Considerations for an existing gift registry solution

Migrating your complete gift registry system

For a full migration, in addition to migrating your current gift registry functionality to work with the IBM Gift Center, also consider data migration. For example, existing gift registry customer data and the gift lists within certain time frame will need to be migrated.

When using the IBM Gift Center for registry creation, a customer must register for an account with the store, before creating the gift registry. User accounts can be set up in one of two ways:

• The customer can either explicitly set up an account (that is, registering with the store and logging onto it before creating a gift registry).
• The system can implicitly set up an account for the customer , the first time the customer creates a gift registry (that is, if the system detects that the user has not logged onto the store using their data provided during store registration).

During migration, the WebSphere Commerce user registration data (stored in the USERREG> table) will also need to be created during migration.

Phasing the migration

Consider phasing your gift registry migration. For example, you may already have a master gift registry system existing in a central office, offering gift registry services in physical stores and the call centers. In this case, consider continuing to use your existing gift registry system for some channels (such as maintaining gift registry services in your physical stores and call centers), while using the IBM Gift Center another channel (for example, for creating gift registries online, through the store's Web site). In this scenario, you may use the IBM Gift Center for online registries and share the registry data between the master registry system and the online registry system.

Each registry is identified by a common registry number across channels and the registry number is usually generated by the master registry system. To support this scenario, some predefined messages are provided in the gift registry system to allow sharing of registry data between the master and the online registry system. Any updates on the online registry system would be be sent to the master registry in real time.