Concepts
The vocabulary behind Orchard. This section is being expanded; the core terms below cover most of what you’ll meet in the admin and the API.
Tenant
A tenant is one store. It owns its products, orders, customers, content,
domain, Stripe account, and staff. Every tenant has a short lowercase slug
(e.g. clearwater-filtration) that identifies it. Tenants are fully isolated —
no tenant can see another’s data by any means.
The three account types
Orchard has three different kinds of account, each with its own sign-in:
| Account | Who | Sign-in |
|---|---|---|
| Operator | Platform staff who run the infrastructure | Email + password + required TOTP |
| Tenant admin | Store owners and their staff | Email + password + optional TOTP |
| Customer | Shoppers on a storefront | Passwordless magic link |
A customer account on one tenant is unrelated to the same email on another tenant.
Product and variant
A product is a catalog item (name, description, images, price, SEO). A
variant is a specific purchasable version of a product (size, color, SKU).
Products carry a metadata JSON field for category-specific attributes.
Order
An order is a completed purchase. It moves through payment (via Stripe), fulfillment (shipping label, packing slip, mark-shipped), and optionally returns or refunds — all from one order page in the admin.
API key
A secret credential that code uses to talk to the Orchard API. Keys encode a
mode (live or test) and an exposure (secret sk_ or publishable pk_),
and each carries a set of scopes limiting what it can do. See
Authentication.
Module / feature toggle
An optional capability a tenant can switch on (subscriptions, wholesale, content, abandoned-cart recovery, and category-specific modules). Toggled per-tenant; only that tenant sees it.
Go deeper
- Data model — the entities behind the API (product, variant, order, customer, subscription, …) and how they relate.
- Architecture — the three planes, tenant isolation, and where your app fits.
- Order lifecycle — the states an order moves through and the webhooks each transition fires.
- Subscription lifecycle — how recurring subscriptions are created, renewed, and canceled.