Introduction to Norce - a Headless Platform for B2B and B2C

What is Norce Commerce?

Norce Commerce is a Swedish, cloud-based e-commerce platform formed in 2022 when two established Nordic e-commerce companies, Storm Commerce and Jetshop, merged. Norce is today the dominant SaaS-based commerce engine for mid-sized and large Nordic merchants, with a customer base spanning industries such as fashion, sports, industrial supply, and consumer electronics in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland.

The platform is built as a pure headless commerce engine: Norce handles the product catalogue, pricing logic, inventory management, shopping cart, checkout, order management, and customer accounts — but not the storefront. This means there is no built-in CMS or presentation layer in the platform. Instead, Norce exposes a complete API for all these functional areas, and a frontend of choice is connected to that API to render the shopping experience independently of the backend logic.

Architecture: pure headless and API-first

What most clearly defines Norce as a platform is its consistent API-first philosophy. All functions in the platform — products, prices, inventory, shopping cart, checkout, orders, and customer accounts — are exposed via a well-structured API designed to be stable, well-maintained, and expressive enough to cover advanced commerce scenarios without the frontend team needing to find workarounds.

Since Norce has no built-in presentation layer, each implementation project chooses its own frontend solution — for example, a standalone React- or Next.js-based storefront, or a CMS such as Umbraco or Storyblok combined with a commerce integration. The decoupled architecture makes it possible to replace or upgrade the storefront without touching the commerce backend, and vice versa — a major advantage for businesses that want to renew the customer experience without undertaking a full platform migration.

Core functionality in Norce

Norce Commerce brings a broad range of functionality together within a single commerce engine. Some of the most central functional areas are:

• Built-in PIM system — centralised management of product information for large and complex assortments, with support for variants, bundles, and relationships, as well as multilingual and multi-market distribution of product data.
• Advanced pricing engine — support for customer-specific price lists, volume-based pricing, promotional prices, and contract prices, with the ability to have entirely separate pricing logic per customer type and market.
• B2B functionality — account hierarchies for purchasing organisations, order approval workflows, quick order, customer-specific assortments, and payment terms are built into the platform’s core logic rather than added as extensions.
• Multi-market management — native support for multiple currencies, multiple languages, and market-specific settings for shipping, payment, and campaigns, making the platform well-suited for Nordic companies operating across several countries.
• Campaign and offer management — a powerful campaign framework for targeting offers at specific customer groups, markets, and channels with multi-level campaign logic.
• Order management and inventory synchronisation — real-time handling of orders and inventory with support for multiple warehouses and distribution points.
• Open APIs for integration — well-structured APIs towards ERP, WMS, POS, CRM, and external marketplaces, designed to handle data exchange in complex system landscapes.

Who is Norce suited for?

Norce is primarily aimed at mid-sized and large Nordic merchants running either advanced B2B commerce, pure B2C commerce, or a combination of both from the same platform instance. The platform is particularly strong when one or more of the following criteria apply to the business:

• The assortment is large and complex, with many product variants, bundles, and relationships that require a powerful product data model.
• The pricing structure is complex, with customer-specific contracts, volume pricing, or a large number of price lists that need to be kept in sync with an ERP system.
• The business operates across multiple Nordic markets with a need for native support for local currencies, languages, and payment methods.
• The integration landscape already is, or is planned to become, extensive — covering ERP, WMS, and potentially POS.
• There is a technical organisation — either in-house or via an implementation partner — capable of building and maintaining a frontend solution separately from the commerce backend.

Norce is less well-suited for companies that want to get started quickly with minimal technical investment, for single-market ventures with a simple product structure, or for businesses that lack the technical capacity to manage the frontend solution and integrations that a pure headless architecture requires.

True SaaS and continuous updates

One of Norce’s strengths from a maintenance perspective is that the platform is delivered as true SaaS with continuous releases of new functionality. Unlike platforms that require separate upgrade projects — with associated costs and risks — Norce’s SaaS model means the customer is always on the latest version without manual upgrades. The platform runs on Microsoft Azure and is built for high availability and automatic scaling.

This is an important factor in the total cost of ownership for a Norce solution: the customer avoids the costly upgrade projects that have historically consumed resources in older monolithic solutions, but instead needs to invest continuously in the maintenance and further development of the frontend and integrations, which are always customer-specific regardless of which commerce engine has been chosen.

Partner network and delivery model

Norce is distributed primarily through a network of certified solution partners. Norce as a product company is responsible for platform development, operations, and ongoing releases, while implementation, customisation, frontend development, and maintenance are handled by a partner organisation. This means that delivery quality in any individual project is largely determined by the chosen partner’s expertise within the Norce ecosystem, frontend technology, and relevant ERP integrations.

Norce has solution partners with varying specialisations, and it is worth verifying during procurement that the partner in question has relevant reference projects in your industry and experience with the specific frontend solution and integrations your project requires. A partner with strong Norce expertise but limited experience with your chosen frontend may deliver a worse outcome than a partner with a more complete offering across the full stack.

Integrations and system landscape

One of Norce’s greatest strengths is its well-developed integration layer. The platform’s APIs are designed to handle data exchange with the business systems most common in Nordic commerce, and Norce has established integrations with a broad range of ERP systems, WMS solutions, and POS systems. For companies where product data, prices, and inventory are centrally managed from an ERP system — and the e-commerce solution needs to reflect this in near real time — Norce’s API maturity is a concrete advantage that simplifies integration work compared to platforms where APIs are an afterthought rather than a cornerstone of the architecture.

A typical Norce installation at a mid-sized to large B2B company includes integrations with an ERP system for prices, inventory, and order data; optionally a standalone PIM system if the product enrichment requirements exceed what the built-in PIM can handle; a payment system; a shipping system; and a CMS or storefront for the customer experience. Coordinating and testing these integrations is often the part of a Norce project that takes the most time and places the greatest demands on project scheduling.

Cost overview and total ownership

Norce is delivered as SaaS with a volume-based licence fee that also includes hosting. In addition to the licence fee, there is the implementation cost at a solution partner, the cost of the chosen frontend solution (either built as a custom frontend or as an adaptation of a ready-made storefront), and ongoing costs for maintenance and further development.

The total cost of ownership for a Norce solution is often higher initially compared to platforms that include a ready-made frontend, but this can be offset by the fact that SaaS delivery eliminates upgrade costs, that the integration layer is well-developed which reduces development time for various integrations, and that the frontend and backend can be scaled and developed independently of each other as the business grows. It is an investment justified by long-term ownership and flexibility rather than the fastest possible time-to-market.