Consent management

Consent management refers to the process of obtaining consent from shoppers to collect and process their personal and behavior data.

WebSphere Commerce provides a combination of store pages, content, and business user functions that our organization can use to customize the store to request and obtain consent from shoppers. For instance, your store can request and obtain consent from shoppers for collecting and processing personal and behavior data from the shoppers, such as for marketing purposes.

If our organization must comply with the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we might need to obtain shopper consent before the site collects and processes any personal data about the shopper or any other user of the store. To add support to store pages for requesting and obtaining consent, enable the store function for shopping behavior tracking consent management and use the sample store pages to help our organization's developers create custom store pages for requesting and obtaining consent when shoppers visit our custom store.

By default, WebSphere Commerce tracks how shoppers interact with a store to collect behavioral data of shoppers, such as which products the shoppers search, view, add to cart, and more. This data can then be used to in precision marketing processes to personalize advertisements, recommendations, search results, and more for shoppers.

The consent management support in WebSphere Commerce provides the store with the capability to give shoppers the option to consent or refuse consent for being tracked when they are interacting with the store. By granting consent, data about the shopper and the shopper's interactions with the store are collected and used in marketing processes, such as to include the shopper in customer segments or to personalize recommendations and advertisements. The shopper's actions when they are browsing the store can also trigger marketing activities and promotions that target the shopper or target shopping behavior. By refusing consent, behavioral data for a shopper is not collected. Any previously collected behavioral data for the shopper is deleted. Store advertisements and recommendations are no longer personalized and instead display only default content and settings. When the consent management store function is enabled, WebSphere Commerce tracks the behavior of only the shoppers that provide consent to be tracked.

To add support to store pages for requesting and obtaining consent, enable the store function for shopping behavior tracking consent management and use the sample store pages to add support for requesting and obtaining consent to our custom store.

Marketing considerations

If a shopper decides to opt out of consenting to being tracked at any time, any information that was collected about the shopper before they opted out is deleted. The shopper is also excluded from being targeted by precision marketing processes (web activities, dialog activities, marketing experiments, search rules, search rule experiments).

If you need marketing activities to advertise to excluded customers, you need to update the activities so that the activity does not only target specific shoppers or specific shopping behavior. Activities that advertise default content still display and function normally for the excluded customers as they display the same content to all shoppers. Activities that include branches can still apply to shoppers that opted out as long as a branch does not target specific shopper data. If an activity has two branches, one that targets a customer segment and a second branch that shows default content, such as a general advertisement or store-wide promotion, shoppers that opted out can still view the default content. However, if the content recommends a promotion that targets a specific customer segment, the customer is excluded from qualifying for that promotion.

Promotion considerations

When a shopper does not provide consent to being tracked, the shopper is excluded from qualifying for any promotions that target a customer segment. If we want promotions to apply to excluded customers, the promotions must not target a particular segment directly. Also, the promotions should not be included for display in any marketing activity that directly targets a customer segment. We can include the promotions for display as default content for activities.




Procedure

1. Store pages for requesting and obtaining consent
   (Business user) Add the Privacy Policy content that is provided by the Data Protection Officer as e-Marketing Spot content.

2. Optional: Enable track shopping behavior store function
   (Business user) Enable shoppers to opt-in or opt-out of having their shopping behavior tracked.

3. Optional: Setting the track shopping behavior store function by running an SQL statement
   (Developer) Run SQL statements to enable shoppers to opt-in or opt-out of having their shopping behavior tracked.


Related concepts
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and WebSphere Commerce