Getting Started
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:
- NetSuite Essentials — basic training for those new to NetSuite in general
- SuiteCommerce: Web Store Administration — basic training for operating a SuiteCommerce web store (non-technical)
- SuiteCommerce: Theme and Extension Development — basic training on customizing a SuiteCommerce web store
- SuiteCommerce InStore: Fundamentals — useful if you’re going to be working on SCIS
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.
This section, named Getting Started, has a number of tutorials aimed at beginners — but note that they are version dependent.
If you want to know more about the products, or want to tackle more advanced topics, check out the other areas on this site:
- Architecture → explore the nuances of SuiteCommerce and NetSuite architecture
- Example Customizations → get ideas about customizations you can make
- Best Practices → learn the best ways to introduce change
- User Interface → build intuitive and powerful shopping experiences
- Performance → optimize your site for speed and efficiency
- Troubleshooting → track down and eliminate problems
- Unlock the Suite → leverage NetSuite features that complement your web store
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.
If you’re looking for inspiration, why not take a look at our reference sites?