Overview:
This article gives you overview of the commerce server 2007 and the features of that. Commerce server 2007 mainly used in E-commerce and Portal based sites. This will have much number of API's and Business Application to handle this. Before that we should know core systems of the commerce server.
Here I am explaining you about that core 5 sub systems:
- Catalog System
- Inventory system
- Profile system
- Marketing system
- Order syste
Apart from this it contains CSS (Commerce server staging), Biztalk adapters, web services, User Business Applications and Data warehouse system...etc...
Catalog System:
Catalog system will provide you to organize the products which you want to show into the end user. You can logically group the product by variants. The order would be like Catalog --- Category(s) --- Product(s).You can group the product/Category under one base catalog, like this you can create more catalogs. If you want group products from different catalog you can create Virtual catalog and use it. Under category you can create multiple products and give a rank for that. Catalog system integrates with inventory system for maintaining the product related inventories. ProductId/CategoryId would be unique in that parent catalog. Catalog system will provide the editor to easily edit and save the products in any time. We can import /export the products as XML files so deployment would more easily from staging to production.
Inventory System:
This is used to manage product inventory which in the catalogs. As like catalog system you can import/export this inventory system properties. This will give you the product schema for different products. Using this we can create different properties, according to requirement we can group these properties for Product/Category. Each grouped properties for category called as 'Category definition' and each grouped properties for the product called as 'Product Definition'. This inventory system integrated with Order system; through pipeline components commerce server applies inventory check for the products/promotions/Gifts... etc...
Profile System:
From the name it self you can find this is related to User specific. Its used to store and retrieving the user specific data's.
It contains mainly two business objects are Profiles and Site terms. Profiles talk about the storing user's first Name/last Name/Unique User Number/Address/Country/Pin code...etc...Also keep track on the basket references.Siteterms provide the limited options to select by the User like Gender (Male/Female).
As default Commerce server integrated with membership provider facility for controlling User login and order details.
Commerce server provides you the API's for accessing this profile system. After extracting the commerce server package the profile related Database will be created with the name of "Sitename_Profile". This database will have number of tables related to maintain the user details.
If you want you can extern the profile system also.
Marketing System:
This system used to create discount for the products/categories, advertisement, direct mailer to send a newsletter/gift coupons.
Any time you can easily edit and change the discount of the products. We can apply the filter for discounts according to Price of the product/Total price/User/Category wise. Depending on the filtration pipeline components run and apply the discounts, this will happen automatically without any code effort.
Order System:
This will hold the user specific orders. This system provides many numbers of classes like Orders, Baskets, Purchase order...etc...
While end user adding products this order system create one new 'Basket' with the name of that user. Each basket contains 'Order Form', this will hold number of products as line items. Other than basket we can create wish list also. We have checkout facility, this will check the inventory of the products and applying proper discounts/gifts...etc... this will be handled by the Commerce server systems, we don't require any code. Other than this we have payment methods and class for handling different payment gateways. Once basket purchased through payment gateway; order will be saved as purchase order for further reference. We have so many API's for adding product to basket, getting basket and getting discount details.
This is just basic over view of the Commerce server sub systems. There is lot of things under each sub system.
Keep reading! Keep implementing! Keep posting!