Develop > Presentation layer > Customize marketing
Marketing customization: Management Center
There are many aspects of the Marketing tool that you can customize to suit the business needs of the site. For example, you can customize Web and Dialog activities, the Activity Builder user interface, e-Marketing Spots, and customer segments. Customization is supported for both the Marketing tool user interface and the marketing services.
What know before you start
To customize the Marketing tool, you should be able to use WebSphere Commerce Developer and you should know the following programming languages:
- The Java programming language
- The OpenLaszlo programming language
- The XML programming language
What do before you start
You must have WebSphere Commerce v7 installed. In addition, the WebSphere Commerce server must be configured to support features of the Marketing tool that are relevant to the customization scenario.
To check, review all the steps in Enable Management Center marketing features.
You should also be aware of the properties in the marketing component configuration file and how they relate to certain customization scenarios. See Marketing component configuration file (wc-admin-component.xml).
Procedures
When you have the required skills and knowledge, and you are ready to customize the marketing component, the following instructions are available to you in the WebSphere Commerce Information Center:
- Customize triggers, targets, and actions
To provide business users with more options for Web and Dialog activities, you can create new triggers, targets, and actions to use in the Activity Builder for the Marketing tool. You can also change the behavior of existing triggers, targets, and actions.
- Customize the palette and template picker contents
You might want business users to see a customized view of the element palette in the Activity Builder, or the New Activity From Template window (called the marketing activity template picker). If so, you can add or remove items from these views, or rearrange their contents.
- Customize customer segments
Business users create customer segments using the Customer Segments properties view in the Management Center Marketing tool. The properties view contains all the attributes for defining a customer segment, arranged in a series of tabs.To customize customer segment support for the site, you can add new attributes or remove those that the site does not use.
- Customize e-Marketing Spot behavior
There are a number of customization scenarios supported for e-Marketing Spots on the store pages.
- Work with the marketing component configuration file
Some Management Center components, like the marketing component, have customizable configuration files. These files contain properties that control certain component features.
- Customize the Marketing tool to display catalog entry recommendations from an external system
Marketing managers can boost sales by displaying relevant catalog entry recommendations to customers in e-Marketing Spots on store pages.To determine which catalog entries to recommend, the site might choose to use a system external to WebSphere Commerce, such as a product recommendation engine or a data warehouse. If so, WebSphere Commerce provides an infrastructure you can customize to retrieve the recommendations from the external system and display them to customers on the storefront.