WebSphere Commerce

IBM has announced the latest WebSphere Commerce enhancements to its market leading e-commerce solution to help clients lay a solid foundation for the future. Our latest enhancements enable you to:

• New! Redesigned Web 2.0 Starter Store with streamlined purchasing process
• New! Buy Online and Pickup in Store cross-channel support via Distributed Order Management (DOM) solution integration implemented with vendor-neutral interfaces
• New! Use the powerful Management Center business user tooling to manage Extended Sites and manage workflow and tasks without IT assistance.
• Increase business users' independence, productivity, and effectiveness in managing catalog updates, marketing campaigns, and promotions with less reliance on your company's IT group.
• Create a dynamic customer shopping and purchasing experience with Web 2.0 functionality such as streamlined checkout and interactive marketing to increase conversion rate, basket size, and return visits.
• Track and analyze cross-channel customer behavior to gain insights, then apply them to sales and marketing initiatives to increase conversion rate.
• Leverage SOA and seamlessly integrate business processes and back-office systems to improve your business's multichannel retailing strategy.
• Protect customers' confidential credit card information and enable compliance to the latest Payment Card Industry (PIC) security standards.

To help customers achieve the above benefits, WebSphere Commerce provides the following enhancements:

• New! Support order capture/modification and buy online - pickup in store scenarios
• New! Open services interfaces and message flows support order transfer/updates, payment, customer and inventory data over ESB and Smart SOA Foundation Components
• New! Improved product fast finder design
• New! Easier access to shopping cart, wish list & product comparison
• New! Streamlined checkout process
• New! Manage catalogs, campaigns, and promotions for Extended Sites.
• New! Work on assigned tasks, complete tasks, and submit tasks for approval within Management Center.
• New! Optimize marketing campaigns and promotions with intuitive marketing experimentation.
• New! Preview store changes before they are committed to production.
• New! Enhance performance with new catalog data model.
• Intuitive, role-based tools to manage online commerce provide a new independence for e-Commerce business users to manage product catalogs, generate tailored promotions, and drive marketing campaigns. The new Management Center for WebSphere Commerce delivers a dynamic and intuitive interface to help increase user productivity with a multi-pane UI with left-tree navigation, a rich text editor, drag & drop functionality, and powerful search capabilities to increase efficiency and facilitate multi-tasking. It also includes Behavioral Marketing to create targeted marketing triggered by customer's behavior, as well as a flexible activities calendar and multi-variate testing.
• The Web 2.0 Store Model includes features such as product quick view, interactive marketing spot, streamlined checkout, product comparison, drag and drop page objects, embedded measurement capabilities, and support for open source including AJAX and Dojo toolkits. These new functionalities are designed to empower your customers and improve conversion.
• Integration to IBM® Commerce Module for OmniFind™ Discovery Edition (sold separately) provides natural language search capabilities including spell correction and synonym processing, as well as the ability to trigger product recommendations based on customer search requests.
• Improved Search Engine Support via Sitemap Integration helps customers locate your offerings through search engines. New features improve ability of search engine to index dynamic web pages and help lower the lag time between content changes and index updates.
• Improved Service Orientation enables you to quickly and easily integrate WebSphere Commerce with existing back office infrastructure. New enhancements include JCA adapters for Web Services plus reference applications and pre-defined Web Services for integration with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Order Management Systems (OMS).
• Enhanced Web Analytics helps you turn site and customer data into business insights, and quickly close the loop to make decisions and take effective action. Seamless integration of the Web 2.0 Store Model with Coremetrics for WebSphere Commerce provides best-of-breed analytics for WebSphere Commerce powered channels. Auto-tagging and pre-defined tag libraries speed implementation. Custom reports for analyzing promotions, campaigns, Marketing Experimentation, and B2B transactions provide actionable insights; and the latest enhancements include e-mail marketing and multichannel analytics which provides marketing managers a holistic view of sales, products, and promotions across the call center and web.
• Enable Compliance with Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards. WebSphere Commerce is Visa-CISP Payment Application Best Practice (PABP) certified with the latest feature enhancements. To learn how this helps minimize the potential for security breaches leading to compromises in financial