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.
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).
Use the Catalogs tool in Management Center to manage catalogs, categories, catalog entries, merchandising associations, product attributes, and attachments in your store. The Catalogs tool lets business users create, and manage online catalogs. Catalogs provide a way of organizing the products that you want to sell. You define catalog data in groups of categories and products. Catalog data contains descriptions and pricing information for products and services.
The Category Manager or Product Manager determine the best way to display, price, and sell products in the online store, including assigning or changing product attributes.
You can manage attributes within individual catalog entries.
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.
Review the following sections for information about installing the WebSphere Commerce product, associated maintenance, and WebSphere Commerce enhancements.
Before you migrate to WebSphere Commerce Version 8.0, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
The topics in this section describe how to publish stores to either a test or production environment, and how to deploy customized code.
If you are using WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, consider using Management Center to manage your store.
Use the Management Center keyboard shortcuts to access user interface functions or complete tasks, using a single key or combination of keys.
If your company operates an extended site, you can perform certain tasks directly from your extended site store within Management Center.
If content management capabilities other than the functionality that is provided by default with WebSphere Commerce is required, WebSphere Commerce can be integrated with IBM Web Content Manager. If WebSphere Commerce is integrated with IBM Web Content Manager, you can use content from IBM Web Content Manager content libraries with Management Center objects.
If your site is integrated with IBM Marketing Center, Management Center users can open IBM Marketing Center from Management Center to upload promotion codes and to create and manage marketing campaigns.
The Management Center user interface provides a usable, intuitive, and efficient way to complete your business tasks.
The starting point for all Management Center tasks is to open the tooling. Afterward, you can use several methods to complete a task: by selecting menu options, by clicking toolbar buttons, by right-clicking and selecting menus, or by keyboard shortcuts.
The Category Manager or Product Manager manages the catalog hierarchy by creating, modifying, and deleting catalogs for stores. There are two types of catalogs: master catalogs and sales catalogs.
The Category Manager or Product Manager can use the Catalog Upload feature in the Catalogs tool to upload sales catalogs, categories, catalog entries (products, SKUs, bundles, and kits), attributes, asset references, and more into Management Center.
The Category Manager manages the category hierarchy by creating, modifying, and deleting categories. The category hierarchy organizes products or services offered by the store.
The Category Manager manages catalog entries in the store including, products, bundles, kits, and SKUs.
The Category Manager or Product Manager manages products, including adding or changing products in the catalog hierarchy.
The Product Manager is responsible for determining the best way to display, price, and sell products in the online store.
The Category Manager or Product Manager can organize kits in the catalog hierarchy, and create and change kits to determine the best way to sell them in the store.
The Category Manager or Product Manager can organize bundles in the catalog hierarchy, and create and change bundles to determine the best way to sell them in the store.
As a Category Manager or Product Manager, you can use Management Center to manage individual attributes within catalog entries or to manage attributes within the attribute dictionary. The attribute dictionary contains two types of attributes: attributes with predefined values and attributes with assigned values. You can reuse the attributes that are contained in the attribute dictionary across multiple catalog entries. You can assign attributes to catalog entries for use as defining attributes or descriptive attributes.
The attribute dictionary in Management Center provides a flexible, alternative method for managing attributes within a store catalog. Before you begin to use the attribute dictionary in Management Center, review the available options for managing attributes.
Before you create products in your store, create attributes. Attributes are characteristics of a product such as size or color. There are two types of attributes, attributes with predefined values, and attributes with assigned values.
Defining attributes are properties of products and SKUs in an online store, such as color or size for clothing. You can add defining attributes to a product, such as color and size for corduroy pants.
Descriptive attributes are properties of products and SKUs in an online store, such as care instructions for clothing. You can add descriptive attributes to a product if you need to provide more information to customers. For example, some pieces of clothing must be dry cleaned. A descriptive attribute can specify the dry clean only condition.
You can change the defining attributes for catalog entries to reflect changes in certain properties, such as color or size. For example, if a manufacturer introduces a new color.
You can change the descriptive attributes for catalog entries to reflect changes in certain conditions. For example, if a product is now machine washable, instead of dry clean only.
You can use the References tab for an attribute to view the list of catalog entries that are assigned the attribute. The list of assignments for an attribute in the References tab also identifies whether the attribute is assigned as a defining or descriptive attribute for each catalog entry.
You can delete values from descriptive and defining attributes within catalog entries. This is useful when conditions change, for example, if the manufacturer no longer makes a product in a certain color, or a product is no longer available in a certain size.
You can delete an attribute from a catalog entry if conditions change. For example, if the manufacturer no longer makes a product in various sizes and the product is now available only in one size fits all.
You can create promotions that use attributes from the Management Center attribute dictionary. This task flow guides you step-by-step through the process of creating and activating an attribute-based promotion and creating a web activity to advertise this promotion.
You can create price rules that use attribute-based catalog filters. This task flow guides you step-by-step through the process of creating an attribute-based catalog filter and then creating a catalog condition to create attribute-based price rules.
Facets group similar items and attributes together in the left sidebar of your store to target meaningful product results. The facets are displayed with the number of products that are contained in each facet, and are clickable to filter search results. The Category Manager or Product Manager determine the best way to display facets in the online store, including assigning or changing product attribute and category facets.
Product Managers, can find, list, create, and change merchandising associations (such as up-sells or cross-sells).
A catalog asset is a managed file, URL, or attachment that is associated to a category or catalog entry. For example, a product image or a PDF document. The usage type of the catalog asset determines the store page on which the asset is displayed, and the location on the page.
You can manage external content coming from Watson Content Hub in the Catalogs tool.
The Product Manager is responsible for creating and managing search term associations. Search term associations include synonyms and search term replacements, and linking search terms with landing pages.
By reviewing site search statistics, you learn what customers are intending to find on your web site when they enter keywords in the search field. You can then make targeted improvements to optimize your site search, improve your site navigation, and ultimately increase conversions. Management Center provides site search statistics in two reports: the Top Search Hits report and the Top Search Misses report.
Category Managers and Product Managers can manage versions of business objects to: rollback changes, make seasonal changes, or track the history of a business object.
WebSphere Commerce provides several tools that you can use to improve search results from search engines, and search results on your storefront.
You can open in Management Center several catalog-related reports from IBM Digital Analytics, formerly known as Coremetrics Analytics. After you open a report, you can view any other reports and dashboards that are available to you in IBM Digital Analytics.
Not all fields in the Catalogs tool views are displayed by default. This page lists all of the database fields that can be displayed in a properties view in the Catalogs tool, and if they are displayed by default.
Find answers to some frequently asked questions about using certain features of the Catalogs tool and completing tasks.
If you encounter issues while you are using the Catalogs tool, review this troubleshooting topic to solve common problems.
Use the Marketing tool in Management Center to create and manage marketing campaigns and other store content, excluding catalog content. You can use the extensive precision marketing features in the tool to deliver targeted marketing messages to customers.
Use the Promotions tool in Management Center to create and manage promotions that support the marketing campaigns for your site.
As a Product Manager, Marketing Manager, or Category Manager, you can use the Assets tool to upload and manage your store assets. The term assets refers to web content that you use on your storefront and in marketing campaigns, such as marketing image files, catalog image files, PDF documents, and multimedia files.
Use the Catalog Filter and Pricing tool in Management Center to create and manage catalog filters, price lists, and price rules. Sellers, Sales Managers, and Account Representatives can use the tool's flexible features to implement catalog filtering and pricing strategies that meet the site's business needs over time.
Use the Installments tool in Management Center to create and manage installment rules that support the payment methods for your site.
Create pages and build layouts for your store directly in Management Center without involving IT by using the Commerce Composer tool. Take advantage of the tool's page design and management functions to improve your productivity and give you more control over the customer experience.
As a Seller, Site Administrator, or Channel Manager, you can use the Store Management tool in Management Center to manage your stores. The Store Management tool in Management Center replaces all of the store management features in WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, except store creation and the ability to suspend and resume stores. Continue to use the Store Creation wizard in WebSphere Commerce Accelerator to create new stores; continue to use WebSphere Commerce Accelerator to suspend and resume stores.
You can use the Workspace Management tool in Management Center to manage and edit workspaces and its tasks and task groups that you are authorized to work with.
Preview your store to ensure that changes made in Management Center show up in your store as expected. You can use store preview in production, authoring, and staging environments.
Find answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about the Management Center.
If you encounter issues with the Management Center that are not related to any specific tool, review this troubleshooting topic to solve common problems.
Use the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator to maintain online stores.
Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using WebSphere Commerce in combination with other products.
WebSphere Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your WebSphere Commerce instance and stores.
The topics in the Developing section describe tasks performed by an application developer.
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.
These topics describe the security features of WebSphere Commerce and how to configure these features.