Add ecommerce functionality

Your solution's requirements determine the following steps. As a prerequisite, you should have a working empty websiteempty website installed.

Before you create a catalog, consider how it is managed and updated. Which marketing, promotion, and merchandising requirements must the catalog support?

Various methods for importing catalog data from other Optimizely Commerce sites or external systems are described in the Commerce Developer.

Create a cart with functionality for adding and viewing items, and make it display on the website. This is connected to the steps of the checkout procedure, but typically you need features like Add to cart, View cart, and Continue shopping with related functionality.

The checkout typically involves these activities: collecting address information, selecting and adding a shipment method, associating the order's line items with one or more shipments, placing the order, and updating the cart total. You have several options for setting up a checkout procedure. You can either have a multiple-step procedure based on several pages, or a one-page checkout with address, payment options, and order preview all in one.

A typical checkout can be divided into these steps:

The checkout page is connected to the corresponding workflows, and payment and shipping providers (see the following sections).

Shipping and payments are similar in that they are built-up of methods, providers, and gateways. Commerce Connect includes two shipping options or providers that are used by two shipping methods. You can also create your own shipping providers matching specific requirements. For instance, you can create your own jurisdiction rules and groups for national or international deliveries or create weight jurisdictions for price calculations during checkout.

You can also add web services for obtaining shipping rates. Shipping methods are created in Commerce Manager. Manage your shipping provider in a separate project, which you then add to the front-end site solution.

Payment methods use a payment provider to process payments. Commerce Connect has a set of providers. You often want to create and customize payment providers for your solution. Creating a credit card payment provider can be complex, and these are often integrated with external systems, such as PayPal, credit card brands, or banking systems.

The setup usually involves communication with external systems for checking and verifying orders and payments. In many cases, an external ERP system is involved. Payment methods are created in Commerce Manager. Manage your payment providers in a separate project, which you then add to the front-end site solution.

Pricing is a central area in most ecommerce solutions. Tasks here may involve the definition of a pricing structure for sellable catalog entries and targeting of pricing towards specific markets or customer groups, and integration with external systems. You can use the pricing provider and pricing logic or modify these for your own purposes.

Search is another key feature for ecommerce sites. Tasks in this area involve the creation of a product-specific search, customizing the Lucene-based search, and configuring search indexing, facets, and filtering.

For example, you can create catalog-specific filtering by defining the type of entries to include in the search. You can also extend the search by replacing the search provider with Optimizely Graph to add more powerful search features.

Warehouses and inventories are examples of components for which information is typically retrieved from external systems and displayed for related items in Commerce Connect. Tasks in this area may involve creating a list of warehouses, getting inventories per warehouse, and picking up catalog entries from a warehouse, and adding them to a shopping cart. Commerce Connect has an IOC provider model for warehouses, a warehouse inventory listing, and the warehouse retrieval service.

Orders are related to many parts of the ecommerce process, and the order fulfillment process can be set up differently. Orders in Commerce Connect are based on workflows and related activities, which can be used as they are or customized to suit specific business procedures. Orders can be extended, and you can model orders and line items on orders and add customized properties to orders.

Marketing in Commerce Connect includes campaigns and promotions. Commerce Connect includes several promotions, but you can also create your own promotions by accessing the promotion engine.

Customer data is stored in the Commerce Connect database and managed from the Customers subsystem. Customers can be associated with addresses, organizations, and customer groups. A contact in Commerce Connect can be of any user type in the system - a shopping website visitor, a marketer, a merchandiser, or a system administrator.

Tasks in this area involve, for instance, retrieving customer addresses for the checkout and creating customer group-specific pricing, and defining user groups and permissions for Commerce Connect users.

The Optimizely Service API is a service layer available for system integrators to update and retrieve information from Optimizely, ensuring seamless integration between Commerce Connect and external systems such as PIM, DAM, and ERP systems.

Deployment involves publishing an updated website and its content to a testing or live production environment. Deployment typically includes exporting and importing data and content to staging environments, on-premises or cloud-based.

See DXP cloud servicesDXP cloud services how to work with development and deployment using the Optimizely Digital Experience Platform cloud services.