WebSphere Commerce product overview
Product portfolio
WebSphere Commerce is available in two editions:
-
WebSphere Commerce Professional
- Business-to-consumer (B2C) sales for midsized companies. Capabilities include...
- precision marketing and merchandising
- configurable business processes
- A/B testing and multivariate testing
- search engine optimization
- personalization
- Limited use of the Extended Sites architecture
-
WebSphere Commerce Enterprise
- Business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) sales across all channels, including web, mobile, tablet, social, store, and call center. Allows brands to engage shoppers in a personalized and consistent way with...
- merchandising tools
- precision marketing
- site search
- customer experience management
- catalog and content management
- social commerce capabilities
WebSphere Commerce Enterprise enables B2B business models with buyer administrator and approver administrative and operational functions. With WebSphere Commerce Enterprise, businesses can use multiple Extended Sites. Only one Extended Site is allowed in WebSphere Commerce Professional.
WebSphere Commerce Managed Hosted is a single tenant, cloud offering of WebSphere Commerce Enterprise that features a private cloud configuration on IBM Cloud.
HCL Commerce Developer
WebSphere Commerce Developer Enterprise and HCL Commerce Developer Professional include tools to:
- Create, test, and deploy a WebSphere Commerce site under the test environment and workspaces provided by Rational Application Developer (RAD).
- Build and extend WebSphere Commerce functionality.
- Customize IBM Management Center for WebSphere Commerce.
The WebSphere Commerce development environment can interact with different test servers, including the Transaction server, Search server, Store server, and customization server. A developer can work with only one or more parts of the servers in a modern development organization, without having to depend on another team for build and deployment.
WebSphere Commerce Developer uses IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software as the foundation of the Java IDE. Rational Application Developer extends the Eclipse environment with visual development features.
IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce
customer service representatives (CSR) resolve common issues and capture orders. These capabilities are built into the WebSphere Commerce storefront of the Store server and enable a CSR to perform key tasks on behalf of a guest, registered customers, and for both B2B and B2C business models. Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce is offered for both Professional and Enterprise editions.
Because the customer service enhancements are built into the storefront, site owners benefit from:
- Uses a single and centrally maintained web application with a common user interface for both customers and CSRs.
- Intuitive customer service interface for the storefront.
- A common experience for customers and CSRs.
- Personalized content and promotions presented to CSRs.
- Site search.
With the new customer service enhancements, CSRs can:
- Work with customer accounts for both B2B and B2C business models.
- Find products through catalog navigation or through powerful faceted search that provides detailed product information.
- Work with customer orders so they can create new orders, view order history, and cancel orders.
Plug-in architecture
The Payments subsystem contains three main parts: Payment rules engine, Payment plug-in controller, and payment plug-ins.
Distributed servers
WebSphere Commerce is modularizing into loosely coupled components. In this release, the Store server and Search server are decoupled from the larger WebSphere Commerce server, now called the Transaction server. This separation is along well-defined service interfaces that allow for better horizontal scaling of your e-commerce system.
WebSphere Commerce Version 9 evolves the traditional architecture into a microservices architecture with separate servers as Docker images. In this version, the Transaction Server is separated into five major functional servers:
- Transaction server
- Runs the transactional business logic and APIs that serve other WebSphere Commerce servers. The Transaction server container where all transactional operations run. For instance, the server is used for completing the following operations:
- Processing transactions from the storefront.
- Processing REST calls from the store, and, if needed, routing calls between servers.
- Hosting all business user and administrative tools.
- Processing database and utility operations, such as to load data or rebuild the search index.
- Utility server
- A WebSphere Application Server-based server that runs application administration utilities. Unlike the other servers, the Utility server does not exist in the development environment.
- Search server
- A WebSphere Liberty-based server that provides search engine capabilities for front end applications.
- Customization server
- A WebSphere Liberty-based server that runs custom business logic in the form of xC extensions for supported components.
- Store Server
- A WebSphere Liberty-based server that runs the storefront for all stores. It includes all custom storefront assets, such as JSP pages and widgets.
The separation of servers allows developers to work in parallel with fewer dependencies.
Customization techniques
Externalized customization is a programming pattern that provides a separation between the core application components and customizations, allowing deployment innovation more quickly. Developers create customization code external to WebSphere Commerce. When the customized business logic is called, there is a reference to fetch the customized instruction instead of running the IBM provided code. This isolation of customization also improves security, and the stability of your application, the e-commerce store.
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If an xC extension point is not available for the component to customize, then we can use other customization methods. For example, we can extend the Transaction server on the persistence layer, extend business logic on the REST service layer, or the Store server for store application customization.
Utility Docker image and Administration tools
The Utility Docker image can be deployed in a staging or production environment to run a Utility Server. The Utility server holds tools to service WebSphere Commerce operations such as loading access control policies, loading store data, and cleaning the database of obsolete objects. The server provides a familiar experience for previous WebSphere Commerce users since the tools are still run from a command line interface. With certain customization, it can become a full-fledged administration center for a WebSphere Commerce application.
The Data Load utility provides an data load solution for catalog, inventory, and pricing information into the WebSphere Commerce database.
Globalization and localization support
Globalization is the design and execution of systems, software, services, and procedures so that one instance of software, running on a single server or end-user machine, can process multilingual data and present culturally correct data in a multicultural environment such as the Internet.
Order Management System integration
This integration provides comprehensive coverage of the order lifecycle across channels, from capture to fulfillment.
Sterling Order Management integration offers further integration of HCL Commerce and IBM Sterling Order Management This order management-enabled commerce integration strengthens both products, providing a complete end-to-end solution.
Business user tools for managing catalogs, promotions, campaigns, prices, page layouts, and stores
The IBM Management Center for WebSphere Commerce, or Management Center, is a suite of tools to support store management, merchandising, and marketing tasks for business users (Sellers, Marketing Managers, Product Managers, Catalog Managers, and others).
Watson Content Hub integration
Watson Content Hub (formerly DX Content Hub) gives business owners the power to create iconic, robust, and consistent brand experiences by using cloud-based, cognitive content management capabilities. Marketing and merchandising professionals can quickly select content to create relevant offers that are delivered across multiple channels, such as mobile, web-based or email, including those delivered by IBM Marketing Cloud Transact XML.
IBM Watson Commerce Insights
Commerce Insights is a software as a service (SaaS) offering that empowers merchandisers, product managers, and marketers with the flexibility and agility to innovate quickly by leveraging business data and analytics in a combined view.
Delivers performance metrics. Assemble interactive graphical displays to monitor the performance. Track how campaigns and product placement decisions are affecting conversion rates, sales, and other KPIs. Initiate improvements to stores in IBM Management Center for WebSphere Commerce directly from Watson Commerce Insights.
Independent software vendors can create plug-ins to be used by business users as widgets in Watson Commerce Insights.
Marketing
Marketing Managers use web activities and dialog activities to deliver brand or promotional messages to customers through various methods. Methods include: displaying the message on store pages, or sending a message with email or mobile text messaging.
Precision marketing capabilities allow marketers and merchandisers to create, manage, and deploy personalized marketing campaigns across direct and extended brand touch points according to customer behavior: Target customers with relevant marketing information based on their personal browsing and shopping habits. Other approaches include marketing experiments, targeted marketing, campaigns, and e-Marketing Spots.
Automatically generates personalized product recommendations for each visitor. Recommendations are based on current session and historical browsing, shopping, and purchasing data through a powerful set of proven and configurable algorithms. Marketers can create marketing campaigns to control when, where, and to which customers to display these relevant product recommendations.
WebSphere Commerce Search
WebSphere Commerce search provides enhanced search functionality in stores. The functionality provides enriched search engine capabilities such as automatic search term suggestions and spelling correction, while influencing store search results with search term associations, and search-based merchandising rules.
Promotions
Promotions offer customers incentives to purchase. Examples of price promotions include simple discounts; merchandise specials such as gifts with purchase and buy-one-get-one; and service promotions that include reduced shipping costs.
WebSphere Commerce Accelerator
With the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, we can maintain online stores, hubs, and catalogs by completing various store operations. Managing business operations includes maintaining the presentation of the store to creating and maintaining orders, to tracking store activities.
IBM Data Analytics
Framework and tools to simplify the process of setting up a site. The framework is implemented as a tag library designed to act as an intermediary layer between WebSphere Commerce and IBM Digital Analytics. Includes an auto tagging utility to place analytics tags in store pages. The tools also include a utility to generate a file that contains a catalog hierarchy for IBM Digital Analytics. This solution can significantly reduce the time required to deploy web analytics
Workspaces
A workspace is an access-controlled work area where we can make and preview changes to managed assets, without affecting what is currently running on the site. Working in the context of a workspace is similar to having our own private copy of the managed assets. We can make and preview changes without affecting managed assets outside the workspace. We can commit the changes made in a workspace to the production database, and see the effects of changes on the site.
Contracts and entitlement
Entitle customers to various aspects of a store such as what products they can purchase, the price they pay, and what payment methods a store accepts.
Customer entitlement is controlled by business accounts, contracts, and business policies.
The Catalog Filter and Pricing tool in Management Center can be used to filter by product, category, or product attribute. Filters can be assigned to contracts to support B2B, or to stores to support Extended Sites.
Related reference
Recommended fixes and settings for WebSphere Commerce Version 9
Fixes included in WebSphere Commerce runtime Update Packages
Fixes included in WebSphere Commerce Developer Update Packages
eAssemblies
WebSphere Commerce Developer fix packs and eAssemblies