Order and Quote Capture Integration in Elite starter store
A site administrator can enable the Order and Quote Capture Integration features in the Elite starter store by publishing the sample EliteExternalIntegrationAddOn.sar file provided with this version of WebSphere Commerce.
Enabling the Order and Quote Capture Integration in the Elite starter store enables an enterprise to leverage the combined strength of the intuitive user interface of the Elite starter store and the order and quote management capabilities of existing, external back-end systems. For a customer, this integration does not lead to major deviations from the normal shopping flow of the base Elite store. For a list of changes in the store pages and task flows that the Order and Quote Capture Integration introduces in the base Elite starter store, see Changes in Store pages.
The implementation of the integration, however, introduces several internal changes when retrieving and serving inventory availability, offer price, order, and quote related information to the customer. Initially, master data related to customers and products is batch loaded into WebSphere Commerce database. Thereafter, when customers browse the catalog, inventory availability and offer price information for a product is fetched from the external system and cached in WebSphere Commerce for subsequent use. The order calculation is performed in the external system. Customers can view all their orders and quotes in the external system from the Elite starter store, regardless of the channel they used to submit these orders and quotes to the external system.
To summarize, the Order and Quote Capture Integration in the Elite starter store enables the following features in the base Elite starter store:
- External inventory integration that enables checking availability of, reserving, and canceling inventory in the external system
- Real-time retrieval of offer price and inventory availability for a product from the external system
- Caching of inventory availability and offer price for products
- Execution of order calculations in the external system
- Quote creation from the current order
- Order fulfillment and quote processing in the external system
- Display of listing and details of orders and quotes from the external system. This listing includes all the orders and quotes created by the customer in the external system, irrespective of the channel used to submit order or quote to the external system.