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User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to WebSphere Commerce Version 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in a newer section.WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified e-commerce platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B), and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models). WebSphere Commerce is designed to be a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to leverage open standards. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels.
Administering
Overview of administering a WebSphere Commerce site
In WebSphere Commerce the person who performs administrative tasks is called a Site Administrator. The Site Administrator installs, configures, and maintains WebSphere Commerce and the associated software and hardware. The administrator responds to system warnings, alerts, and errors, and diagnoses and resolves system problems. Typically, this person controls access and authorization (creating and assigning members to the appropriate role), manages the Web site, monitors performance, and manages load balancing tasks. The Site Administrator might be responsible for establishing and maintaining several server configurations for different stages of development such as testing, staging, and production. The Site Administrator also handles critical system backups and resolves performance problems.
Organization Administration Console
The Organization Administration Console enables administrators to manage organizations, business users and member groups. Access Control policies can also be managed and approval requests can be processed.
Business relationship roles
The following business relationship management roles are supported by WebSphere Commerce: Account Representative, Sales Manager and Channel Manager.

User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to WebSphere Commerce Version 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in a newer section.WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified e-commerce platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B), and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models). WebSphere Commerce is designed to be a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to leverage open standards. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels.
- Planning
  Creating a custom implementation of a WebSphere Commerce store requires a significant amount of planning. From gathering client needs, to deploying the live solution, much work is needed to successfully deploy a custom client store. Use the resources in here to help you plan every phase of store creation.
- Installing
  Review the following sections for information about installing the WebSphere Commerce product, associated maintenance, and WebSphere Commerce enhancements.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to WebSphere Commerce Version 8.0, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
- Deploying
  The topics in this section describe how to publish stores to either a test or production environment, and how to deploy customized code.
- Operating
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using WebSphere Commerce in combination with other products.
- Administering
  - Overview of administering a WebSphere Commerce site
    In WebSphere Commerce the person who performs administrative tasks is called a Site Administrator. The Site Administrator installs, configures, and maintains WebSphere Commerce and the associated software and hardware. The administrator responds to system warnings, alerts, and errors, and diagnoses and resolves system problems. Typically, this person controls access and authorization (creating and assigning members to the appropriate role), manages the Web site, monitors performance, and manages load balancing tasks. The Site Administrator might be responsible for establishing and maintaining several server configurations for different stages of development such as testing, staging, and production. The Site Administrator also handles critical system backups and resolves performance problems.
    - Stores in WebSphere Commerce
      WebSphere Commerce supports several different types of entities that are defined as stores. The assets of these store entities may be edited using the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.
    - Enabling registered users to access all stores in the Extended Sites business model
      WebSphere Commerce users can access storefronts by virtue of having the role of Registered Customer in the organization that owns the store, or in any organization above it. The roles a user has access to during registration are defined within the MemberRegistrationAttributes.xml file.
    - Configuration Manager
      To configure a WebSphere Commerce instance, use the Configuration Manager. The Configuration Manager interface shows mandatory fields and provides help.
    - Administration Console
      Site Administrators use the Administration Console to control a site or store by completing administrative operations and configuration tasks such as publishing stores, refreshing the registry, and scheduling jobs. You can access the Administration Console at a site-level, or for a particular store.
    - Organization Administration Console
      The Organization Administration Console enables administrators to manage organizations, business users and member groups. Access Control policies can also be managed and approval requests can be processed.
      - B2C view
        Organization Administration Console users have access to the following menus and tasks.
      - B2B direct view
        If you are a Buyer Administrator, Buyer Approver, Seller Administrator, or Site Administrator working with a B2B direct store, you can perform specific tasks in the Organization Administration Console according to your role.
      - Supply chain view
        If you are a Seller Administrator, Site Administrator, or Channel Manager working with a B2B indirect store, you have access to the several Organization Administration Console menus and tasks.
      - Opening the Organization Administration Console
        The Organization Administration Console allows you, and the buyer's administrators to control the organizations that access your site or store. Tasks that you are authorized to perform in your role are displayed on the Organization Administration Console home page menus. These tasks are based on user roles and authority levels, which are defined in XML files on your WebSphere Commerce system and are assigned by the Site Administrator by using the Administration Console. To return to the Organization Administration Console home page, click the Home link at the top right of the screen.
      - Organizational management roles
        WebSphere Commerce supports the following organizational management roles: Buyer Administrator, Buyer Approver, Organization Participant, Buyer (buy-side), Procurement Buyer Administrator, Procurement Buyer (buy-side), Seller Administrator.
      - Business relationship roles
        The following business relationship management roles are supported by WebSphere Commerce: Account Representative, Sales Manager and Channel Manager.
      - Roles mapped to business models
        WebSphere Commerce provides default sets of roles. The Site Administrator must assign specific roles to every organization before assigning users to those roles. An organization can only take on roles that have been assigned to its parent organization.
      - Users
        When a user first accesses an e-commerce site and is browsing product pages, the user is running as a generic user. The generic user has a common user ID (-1002) that is used across the entire system. The use of a common user ID on the site minimizes system resource usage. Once the user performs an operation that requires a unique identity, for example, adding a product to the shopping cart, the user is converted from a generic user to a unique guest user. A guest user has a unique user ID, but no password. This user implicitly belongs to the Default Organization and does not have any roles in the site. Depending on the business model of the store, and the access control policies, the user may be able to do other operations on the site, for example, placing an order. Both the generic user and a unique guest user have the registration type of "G" (Guest user). If the guest user registers to the current store, then the user is converted to a registered user, and any assets that the guest user owned will now be owned by the registered user.
      - Member groups
        A member group is a grouping of members - users, organizations, or other member groups - used for various business purposes. Two kinds of member groups exist: implicit and explicit. An implicit member group contains users that share common attributes and are therefore considered members of a specific member group. An implicit member group specifies criteria on attributes that users must satisfy in order to be considered members of that member group. You can also explicitly exclude certain users although they satisfy the criteria. An explicit member group contains explicitly assigned users, who may or may not share common attributes. A member group can be both implicit and explicit at the same time.
      - Organizations
        An organizational entity is a type of member in WebSphere Commerce. An organizational entity is classified into one of three types: an organization, an organization unit, or an authorization domain. For site administrators, one of your first tasks after installing and configuring WebSphere Commerce is setting up and managing access to your e-commerce site. This process involves creating organizations that participate at your site, and defining users that are members of those organizations. After an instance is created, you can publish a starter store that defines the organization structure. Sometimes, organizations joining your site might be buyer organizations. In other cases, you might have customers registering at your site who are engaged in a business-to-consumer relationship with your business. Defining the organizational structure of site is an important step in managing the types of access that members have to your system.
      - Approvals
        Accurate, secure transactions require that a second individual approve some electronic marketplace actions before they proceed. This individual, called an approver, can accept or reject requests to perform a specific action. During the organization registration process, the organization administrator selects the business processes for which they want to enable approval. This is done by signing up for the appropriate approval member group during membership registration. The organization administrator also populates the approver member groups. Only users within these groups have the authority to accept or reject requests to perform those actions for which approval has been enabled.
    - Common installation and administration tasks
      The following tasks are common tasks that you need to perform, often repeatedly, as part of WebSphere Commerce installation and administration duties.
  - WebSphere Commerce instance
    Every WebSphere Commerce installation requires at least one instance to function, and each WebSphere Commerce instance can contain one or more stores.
  - Managing features
    You can administer the features for your store and site, such as attribute, catalog, promotion, marketing, order management features, and more. The administration tasks that you can complete differ depending on the type of feature and the tool that you use to administer your store and site.
  - Logging services
    WebSphere Commerce provides facilities for logging. For existing customers, ECTrace and ECMessage are still supported. For new implementations, use the WebSphere Application Server recommendation for logging and tracing.
  - Business auditing
    Business auditing is the capturing of the business logic and objects during a WebSphere Commerce operation. You may want to audit your business for various reasons: generic, such as to review various tasks performed weekly; or specific, such as to track the steps involved in a particular Customer Service Representative's order. A report on business auditing is available in the Administration Console.
  - Business events
    Each time that a command triggers a business event, a record is added to the BUSEVENT database table to persist data from the event. Event listeners and external systems (such as the Marketing component, a back end order management system, or an external analytics system) can use this data to perform further processing.
  - Staging server
    The WebSphere Commerce staging server is a part of the production environment where business and technical users can update and manage store data and preview changes. The changes can then be propagated to the production server.
  - WebSphere Commerce database
    As a site administrator, maintain the WebSphere Commerce database and ensure that any WebSphere Commerce utilities and processes that load and retrieve data from the database is configured to connect to the database properly.
  - Dynamic caching
    In general, caching improves response time and reduces system load. Caching techniques are used to improve the performance of World Wide Web Internet applications. Most techniques cache static content (content that rarely changes) such as graphic and text files. However, many websites serve dynamic content, containing personalized information or data that changes more frequently. Caching dynamic content requires more sophisticated caching techniques, such as those provided by the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache, a built-in service for caching and serving dynamic content.
  - Extracting, transforming, and loading data
    WebSphere Commerce provides multiple utilities for preparing and loading data into a WebSphere Commerce database. The loading utilities are flexible and you can continue to use these utilities when you customize the WebSphere Commerce schema.
  - Payment plug-ins
    To configure a payment plug-in define payment and refund methods; payment and refund rules; and the payment protocols that you intend to use.
  - WebSphere Commerce Search
    For a fully functioning WebSphere Commerce Search implementation, you must understand and complete the search administration tasks, which include search index management and ongoing maintenance.
  - Deploying a WebSphere Commerce dual cell environment
    Consider deploying a dual cell environment to achieve continuous availability and ensure that shoppers are minimally affected by planned or unplanned outages.
  - IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce
    IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce is a separately purchased product that provides a light-weight customer service solution that is embedded in the Aurora B2C and Aurora B2B storefronts. Even though this solution is a separately purchased product, it is not a separate application. Stores that are enabled with IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce allow a customer service representative (CSR) to act on behalf of guest customers and registered customers. A CSR can manage customer accounts, cancel and reorder orders, and shop as customer. A CSR can also act on behalf of Buyer Administrators to help complete Aurora B2B tasks from the storefront, without having to access the Organization Administration Console.
- Tutorials
  WebSphere Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your WebSphere Commerce instance and stores.
- Samples
- Developing
  The topics in the Developing section describe tasks performed by an application developer.
- Compliance
  The following section describes how you can leverage WebSphere Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of WebSphere Commerce and how to configure these features.
- Performance
- Troubleshooting

WebSphere Commerce Enterprise

Business relationship roles

The following business relationship management roles are supported by WebSphere Commerce: Account Representative, Sales Manager and Channel Manager.

The following table describes each role and the business model that each role can work within.


Role	Description	Business model
Account Representative	Account Representatives work with individual accounts to build relationships, and manage customer service issues. They may be authorized to change contract pricing, negotiate contracts, profiles, and analyze profitability by account category.	B2B direct
Sales Manager	Sales Managers acquire and retain customers, meet sales forecasts, provide incentives for increased customer business, handle contract management, set pricing terms, and work with the product management team to establish inventory forecasts, and with the Marketing Manager for promotions. They also manage across accounts, assign accounts to, and approve contracts of Account Representatives.	B2B direct
Channel Manager	The Channel Manager manages the channel store, as well as the maintenance of the relationship between distributors and resellers, including creating and importing distributor and reseller contracts. The Channel Manager is also responsible for acquiring and retaining more resellers and distributors for the marketplace.	Extended sites