuite technologies such as records, searches, SuiteScript (1.0 and 2.0+), services, etc

Note that completing basic training for NetSuite and SuiteCommerce can take a number of weeks. New developers can reasonably expect to be ‘productive’ after a couple of months, depending on their pre-existing skills and knowledge, and how quickly they learn new concepts. Mastering SuiteCommerce can take years of experience and practice. We are telling you this not to scare you, but so that you (and your employers!) can set reasonable expectations about your progress.

Training

If you are new to SuiteCommerce or NetSuite, we strongly recommend taking our training courses.

Here are some courses we recommend:

Depending on you agreement with NetSuite, you may have to pay additional fees to access these courses. If you do not already have a NetSuite account or SuiteCommerce bundles provisioned to it, a demo account with the required bundles may be provisioned to you as part of the training course. Practicing your development skills and trying out new customizations should always happen in a non-production environment, such as a sandbox account.

At the moment, we do not have a training course specifically for SuiteCommerce Advanced. Modern SuiteCommerce Advanced sites use the same technology of SuiteCommerce sites, so the training is largely applicable to those sites as well. If you are using a site that is running Kilimanjaro or older, you should still take the training but refer to pages on this site, such as Denali and Mont Blanc: Developing Your First SuiteCommerce Advanced Customization.

Documentation

Documentation is an important part of developing on any platform. All documentation is available through these sources:

No documentation is hosted on this site, the developer portal. (Previous incarnations of this site did, but this is no longer the case.)

All new developers are required to read through a number of pages in the documentation to get started, as they will provide information on, for example, how to set up the developer tools and prepare your local environment, the basic concepts of the libraries and technologies we use, and the APIs available to you.

Next Steps

All the written resources you see on this site should be seen as supplemental to the training and documentation. Only once you have completed training, basic setup, and had a good perusal of the documentation, should you begin exploring the content of this site.

The content on this site seeks to:

  • Give you ideas about the types of customization that you can make
  • Teach you the best ways to approach customizations
  • Go into greater detail about the nuances of the technology
  • Show you how to use our APIs
  • Speed up development time by reusing existing functionality

The pages that neighbor this one are good paths to start on. For example, you could create your first module, extension, or custom content type; you might want to adjust how your theme looks; and so on. See below for links, or use the navigation.

Reference Sites

We maintain a number of reference sites that run various themes. You can refer to them if you wish to see simple versions of our sites: