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.
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.
You can enable and manage workspace assets and determine policies such as locking rules and commit and publishing options.
Workspaces can be used in a variety of scenarios.
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.
Review the following sections for information about installing the WebSphere Commerce product, associated maintenance, and WebSphere Commerce enhancements.
Before you migrate to WebSphere Commerce Version 8.0, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
The topics in this section describe how to publish stores to either a test or production environment, and how to deploy customized code.
Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using WebSphere Commerce in combination with other products.
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.
Every WebSphere Commerce installation requires at least one instance to function, and each WebSphere Commerce instance can contain one or more stores.
You can administer catalog features such as the attribute dictionary and categories.
To support marketing features in Management Center, there are a number of administration tasks that you might need to perform.
You can administer promotion features such as creating or deleting promotion folders and configuring the promotions engine.
A workspace is an access-controlled work area where you can make and preview changes to managed assets, without affecting what is currently running on your site. Working in the context of a workspace is similar to having your own private copy of the managed assets. You can make and preview changes without affecting managed assets outside the workspace. You can commit the changes that you make in a workspace to the production database, and see the effects of your changes on your site.
You enable workspaces by creating a new WebSphere Commerce authoring server instance.
The following scenario is an example of a workspace, task group, and task lifecycle for emergency fixes. In this scenario, wrong information about several products is appearing in a store on the production server. The product information must be corrected as quickly as possible on the production server. The changes require the approval of one person, the Product Manager.
The following scenario is an example of a workspace, task group, and task lifecycle for regular maintenance for your store. In this scenario, some product descriptions are being changed, and some new merchandising information is being added for products in the store.
The following scenario is an example of a workspace, task group, and task lifecycle for seasonal changes to a store. In this scenario, the store is preparing the introduction of new products for summer, while removing winter products from the store.
Managed assets are WebSphere Commerce components or resources that are enabled for workspaces and allow content to be written to separate workspace database schemas. Workspace Content Contributors can modify managed assets in the context of a workspace.
Locking policies in workspaces allow you to control how changes are made and who is able to make the changes. A locking policy determines if managed assets are locked to a workspace, task group, or task, or if they are not locked at all. The locking policy applies to the entire WebSphere Commerce site and is not configurable by store.
Once all workspace tasks are completed and approved, you can publish files and data from the authoring server to the production server to view the effects on your site.
When you use workspaces, you should have strong business processes in place to prevent the situations outlined in Workspaces limitations and restrictions.
When you are using workspaces, be aware of known limitations.
Workspaces use database views instead of tables to retrieve data. Retrieval of underlying data might be more time-consuming because of the complexity of SQL statements that are used in workspace view definitions.
Content management is achieved through the use of workspaces. Each workspace is comprised of three database schemas.
Workspaces can be used in a variety of states. State-flow diagrams can help you understand the allowed actions during various states in workspaces, task groups, and tasks.
A Site Administrator must perform a series of tasks to enable and configure price rules and price lists in Management Center.
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.
To use negotiated pricing, you must have a nominal cost price list that is defined for your store.
You can administer store preview functions such as enabling and disabling commands and views, and adding a customized business context.
As a Site Administrator, you can manage various features of the order management subsystem.
As a Site Administrator, you can enable and disable the RFQ trading mechanism, and enable RFQ notification messaging.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To configure a payment plug-in define payment and refund methods; payment and refund rules; and the payment protocols that you intend to use.
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.
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 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.
WebSphere Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your WebSphere Commerce instance and stores.
The topics in the Developing section describe tasks performed by an application developer.
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.
These topics describe the security features of WebSphere Commerce and how to configure these features.