Aurora starter store

The Aurora starter store is packaged with WebSphere Commerce as a store archive (Aurora.sar). You can publish the Aurora starter store as any of the following store types:

• Consumer direct stand-alone store
• Consumer direct storefront asset store in the extended sites business model
• B2B direct stand-alone store
• B2B direct storefront asset store in the extended sites business model

Store features

• Site level features: Using site-level features, you can customize the look and feel of your storefront. Site level features are visible from multiple pages in your store.
• Category level features: Category-level features help customers to browse categories, search the catalog, and filter product listings to find the right product.
• Product level features: Product-level features showcase details about a specific product in your store.

Aurora offers B2B-optimized features to enhance and simplify catalog browsing, order placement, and administration tasks for B2B direct customers:B2B-optimized features

Technology

• Responsive web design (RWD) patterns in catalog browsing page layouts and widgets.
• Customizable REST services to facilitate the invocation of classic controller commands and the activation of data beans.
• Ability to define store functions as self-contained widgets.
• Ability to combine Ajax and Dojo widgets to build a store page layout.
• Easier styling and customization of the site.
• Use of WebSphere Commerce services for all marketing, member, and order component interactions.
• Ability to retrieve product attributes with catalog services.

Aurora starter store feature set

• Catalogs
• Marketing
• Promotions
• Registration
• Orders
• Checkout
• Store locator
• Organization and buyer administration (for B2B direct only)
• Technology
• Page design

Catalogs

Marketing

Promotions

Registration

Orders

Checkout

Store locator

Organization and buyer administration (for B2B direct only)

Technology

Page design

Aurora sales catalogs

• If you publish Aurora as a consumer direct store, the default catalog is set to a sales catalog called Aurora consumer direct sample data. This sales catalog has a housewares theme, with departments that include Apparel, Electronics, Grocery, Health, Home and Furnishing, and Newsletters and Magazines.
• If you publish Aurora as a B2B direct store, the default catalog is set to a sales catalog called Aurora B2B direct sample data. This sales catalog has a hardware theme, with departments that include Fasteners and Lighting.

The default catalog setting is controlled in the Catalogs tool in Management Center. For more information, see Sales catalogs and Default catalog.

Mobile store pages

Limitations

• The following features are not demonstrated in the Aurora starter store:
  • Gift registry (Gift Center)
  • Deprecated featureCoshopping
  • Deprecated featureRemote widgets
  • Specific social commerce features including social bridging, public-facing user profiles, blogs, photo galleries, and social bookmarks. However, social commerce features are available through IBM Commerce Partner Solution. IBM partners offer Commerce Composer widgets that can be integrated into the Aurora starter store through the Commerce Composer tool. For more information, see the IBM Commerce Partner Solutions website.
• Bi-directional language support limitations:
  • The store pages that are introduced in the Feature Pack 8 Aurora starter store do not have bi-directional language support. These new store pages are designed primarily for B2B direct stores and include pages for requisition lists, B2B-optimized browsing, saved orders, self-registration, and buyer and organization administration. If you require a store translated into the Arabic and Hebrew languages, consider using the Feature Pack 7 Aurora starter store. If you decide to use the Feature Pack 8 Aurora starter store in Arabic or Hebrew, you might need to fix the bi-directional language display issues in the new pages.
  • There are known limitations with the Internet Explorer 7 browser when you view the Aurora store in the Hebrew language. Limitations include misalignment or exclusion of certain page elements throughout the store.
• The Aurora starter store contains default behaviors that might affect storefront performance. Changing the default behaviors might improve your storefront performance. For more information about limitations, see Troubleshooting: Performance considerations for the Aurora starter store.
• The video/mp4 MIME type must be enabled in your WebSphere Application Server configuration. This enablement resolves potential video playback issues for Firefox and Internet Explorer 9+. For more information, see MIME type collection.
• The mini shopping cart displays a maximum of 50 items by default. If a customer reaches 50 items and adds more items to the shopping cart, the mini shopping cart does not display the new additions. You must increase the default value in the mini cart JSP file fragment when you are expecting typical shopping cart sizes to exceed 50 items.