Promotion evaluation considerations
When you are designing promotions for your site, consider how your promotions are being evaluated. How you design your promotions and configure your promotion evaluation process can affect your site performance during promotion evaluation. When you are creating promotions, consider the promotion type, the promotion conditions, the size of orders that are evaluated, and the agenda builder that is used for promotion evaluation.
Promotion types and conditions
When creating promotions in Management Center, certain promotion types and conditions can affect your store performance. For more information about the effect of certain promotion types on your store performance, see promotion types and conditions considerations.
Promotion engine configuration
For more information about adjusting the settings of the promotion engine and more promotion engine configuration options, see configuring the promotion engine.
Promotion agenda builders
When the promotion engine is invoked, an agenda builder is first used to determine the active promotions for an order. The specific promotion agenda builder your site uses can affect the performance of the promotion evaluation process. For more information about ensuring your site uses the appropriate agenda builder, see promotion agenda builder considerations.Number of products in an order
A shopping cart with many products does not perform the same as a cart with few products. This behavior is due to the number of calculations that need to perform to evaluate the promotions for a cart with many products. This calculation-based performance issue is compounded when multiple promotions are applied to the same item in a cart. To improve performance, focus on the typical size and makeup of orders for promotion performance evaluation during performance tuning. Test large orders concurrently with typical orders to ensure that the evaluation of these orders do not cause a reduction in performance for average shoppers.
You can adjust the cart size threshold for shoppers to help avoid performance issues as a result of large cart order sizes. For more information about adjusting the cart size threshold, see configuring order boundaries to prevent unbound exceptions.
Catalog structure
CalculationCodeListDataBean must resolve
the item-product relation. The CalculationCodeListDataBean must
discover the category structure for each item in a shopping cart to
verify whether the order item qualifies for a category-level promotion.
The process uses the category structure for each item to build a query
for promotion information against the CATENCALCD and CATGPCALCD tables. The number of catalogs
for your store and the depth of your category structures can affect
the performance of this process. This process is also triggered in ShopcartDrivenAgendaBuilder logic
to filter out unrelated promotions according to the shopping cart.
The logic for this process uses the WCS DataCache to
access catalog information. You can enable the following distributed
maps to enable better performance of the promotion logic for retrieving
catalog information:WCCatalogGroupDistributedMapCache DistributedMapWCCatalogEntryDistributedMapCache DistributedMap
Number of customer segments and conditions
- Explicit customer segments which have members explicitly added into the segment.
- Implicit customer segments where characteristics of the customer are used to determine membership in the segment. For example, demographics or purchase history.
Using explicit segments performs better than implicit
customer segment whose rules must be repeatedly evaluated at runtime.
Enabling the WCUserDistributedMapCache DistributedMap also
helps the performance of member-related logic.
If
your WebSphere Commerce Version 7 instance is at the Fix Pack 6, the
customer segment evaluation logic in a promotion for your store is
improved. Before this fix pack, all customer segments that a shopper
belonged to were fetched and compared against the targeted customer
segments in a promotion. This logic is updated to look at the targeted
customer segments in a promotion and then determine whether a shopper
belongs to one of the segments. This change in how customer segment
requirements are evaluated for promotions improves promotion evaluation
performance.
Category level promotions check
1If your store rarely has category level
promotions, then a flag can be set in the promotion engine configuration file
for the ShopcartDrivenAgendaBuilder. If this
PerformCheckForCategoryLevelPromotions flag is set to true,
then a search is performed when the promotion engine is invoked for any active
category-level promotions in the store. If no promotions are found, then no call
is made to retrieve the parent categories of items in the order. Setting this
flag to true can improve the performance of storefront evaluation of promotions
especially if your catalog has a deep category structure. As well, this
performance improvement has a greater effect for shopping carts with many order
items. If the flag is set to false, then the default behavior of retrieving
parent category information for order items performs. If there are currently no
active category level promotions in the store, then a shopper experiences
reduced response times in the storefront.
PerformCheckForCategoryLevelPromotions flag, you must change
the configuration for the ShopcartDrivenAgendaBuilder in the
promotion engine configuration file:- WC_eardir/xml/PromotionEngineConfiguration/WCSPromotionEngineConfig.xml
ShopcartDrivenAgendaBuilder with the
PerformCheckForCategoryLevelPromotions set to
true:<PromotionExecutionAgendaBuilder impl="com.ibm.commerce.marketing.promotion.runtime.ShopcartDrivenAgendaBuilder">
<PerformCheckForCategoryLevelPromotions>true</PerformCheckForCategoryLevelPromotions>
<InvocationTemplates>
...
...
</InvocationTemplates>
</PromotionExecutionAgendaBuilder>