Catalog Discovery & Commerce

Overview

Catalog Discovery & Commerce covers how prospective and enrolled learners browse, search, and enroll in courses and programs — including the course catalog, search and filtering, course landing pages, and the ecommerce layer that handles paid enrollments, course vouchers, and enrollment modes.

The course-discovery service is the canonical catalog backend; it indexes course and program metadata from Studio and powers the public-facing search experience. The ecommerce layer (historically ecommerce, now partially transitioning to newer implementations) handles payment flows and enrollment modes.

Current State (2026)

• Catalog service: course-discovery (Django) holds all course and program metadata, supports ElasticSearch/Algolia-powered search
• Learner-facing catalog: frontend-app-learner-dashboard and frontend-app-course-about provide the course browsing and landing page experience
• Enrollment modes: Audit (free), Verified (paid/certificate), Honor; managed in edx-platform
• Ecommerce: Legacy ecommerce service (Oscar-based) handles paid enrollment and vouchers; migration status varies by deployment
• Program discovery: Programs browsable via course-discovery; frontend-app-learner-dashboard surfaces program progress
• Enterprise: Enterprise customers (via edx-enterprise) have custom catalog and enrollment flows

Architecture

• course-discovery: Standalone Django service; syncs course/program metadata from Studio via APIs; powers search
• Search: ElasticSearch or Algolia used for full-text catalog search; indexed from course-discovery
• ecommerce service: Handles payment processing, voucher/coupon management, order fulfillment; Oscar e-commerce framework
• Enrollment flow: Course about page → enrollment → payment (if verified mode) → edx-platform enrollment record created
• edx-enterprise: Provides enterprise learner portals, enterprise catalog subsets, and enterprise enrollment flows

Relevant Repositories

Repository	Role in This Feature	Activity Level	Notes
openedx/course-discovery	Catalog service: course/program metadata and search	High	Core catalog backend
openedx/frontend-app-learner-dashboard	Learner home and program discovery MFE	High	Primary catalog browsing surface
openedx/ecommerce	Paid enrollment, vouchers, order management	Medium	Oscar-based; migration ongoing
openedx/edx-enterprise	Enterprise catalogs, portals, and enrollment	High	B2B enrollment flows
openedx/openedx-platform	Enrollment modes, enrollment records	High	Enrollment record source of truth

Recent Changes

• course-discovery continues as the canonical catalog service
• Enterprise catalog and portal features growing via edx-enterprise

History

Origin

• Year introduced: ~2014–2015 (course catalog and discovery emerged as edX scaled beyond a handful of courses)
• Initial implementation: Basic catalog pages in edx-platform; course-discovery extracted as course count grew
• Context: As course counts reached hundreds, search and structured browsing became necessary; ecommerce introduced as edX moved to paid certificate model

Key Milestones

Year	Milestone	Teams / People Involved
~2014–2015	course-discovery service extracted from monolith	Unknown
~2015–2016	Paid enrollment modes (Verified) and ecommerce service introduced	Unknown
~2017–2018	Enterprise catalog and portal features developed	Unknown
~2022–2023	Learner dashboard MFE replaces legacy catalog pages	Unknown

People Who Shaped This Area

• Engineering: Unknown — open question for interview
• Product: Unknown — open question for interview
• Design: Unknown — open question for interview

Open Questions

• [ ] When was course-discovery first extracted and what prompted it?
• [ ] What is the migration path away from the Oscar-based ecommerce service?
• [ ] How does enterprise catalog differ from the standard public catalog?
• [ ] What search technology is used in standard Open edX deployments (ElasticSearch vs. Algolia)?
• [ ] How are enrollment modes managed and what is the relationship between course-discovery and edx-platform for enrollment data?