Commerce Server Blog

Trends in Ecommerce customers are changing regularly. In previous decade, customers started coming to the website just to perform transactions and 8-10 years before a new trend has started where customers are coming to website for content and for purchase. Couple of years before customers are coming to the website to see other’s opinions on the product. Based on the ratings and reviews, they are deciding whether to buy the product or not. Now people trend is changing and they want to buy all necessary products in one website. For example, before we used to buy products in retail website and life or car insurance in another website. Now people wants to purchase all their needs in the same website.

Can we able to achieve this trend with the current & available technology. With the introduction of commerce server 2009, YES, we can able to achieve this but with little customization. Lets see some of the challenges currently we are having.

• So far, we have developed single vertical (like retail, finance, insurance, etc) and deployed successfully. How can we create several services under a single commerce instance.
• How can we extend our services to global markets? Can we develop an application which works with global market with customization instead of development?
• Can we achieve it with minimal cost (less development and more customization)?
• How can we create a service which provides service to our partners.

These are not my questions, but CIOs from different companies are breaking their heads to address these challenges and this point of view article is to showcase how can we address these problems.

To address this problem we can leverage new features of CS2009, i.e., commerce server foundation & channels configuration. Let’s check how the proposed logical architecture looks like.

The presentation layer can be a frontend application by which the devices (desktop, laptop, tablet PC, PDA, etc) can access. For each industry vertical, we can have industry specific component or service which does preprocessing to the incoming message. Once preprocessing is done, the message is handed over to ecommerce bus.

We can create multiple channels with device & industry combination. The channel and industry details are passed to service bus with service call. Ecommerce Service bus can be a WCF layer which does all the tasks for all verticals. WCF provides us a framework by which we can develop the services which are interoperable, less complex, supports multiple protocols, etc and also provides to develop service oriented applications (SOA). Currently Commerce server doesn’t support WCF services but we can able to use them with the help of custom entities. All post processing tasks for each channel can be achieved by creating custom operation components and sequencing them through operation sequence configuration setting in channelConfiguration file. 

This is my point of view on generic ecommerce bus for multiple verticals. In future if any new industry or device is added to the business, then the implementation will be pretty simple and easily achievable by creating custom services or components for your industry and for any post processing tasks, creating new operation components and configure them in commerce server.