Leveraging the Features of WebSphere Commerce v6
Six steps to building a more customer-friendly site

The following key areas will be discussed:

1. Keeping the Site Fresh
2. Highlighting a Group of Products
3. Making the Site More Responsive
4. Thinking like a Customer in Regards to Site Navigation
5. Make Sure a Customer Never Sees an Error Page
6. Validate Early and Often to Improve the Customer Experience

1. Keeping the Site Fresh

Commerce has many options to enable the creative ideas generated from the marketing staff.  Each member of the marketing staff must initially be setup by the IT staff on the display pages, but once setup, they can easily be modified through the Accelerator interface as frequently as desired.   The Accelerator provides three different ways to keep the site up-to-date and fresh.  

• Dynamic content areas allow text areas to be configured, labeled, and then modified within the Accelerator.  These changes are effective immediately, have no scheduling options, and are seen by all visitors. 
• Content spots are text areas that are configured and labeled.  They are a bit more flexible, as they can have dates assigned to when they are used.  They are also seen by all visitors.
• eMarketing spots allow for content to be configured and labeled.  They can have dates assigned to them and they can be targeted to different customer segments.  Targeting eMarketing spots to different audiences makes them a powerful marketing tool, but means they require more internal processing.

2. Highlighting a Group of Products

Commerce has a feature called “Sales Catalogs” which includes any subset of the master catalog.  These catalogs can be specialty, sale, new, or over-stock items; whatever is useful in your current marketing strategy.  These catalogs can be constructed using the Accelerator and displayed using the same catalog pages as the master catalog.  After building a sales catalog, add a link to it within the navigation of the header or sidebar to allow a customer to quickly view the particular grouping of products you would like to highlight.  The content of the catalog can be changed as needed through the Accelerator, making it another tool for marketing that does not require IT intervention.

3. Making the Site More Responsive

Commerce is continually providing enhancements to facilitate making a site more and more responsive for customers.  These techniques described below must all be setup by the IT staff.

• The use of the WebSphere Application Server caching facilities for pages and objects is one such technique.  The starter stores are setup to use page fragments to facilitate configuring caching.  The Commerce help pages and samples have examples of how to get started with page and command caching. 
• Another technique includes adding some of the Web 2.0 development techniques to a store that is not fully Web 2.0 in design, similar to the Madison 2.0 starter store.  The IBM developerWorks site has a quick tutorial, “Using AJAX with WebSphere Commerce”, to help a developer get started with these techniques.  A link to the tutorial can be found here.
• The new use of Optimistic Locking on the database can reduce the wait times on database requests, but it comes with the responsibility of making sure custom commands can handle collisions and retries.  Review the implementation of the “retriable” option with custom controller commands to make sure that they are automatically retried by the Commerce runtime framework when appropriate.

4. Think like a Customer in Regards to Site Navigation

Customers view the site from a different perspective. It is easy for them to get lost in a site with a robust set of features.  What is clear to an IT professional is often confusing or frustrating to a customer.  Several simple ideas can be leveraged to make the site easier for them to use.

• The fragmenting of the Commerce header, footer, and sidebar navigation areas makes them easy to update and allows us to provide additional navigation links. 
• Going a step further, the catalog pages can be modified to include breadcrumb links along the category pages for catalogs that are very large.  These links can help a customer browse the catalog with more ease. 
• Many customers are accustomed to sites that have a home link under the logo in the header, in addition to home links that appear elsewhere. 
• The use of tool tips is an old technique that is still very useful.  These tool tips can help with items such as logon id rules and are particularly helpful to customers who are new to the site.
• Customers may get irritated when they cannot go back through a process like checkout. Checkout often has a fairly sophisticated implementation, so backward navigation buttons or links may work better than the browser back option.

5. Make Sure a Customer Never Sees an Error Page

It is the intent of most sites to never present an unexpected error page to the customer, but it happens.  Below, you will find a quick checklist of areas to review to make sure all of the Commerce error pages have been customized for the site.  One objective of these pages is to make sure that it appears as if the site software is in control, even in the case of a failure.  Another is to provide navigation back to a working page on the site such as the home page.  Finally, each page should have clear branding.

• There are generic system, generic application, and error pages at the site and store level.
• The Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application architecture of WebSphere Commerce provides page and application level error handling that can be implemented.  Application error handling such as this requires special attention to preserve database state and Commerce provides some classes to take care of it.
• The Struts framework provides text resources and tags to facilitate the creation and display of meaningful error messages for customers.

6. Validate Early and Often to Improve the Customer Experience

Data entry errors are frustrating for anyone, so capturing them quickly for correction can improve the customer experience.  The Commerce extensions of the Struts framework have been designed to allow the use of the Struts Validator package.  The starter stores have not been developed using the Validator, but they can be quickly configured and can make the implementation of robust client-side and server-side validation much easier and less repetitive.  The package comes with an extensible set of features that can be used selectively on the site.

• Client-side JavaScripts are provided for many common field validations.  They can even handle validation against a “regular expression” mask or dates.  Any number of custom rules can be added.
• Server-side validation is readily defined by XML configuration files.  Rules such as required, integer, and integer range, can be combined to ensure that the entry of a required integer falls within a prescribed range.  There are many such rules, and more can easily be added.
• Default error messages are provided.  They accept dynamic values and have tags to easily display them on site pages.
• There is a provision for automatic re-routing back to the input page when a validation error is detected by the Validator.  It includes the re-population of customer input fields.

In Conclusion

None of these options are dramatic in themselves.  As a result, they are often underutilized.  It is usually very reasonable to take advantage of them as you implement those final polishing touches on your site.  Most of them can also be readily added to an existing site that has been running successfully.  They are some of the tools that can be used to help your site take the next step in sales growth.  It is easy to forget that one of the main reasons for using the WebSphere Commerce platform is its wide variety of features with which your site can grow.

Want to learn more?

Alpine Consulting has significant experience and skillsets related to WebSphere Commerce. Should you require assistance within your WebSphere Commerce environment, please feel free to reach out to Alpine.