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User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to WebSphere Commerce Version 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in a newer section.WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified e-commerce platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B), and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models). WebSphere Commerce is designed to be a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to leverage open standards. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels.
Performance
Methodology
Like site security, a proper approach to site performance requires planning, execution, testing, monitoring, and maintenance. The following collections of topics describe each phase of this process, and contain the recommended considerations, and best practices for getting the most out of your WebSphere Commerce deployment.
Design phase
During the design phase of your project, it is important to consider performance priorities. It is important to design a solution that has a good balance of features and performance consideration, build a performance test environment, and begin to deploy tools that are required to support your performance strategy. It is also important to identify architecture limitations that might change a non-functional requirement.
Precision marketing
Marketing Managers can use the extensive precision marketing features in the marketing tool to deliver targeted marketing messages to customers.

User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to WebSphere Commerce Version 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in a newer section.WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified e-commerce platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B), and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models). WebSphere Commerce is designed to be a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to leverage open standards. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels.
- Planning
  Creating a custom implementation of a WebSphere Commerce store requires a significant amount of planning. From gathering client needs, to deploying the live solution, much work is needed to successfully deploy a custom client store. Use the resources in here to help you plan every phase of store creation.
- Installing
  Review the following sections for information about installing the WebSphere Commerce product, associated maintenance, and WebSphere Commerce enhancements.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to WebSphere Commerce Version 8.0, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
- Deploying
  The topics in this section describe how to publish stores to either a test or production environment, and how to deploy customized code.
- Operating
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using WebSphere Commerce in combination with other products.
- Administering
- Tutorials
  WebSphere Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your WebSphere Commerce instance and stores.
- Samples
- Developing
  The topics in the Developing section describe tasks performed by an application developer.
- Compliance
  The following section describes how you can leverage WebSphere Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of WebSphere Commerce and how to configure these features.
- Performance
  - Performance enhancements
    Learn about the new features and functions that are offered by WebSphere Commerce Version 8 to improve your site performance.
  - Methodology
    Like site security, a proper approach to site performance requires planning, execution, testing, monitoring, and maintenance. The following collections of topics describe each phase of this process, and contain the recommended considerations, and best practices for getting the most out of your WebSphere Commerce deployment.
    - Design phase
      During the design phase of your project, it is important to consider performance priorities. It is important to design a solution that has a good balance of features and performance consideration, build a performance test environment, and begin to deploy tools that are required to support your performance strategy. It is also important to identify architecture limitations that might change a non-functional requirement.
      - Caching strategy
        When determining a caching strategy for WebSphere Commerce, there are several key issues to resolve.
      - Precision marketing
        Marketing Managers can use the extensive precision marketing features in the marketing tool to deliver targeted marketing messages to customers.
      - Facet Navigation widget
        This widget automatically retrieves and displays a list of facets, such as the Brand, Price, and Color facets. For each facet value, the number of matching catalog entries is displayed in parentheses. Typically, this widget is placed in the left sidebar of the page.
      - Operating system considerations
        Make sure that your system meets the minimum operating system requirements. In a production environment with numerous concurrent users, multiple processors help increase performance. In addition to using faster processors to speed up most operations, there are other areas to consider when you want to improve operating system performance.
      - Marketing cache design considerations
        When you are designing the marketing caching for your site and stores, there are many options, enhancements, and best practices to consider for improving marketing performance.
      - Promotion evaluation considerations
        When you are designing promotions for your site, consider how your promotions are being evaluated. How you design your promotions and configure your promotion evaluation process can affect your site performance during promotion evaluation. When you are creating promotions, consider the promotion type, the promotion conditions, the size of orders that are evaluated, and the agenda builder that is used for promotion evaluation.
    - Development phase
      During the development phase, it is important to measure the response time of business critical steps in the development environment.
    - Testing phase
      During the testing phase, it is important to start with simple, common test cases and gradually go to more complex scenarios and environment configurations. Other priorities include measuring the performance of the application as load scales up to projected peak and identifying and resolving the root causes of resource constraints and application bottlenecks.
    - Maintenance phase
      Post-launch, during the maintenance phase, instrument and monitor performance indicators in the production environment to enable the team to proactively identify and address potential issues before users are affected. Priorities also include fostering communication between marketing, performance, and operation teams to be better prepared for promotional events. And using the data that is captured from production to optimize planning for future marketing and promotional activities.
    - Operating system considerations
      Make sure that your system meets the minimum operating system requirements. In a production environment with numerous concurrent users, multiple processors help increase performance. In addition to using faster processors to speed up most operations, there are other areas to consider when you want to improve operating system performance.
    - Web server considerations
      Even though the web server is a mature technology, it can still be tuned to get better performance, especially on large websites. This section covers the common performance considerations for all the web servers, and is operating system independent.
    - WebSphere Application Server considerations
      WebSphere Commerce Server is ultimately another Java 2 application that runs on top of WebSphere Application Server. As a result, WebSphere Application Server acts as the operating system for WebSphere Commerce. Having the WebSphere Application Server properly optimized improves the performance of WebSphere Commerce.
    - Tuning
      A WebSphere Commerce deployment is made up of many individual parts that work together to provide the e-commerce experience. By default, each part is configured to provide a base level of performance. However, individual changes can be made to potentially gain extra performance. The following collection of topics provides details on how to make these performance changes to the individual components of your site.
    - Measurement
      As each deployment of WebSphere Commerce is different, a measured approach to modifying your defaults must be taken to successfully tune your site. The following collection of topics provides details on how to measure and troubleshoot site performance.
- Troubleshooting

Marketing overview: precision marketing features

Marketing Managers can use the extensive precision marketing features in the marketing tool to deliver targeted marketing messages to customers.

Business benefits

Precision marketing features provide the following key business benefits:

Helps drive traffic to store website with features such as remote widgets and targeted email campaigns.
Facilitates improved conversion rates by providing shoppers with a customized shopping experience through capabilities such as A/B testing, search facet and search relevancy tuning, dialog activities, and IBM Product Recommendations.
Helps increase average order value with features that execute tactics such as cross-sells, up-sells, offers and promotions tied to orders, and product recommendations based on previous purchases.
Assists with strengthening customer satisfaction by enabling loyalty building tactics using features that provide personalized messages and offers, social media engagement, and incentives for repeat business.

Finding precision marketing documentation

Here are the main entry points to learn more about precision marketing:

Precision marketing documentation
Concept	Details and audience	For more information
About the Marketing tool	Learn about the Marketing tool and how to use the precision marketing features of web and dialog activities to deliver targeted marketing messages to customers. This information is intended for the marketing and product managers responsible for creating and managing targeted campaigns and promotions.	Marketing tool
Marketing administration tasks	Learn about the configuration scenarios and administration tasks that are required to support marketing features in Management Center. This information is intended for IT administrators who are responsible for tasks such as configuring marketing, administering email activities, and testing and managing web and dialog activities.	Administering marketing
Improving marketing performance	Learn about how to improve marketing performance by using runtime caching to eliminate processing to and from the database.	Improving marketing performance by using caching Marketing performance tuning