E-commerce is no longer simply about selling things online. It’s about delivering a seamless, integrated experience across all touch points. With the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies, e-commerce is now about transforming customer shopping experiences to leverage the power of your brand, providing a rich, personalized experience across multiple channels of your business.
WebSphere® Commerce V7.0 Feature Pack 3.0 delivers new functions to create a smarter shopping experience with:
- Personalize experience based on user behavior, such as participation in social commerce activities and usage of coupons with granular precision marketing triggers
- Allow business users to perform search engine optimization (SEO) by using the Management Center tool and to benefit from other SEO enhancements to help improve page rank
- Enable business users to optimize search results using runtime statistics and Coremetrics on-site search analytics
- Allow business users to access Coremetrics web analytics reports from the WebSphere Commerce Management Center tool
- Enable selling of configurable and complex products by integrating with the IBM Sterling Configurator
- Optimize order management integration performance
- Support the administration of workspaces using the WebSphere Commerce Management Center tool
WC7 FEP3 Functional Enhancements
IBM Sterling Configurator
Integration with WebSphere Commerce allows business users to easily maintain product relationships and establish configuration rules, and allows shoppers to configure complex products via WebSphere Commerce storefronts. IBM Sterling Configurator allows businesses to easily guide various types of end-users through the process of finding, configuring, and selecting complex products.
IBM Sterling Order Management
Integration with IBM Sterling Distributed Order Management delivers a cross-channel shopping experience by processing and fulfilling orders across channels. In Feature Pack 3.0, the integration with Sterling Order Management is enhanced to provide order sourcing and brokering of products and product bundles and by offering visibility into available inventory.
IBM Sterling Distributed Order Management delivers flexible order process modeling in Sterling Order Management based on user-defined business requirements. It orchestrates orders across internal and external partner order management systems, including those at partners, suppliers, and vendors.
Coremetrics
This enhancement offers deeper integration with the Coremetrics Continuous Optimization Platform to allow business users to easily access relevant analytics reports and dashboards from the WebSphere Commerce Management Center. In addition, business users can export segments using customer behavior data collected from Coremetrics to WebSphere Commerce and use these segments to build precision marketing campaigns in the WebSphere Commerce Management Center.
Precision marketing triggers
WebSphere Commerce V7.0 Feature Pack 3.0 offers new and updated precision marketing triggers in addition to several triggers found in WebSphere Commerce V7.0. These triggers allow marketers to build an ongoing dialog with the shoppers and enable them to respond to customers’ usage of promotional coupons. Additionally, these triggers allow marketers to track when a coupon is redeemed by a customer, monitor coupon redemption rates, and offer these customers similar coupons in the future. These new triggers also help marketers track and leverage their customers’ interactions in social commerce activities when building marketing web and dialog activities (for example, positive reviews could help build a marketing campaign around a product).
Integrated search solution enhancements
In Feature Pack 2, WebSphere Commerce offered a new search solution that helps shoppers find products and services that best meet their specific needs through a simple keyword search and faceted navigation and which let business users define search business rules in the Management Center.
In Feature Pack 3, this search capability is enhanced to provide search runtime statistics for business users to refine the search business rules and to enable shoppers to search web content, product categories, and related information. It also integrates with Coremetrics to allow business users to analyze searches to optimize shoppers’ search experience and improve conversion rates.
SEO enhancements
Feature Pack 3 enables business users to perform SEO using the Management Center tool. Other enhancements in support of SEO include shortening website addresses and surfacing meaningful keywords to help improve page ranking. Also, business users can use the Management Center tool to optimize keywords in website addresses, as well as to update the content of other important SEO locations in store pages, such as page titles. Improvements to the site map generator support this new SEO-friendly website address format so that external search engines can find and index store pages more easily.
Enhanced business user tools
With Feature Pack 3, the WebSphere Commerce Management Center tool is updated to enable administration of workspaces, which previously required the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator Workspace Administration tool. Further, business users should see improved function and usability in the task and task group approval processes with support for Management Center object history for updates performed in the workspace environment.
WebSphere Commerce V7.0 Feature Pack 3.0 is an optionally installable product extension. It offers incremental features to the base product.
Customer benefits
- Personalize the shopping experience by enabling marketers to gain insight into user behavior across multiple channels, by tracking and leveraging customers’ interactions in social networks, and by monitoring customers’ usage of promotional coupons
- Potentially increase revenue and shopping cart size by allowing users to configure complex products, enhance the shopper’s search experience to improve conversion rates, and help improve search engine rankings by allowing business users to perform SEO so that prospective shoppers can find your store pages more easily in external search engines.
- Help increase operational efficiencies by providing order sourcing and brokering of products and product bundles and by offering visibility into available inventory
Accessibility
Accessibility features help a user who has a physical disability, such as a visual impairment, hearing impairment, or limited mobility, to use software products successfully. These are the major accessibility features in WebSphere Commerce that allow users to:
- Use screen-reader software Job Access With Speech (JAWS) to hear what is displayed on the screen for Web 2.0 store and Info Center
- Operate all features using the keyboard instead of the mouse for Web 2.0 store and Info Center
- Use Perform™ for silent-based installation and configuration
For more info, please contact Zobrist Consulting to experience the new WC7 FEP3.
