Core Concepts
Understand the Commerce Gateway architecture: tool schema, adapters, routing, and the OSS/hosted boundary.
2 min read · Getting Started
The tool schema
Commerce Gateway keeps a single source of truth for commerce operations. Define once, and adapters render it for each LLM transport.
Adapters
Each model vendor uses a different function/tool protocol. Commerce Gateway ships adapters for Claude, OpenAI, Grok, and Gemini. The adapter layer maps between a universal schema and vendor-specific request/response formats.
The gateway server
The self-hosted server handles routing, auth, and response normalization. It is OSS and MIT licensed.
The hosted Better Data runtime adds multi-tenancy, analytics, and merchant-facing portal workflows.
OSS / hosted boundary
Self-hostable Protocol definitions, schema contracts, and self-host runtime are open source.
Better Data Hosted Multi-tenant cloud runtime, billing, enterprise SSO, and managed control plane remain proprietary.
This follows the same pattern as open protocols in infrastructure:
- HTTP spec is open.
- Nginx/Apache implementations are open.
- Managed global edge platforms are commercial.
Relationship to Loop Engine
Commerce Gateway handles commerce data and actions. Loop Engine governs policy/state transitions around AI decisions. Together, Loop Engine can call Commerce Gateway as a controlled tool source.
Naming: Loop Engine publishes and resolves loop definitions through a loop catalog (hosted HTTP service and @loop-engine/registry-client). That is separate from the Commerce Gateway Registry, which implements the Commerce Registry Protocol for gateway discovery and domain verification.