Demand Chain sample store (Commerce Plaza) overview
The Commerce Plaza store is a sample store and part of the demand chain B2B indirect business model. Commerce Plaza allows resellers to purchase products directly from their distributors by transferring their shopping carts to the distributor site. The demand chain business model sample includes the Commerce Plaza site, the catalog asset store, the reseller asset store, and the distributor proxy stores.
While purchasing, this site also allows resellers to request prices and availability quotations from distributors on any products of interest. This store includes the following features:
- Navigate the manufacturer or distributor catalog.
- Get real-time price and availability information from remote distributors.
- Select a subset of distributors for quotation and shopping cart transfer.
- Create a favorites list and add items to that list.
- Place an order (place items in shopping cart, request price and availability, assign orders to distributors, transfer carts to distributor sites, and checking out on distributor sites).
- Save a cart (place items in shopping cart, request price, and availability and save it).
- Directly link to the distributor sites to complete the order process.
- Place an order from a saved cart (open a saved cart, request price and availability, assign orders to distributors, transfer carts to distributor site, and check out on distributor site)
- Review order status of fully transferred order
Commerce Plaza also provides self-provisioning tools for resellers:
- Register a new reseller organization
- Edit account information
- Create a store with Store Creation Wizard
- Store management
- Organization administration
Reseller stores can be created by resellers with the Store Creation Wizard. The resulting reseller stores can be based on consumer direct or advanced B2B direct stores. Reseller stores based on consumer direct get all the consumer direct features while reseller stores based on advanced B2B direct get all the advanced B2B direct features.
Commerce Plaza provides all the pages and features necessary for a functioning demand chain online store. Commerce Plaza is packaged with WebSphere Commerce as a store archive (as the composite: DemandChain.sar). Publishing a store archive to a WebSphere Commerce Server allows you to create a running store.
In WebSphere Commerce, Enterprise, store archive files are also used to package and deliver organization structures, predefined user roles, and access control policies necessary to create the environment for your store or site, as well as collections of store assets that create a catalog or a storefront. In order to create a running store, you must publish one of the composite store archives. You can also publish a sequence of component store archives to publish a running store. Stores are published from the Administration Console; only Site Administrators can publish a store archive by selecting Site, and from the Store Archives menu, selecting Publish. The Store Archives page then displays and lists the store archives that are available for publishing. By default, the page that shows composite store archives displays.
Since store creation in WebSphere Commerce is based on selecting a store archive and modifying it, Commerce Plaza is designed to act as the basis for your store. It is based on a typical shopping flow. The store pages can be customized. All Commerce Plaza store pages are JavaServer Pages pages. These pages include HTML, Java, and JavaScript. The JSP files can be cached.