The present page serves as an overview for the topic. All available documents for the topic can be found here.
Generally, web services are web-based applications that dynamically interact with other web applications using open standards without any user interaction.
Intershop 7 and Intershop Commerce Management provide access to resources and functionality using web services in addition to the browser-based Commerce Management application and storefront interfaces.
Using web services, developers can make well-defined business processes or data accessible to any internal or external web service client. Organizations can communicate data without knowledge of each other's IT-systems behind the firewall. For example, one company can call another service to calculate the shipping costs for a package of a certain weight or size.
This enhances the modularity of the system, and enables the re-use of functionality.