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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.
Administering
Managing features
You can administer the features for your store and site, such as attribute, catalog, promotion, marketing, order management features, and more. The administration tasks that you can complete differ depending on the type of feature and the tool that you use to administer your store and site.
Order management
As a Site Administrator, you can manage various features of the order management subsystem.
Exporting order data
You can use the WebSphere Commerce REST API to export order data of a specific store. The output is exported in CSV format.
Configuring promotion reservation
Enable promotion reservation to reserve a promotion for an order for a set time. This feature can be used to count an order against a redemption limit, without the need for the order to be completed.

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
  - Overview of administering a WebSphere Commerce site
    In WebSphere Commerce the person who performs administrative tasks is called a Site Administrator. The Site Administrator installs, configures, and maintains WebSphere Commerce and the associated software and hardware. The administrator responds to system warnings, alerts, and errors, and diagnoses and resolves system problems. Typically, this person controls access and authorization (creating and assigning members to the appropriate role), manages the Web site, monitors performance, and manages load balancing tasks. The Site Administrator might be responsible for establishing and maintaining several server configurations for different stages of development such as testing, staging, and production. The Site Administrator also handles critical system backups and resolves performance problems.
  - WebSphere Commerce instance
    Every WebSphere Commerce installation requires at least one instance to function, and each WebSphere Commerce instance can contain one or more stores.
  - Managing features
    You can administer the features for your store and site, such as attribute, catalog, promotion, marketing, order management features, and more. The administration tasks that you can complete differ depending on the type of feature and the tool that you use to administer your store and site.
    - Catalogs
      You can administer catalog features such as the attribute dictionary and categories.
    - Marketing
      To support marketing features in Management Center, there are a number of administration tasks that you might need to perform.
    - Promotions
      You can administer promotion features such as creating or deleting promotion folders and configuring the promotions engine.
    - Workspaces
      You can enable and manage workspace assets and determine policies such as locking rules and commit and publishing options.
    - Price rules and price lists
      A Site Administrator must perform a series of tasks to enable and configure price rules and price lists in Management Center.
    - Catalog filters
      As Site Administrator, you might be required to assist business users with certain catalog filter tasks that relate to the Catalog Filter and Pricing tool in Management Center.
    - Negotiated pricing
      To use negotiated pricing, you must have a nominal cost price list that is defined for your store.
    - Store preview functions
      You can administer store preview functions such as enabling and disabling commands and views, and adding a customized business context.
    - Order management
      As a Site Administrator, you can manage various features of the order management subsystem.
      - Changing properties in the order component configuration file (wc-admin-component.xml)
        To change any properties in the order component configuration file (wc-admin-component.xml), you must create a customized version of the file in a new folder. The customized version of the file must contain only the changed properties.
      - Configuring deleting order items and requisition lists
        If the OrderTrashCan feature is disabled, when a user deletes an order item or requisition list item the table rows that represent those items are removed from the database. If enabled, these rows are updated to belong to the trashcan. You can clear the trashcan by running the OrderTrashCanClear scheduled job that deletes the rows, or by using the Database Cleanup utility. This feature is disabled by default.
      - Configuring Order boundaries to prevent unbound exceptions
        The Order Management subsystem defines business object values for shopping carts, requisition lists, return merchandise authorizations (RMAs), and order history. The default values are defined in the xml/config/com.ibm.commerce.order/wc-admin-component.xml file. You can change these values to meet your business needs.
      - Exporting order data
        You can use the WebSphere Commerce REST API to export order data of a specific store. The output is exported in CSV format.
        Configuring the minimum elapsed time between order exports
        By default, for each store, only 1 order export is allowed per user (with the appropriate access control role) per 60 minutes.
        Configuring promotion reservation
        Enable promotion reservation to reserve a promotion for an order for a set time. This feature can be used to count an order against a redemption limit, without the need for the order to be completed.
      - Order locks
        An order lock prevents multiple users from editing an order at the same time.
      - Order blocks
        A block is an indicator that specifies whether the items in an order cannot be released to fulfillment. Only order items that are not released to fulfillment are affected by order blocks.
    - Request For Quote (RFQ) trading
      As a Site Administrator, you can enable and disable the RFQ trading mechanism, and enable RFQ notification messaging.
    - User traffic
      Edit the WebSphere Commerce configuration file to set the level of caching performed on user traffic data. The default number of URLs in the cache is 20. If this number is too low for your site, for example, if your site is very busy and you are concerned about performance impacts, you can increase the cache size. User traffic data is used in some operational reports.
    - Catalog and marketing attachments
      As a Site Administrator, you can manage the catalog and marketing attachments, such as for adding attachment usages, changing managed file updater parameters, or deleting attachments.
    - Inventory sharing in extended sites stores (non-ATP)
      The extended sites business model provides scalability and manageability improvements for WebSphere Commerce sites where there are multiple stores which can share assets including non-ATP inventory. The sharing of non-ATP inventory reduces the complexity of managing inventory assets for all the stores in the site. All stores in extended sites can share inventory from a single asset store with distributed fulfillment centers.
    - Tax sharing in extended sites stores
      In extended sites store model, tax assets can be shared between the extended site asset store and the extended site store. You can manage the tax assets in an extended site store in WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.
  - Logging services
    WebSphere Commerce provides facilities for logging. For existing customers, ECTrace and ECMessage are still supported. For new implementations, use the WebSphere Application Server recommendation for logging and tracing.
  - Business auditing
    Business auditing is the capturing of the business logic and objects during a WebSphere Commerce operation. You may want to audit your business for various reasons: generic, such as to review various tasks performed weekly; or specific, such as to track the steps involved in a particular Customer Service Representative's order. A report on business auditing is available in the Administration Console.
  - Business events
    Each time that a command triggers a business event, a record is added to the BUSEVENT database table to persist data from the event. Event listeners and external systems (such as the Marketing component, a back end order management system, or an external analytics system) can use this data to perform further processing.
  - Staging server
    The WebSphere Commerce staging server is a part of the production environment where business and technical users can update and manage store data and preview changes. The changes can then be propagated to the production server.
  - WebSphere Commerce database
    As a site administrator, maintain the WebSphere Commerce database and ensure that any WebSphere Commerce utilities and processes that load and retrieve data from the database is configured to connect to the database properly.
  - Dynamic caching
    In general, caching improves response time and reduces system load. Caching techniques are used to improve the performance of World Wide Web Internet applications. Most techniques cache static content (content that rarely changes) such as graphic and text files. However, many websites serve dynamic content, containing personalized information or data that changes more frequently. Caching dynamic content requires more sophisticated caching techniques, such as those provided by the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache, a built-in service for caching and serving dynamic content.
  - Extracting, transforming, and loading data
    WebSphere Commerce provides multiple utilities for preparing and loading data into a WebSphere Commerce database. The loading utilities are flexible and you can continue to use these utilities when you customize the WebSphere Commerce schema.
  - Payment plug-ins
    To configure a payment plug-in define payment and refund methods; payment and refund rules; and the payment protocols that you intend to use.
  - WebSphere Commerce Search
    For a fully functioning WebSphere Commerce Search implementation, you must understand and complete the search administration tasks, which include search index management and ongoing maintenance.
  - Deploying a WebSphere Commerce dual cell environment
    Consider deploying a dual cell environment to achieve continuous availability and ensure that shoppers are minimally affected by planned or unplanned outages.
  - IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce
    IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce is a separately purchased product that provides a light-weight customer service solution that is embedded in the Aurora B2C and Aurora B2B storefronts. Even though this solution is a separately purchased product, it is not a separate application. Stores that are enabled with IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce allow a customer service representative (CSR) to act on behalf of guest customers and registered customers. A CSR can manage customer accounts, cancel and reorder orders, and shop as customer. A CSR can also act on behalf of Buyer Administrators to help complete Aurora B2B tasks from the storefront, without having to access the Organization Administration Console.
- 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
- Troubleshooting

WebSphere Commerce Version 8.0.4.24 or later

Configuring promotion reservation

Enable promotion reservation to reserve a promotion for an order for a set time. This feature can be used to count an order against a redemption limit, without the need for the order to be completed.

Before you begin

This feature requires two prerequisites before it can be enabled on your site:

This feature was implemented in Fix Pack 24 of Mod Pack 4. Install this, or a later version of WebSphere Commerce before you enable this feature.
This feature requires the version of CheckoutPayments.js from Fix Pack 24 of Mod Pack 4, or later be included on your storefront. Ensure that the version of this file on your storefront is updated to the version provided in the Aurora starter store that is packaged with WebSphere Commerce 8.0.4.24, or later.

About this task

In the standard order flow, a redemption limit is only iterated upon once an order is completed. Due to a lack of tolerance in the design of the order flow, this can potentially allow for multiple orders receiving a limited promotion if a promotion has a very low redemption limit, or if the redemption limit is close to being hit. For more granular control of redemption limits through the order flow, you can configure and use promotion reservations.

This process is designed through the use of two new database tables, PX_RESRV and PX_RESRVUSAGE.

Procedure

Enable promotion reservation for the standard order flow in the order component configuration file.

Create or open the com.ibm.commerce.order-ext\wc-admin-component.xml order component configuration file for editing.
For more information on creating or modifying this file, see Changing properties in the order component configuration file (wc-admin-component.xml).
Set the ReservePromotionFromOrder property to true.
This property will invoke ReservePromotionCmdImpl through PrepareOrderCmdImpl by default.

Results

When enabled, ReservePromotionCmdImpl will check against the PromotionArgumentPersistenceManager to see if there is a redemption limit for the associated promotion.

If there is a limit for the promotion, an attempt is made to reserve the promotion for the associated order ID. If the associated promotion reservation is already maxed out against the promotion redemption limit, RedemptionLimitEnforcementPolicy will fail, and the promotion will not be applied to the associated order.