Understanding the Bright E-Commerce Architecture

A Bright-based e-commerce shop is assembled from the following components:

• WordPress
• WooCommerce
• A Payment Gateway [PayPal, Stripe, authorize.net, etc.]
• Bright
• SCORM Cloud

This document covers these components, and how they interact.

WordPress is the world's most popular and powerful method for creating a website. From https://wordpress.org/:

WordPress is open source software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app.

When customers shop and purchase from your store, they receive an account on your WordPress site.

WordPress includes a powerful plugin system that can be used to extend the functionality of WordPress. Currently there are over 50,000+ plugins availabe for WordPress. The extent of the available plugins is certainly a reason why WordPress is the #1 web publishing platform.

One of the most popular plugins, with over 79M+ downloads, is WooCommerce.

Aura Software produces the Bright Platform for WordPress, which allows SCORM Cloud-based courseware to be flexibly delivered from your website.

WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce platfrom for WordPress. From: https://woocommerce.com/:

WooCommerce powers over 28% of all online stores.  WooCommerce is now the most popular eCommerce platform on the web

WooCommerce provides WordPress site owners with the functionality

• to build online stores
• setup product, prices, coupons, etc.
• set tax rates and shipping policy

WooCommerce integrates with a variety of payment gateways, such as PayPal or Stripe. The payment gateway is required to

• process order payments [including credit card transactions].
• for succesfully completed orders, arrange a mechanism for transfer of the funds to the account owner's bank account(s).
• process refunds

At the time of this article's writing, WooCommerce supports 100+ different payment gateways https://woocommerce.com/product-category/woocommerce-extensions/payment-gateways/.

WooCommerce also supports WooCommerce extensions.

To understand what a WooCommerce extension is, please see: WooCommerce for Store Owners in the WooCommerce documentation.

From https://woocommerce.com/:

With hundreds of free and paid WooCommerce extensions, spanning all your logistical & technical requirements, you can rest assured there's an extension for your specific needs. 

https://woocommerce.com/product-category/woocommerce-extensions/

WooCommerce extensions come in several categories such as:

• store management
• payment
• checkout
• marketing
• shipping
• enhancements

With the Bright Platform for WordPress, you can create a product in your WooCommerce store that is a SCORM Cloud course.

Bright provides store owners with

• default pages to deliver your courseware once a customer has bought them
• mechanism for buyers to buy courses for people other than themselves.
• mechanism for buyers to buy "blocks of course seats", and report on those blocks.

Aura Software produces a complete deliverable for e-commerce storefronts assembled from the core building blocks of:

• WordPress
• WooCommerce
• A Payment Gateway [like Stripe or PayPal]
• Bright
• ScormCloud

These building blocks interact seamlessly in such a way that selling and delivering SCORM Cloud-based courseware is effectively identical to selling any other types of physical or virtual products.

All the functions required to operate the store are encapsulated into the WordPress administrative console and it is not strictly necessary to understand what functions are performed by which component.

Got more questions? Ask us anything: https://bright.aura-software.com/contact-us/.