Oracle Commerce &

WebCenter Sites
Integration
August 2013

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Table of Contents
Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 3
Executive Summary .......................................................................................................................... 3
Commerce Platform .......................................................................................................................... 4
Site Management ............................................................................................................................... 5
Catalog Management ....................................................................................................................... 5
Promotions Management ............................................................................................................... 7
Page and Customer Experience Management ...................................................................... 7
Personalization ................................................................................................................................ 10
Mobile .................................................................................................................................................. 10
Non-catalog Content Authoring ............................................................................................... 10
Summary ............................................................................................................................................ 11




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Introduction
With Oracles acquisition of ATG and Endeca (which together comprise the product solution
named Oracle Commerce), and Fatwire (which has been renamed to WebCenter Sites), there
have been many questions about how customers should use the three Oracle products together.

The Oracle Commerce Product Management team has written this document to offer guidance
for leveraging WebCenter Sites in a commerce environment in which the customer has Oracle
Commerce. The contents of the document answer the most frequently asked questions and
provide a foundation for discussions about the value of Oracle Commerce and WebCenter Sites
and how best to leverage the technologies that comprise the overall solution in a commerce
environment while aligning with the go-forward product strategy of the Oracle Commerce product.

Purpose

The purpose of this document is to document the best practices guidelines for leveraging
WebCenter Sites in an environment which includes Oracle Commerce.


Assumptions

The information in this document is based on the most recent Generally Available product
versions:
o Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10.2
o Oracle Endeca Commerce 3.1.2
o WebCenter Sites 11g
This document does not provide a comprehensive technical discussion and does not replace
the official product documentation for any of the products.

Executive Summary
The roadmap for Oracle Commerce focuses on the combined ATG & Endeca solution. Ideally
customers should plan to use both technologies to operate their Commerce operations,
although there may be cases where the full suite is implemented on a modular basis. The
guidelines in this document are based on the existing product capabilities but influenced by
the product roadmap.
In an Oracle Commerce implementation:
o ATG and Endeca deliver the end-to-end customer experience, including delivering all
customer experience, personalization and pages.
o WebCenter Sites provides content management capabilities to support the customer
experience, including the creation and distribution of marketing content.
This solution architecture ensures consistent customer engagement and unified management
of the customer experience, including common personalization across touchpoints and
channels.
Regardless of the type of customer or industry, if commerce is part of the solution
requirements, the recommendation is the same as to which technologies should be used and
their role in an Oracle Commerce implementation.
The following diagram represents the high level best practice architecture for an Oracle
Commerce implementation:



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Implementation & Migrati on

All Oracle Commerce customers should plan to use ATG Commerce and Endeca Experience
Manager to operate their Commerce operations. (As noted, these may be implemented on a
modular basis based on existing environments). This includes creating and managing site
pages (i.e., use templates & cartridges to present content to shoppers), managing the
product catalog, commerce functionality such as pricing and promotions, personalization, and
search and guided navigation.
Oracle Commerce customers should plan to use WebCenter Sites to create and manage
certain content, such as articles, press releases, images, etc. This content will then be
available to include in the site experience via integration with ATG or Experience Manager,
depending on the type of content (catalog versus non-catalog).

Commerce Platform

The bulk of commerce-specific functionality in an Oracle Commerce implementation is delivered
by Oracle ATG Web Commerce. This includes functionality such as:

Pricing
Contract, product, SKU, or volume-based (bulk and tiered) pricing
Custom price lists for specific accounts or region, selling season, or any custom-defined
segment
Flexible promotions/coupons (see Promotions Management below)
Product comparisons
Gift list/wish list/purchase list
Gift certificates and couponing


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Shopping Cart
Saved shopping carts
Tracking of shopping cart abandonment
Save-for-later functionality with the cart
Cart visibility across multiple channels

Ordering
Order capture
Approvals workflow
Order restrictions
Recurring/scheduled orders/purchase orders
Requisitions
Inventory Integration
o Inventory lookups, potentially from multiple systems, including support for retail store
holds, in-store pickup, and visibility to store stock position
o Customizable rates for inventory refresh, including support for real-time (or near real-
time)

Payment
Support for multiple payment methods, shipping addresses, and cost centers per line item
Integration with fraud detection, tax, credit card transaction processing

Shipping
Line item independence, cost centers, multiple shipping addresses, multiple billing addresses
Site Management

Commerce enterprises require that their business users, to the largest extent possible, are able to
quickly and easily set up online storefronts. This includes the ability to create and manage
multiple storefronts that may share a centrally managed common infrastructure, but with distinct
presentation, product assortment, and business rules. Support for multiple sites should be at the
architectural level, without requiring replication of store sites and business processes.

In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the best practice is to use Oracle Commerce to manage
and deliver sites.
Catalog Management

A key requirement for commerce enterprises is robust support for catalog management. Some of
the main features that are needed include:

Support for multiple catalogs. The product should allow the creation of multiple brand and/or
regional catalogs. Catalogs should be able to be shared across multiple sites and stores, and
modified at a local level where required.
Support for all data types (including business and technical definitions, documentation,
pricing, business rules, etc.).
Providing validation to ensure data quality and consistency.
Managing all product definitions, including product bundles or configurable products, effective
dates, etc.
Pricing, including list and sale prices, and complex pricing models such as volume-based
pricing (by site or customer segment), and dynamic price calculation.

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Assembling the product hierarchy. The product catalog should support both fixed hierarchies
(e.g., categories) and dynamic structure based on criteria. The product should also support
integration with third-party systems to derive category assignments.
Managing business rules relating to offers, including options, add-ons, upgrades, etc.
Support for cross-sell, up-sell, and substitute-sell:
o The selection of cross-sell and up-sell products that are displayed should be able to be:
fixed, based on merchandise specification; dynamic, based on customer rules (order
history, quantities, geography, etc.); and automated (i.e., supplied via a
recommendations engine).
o It should be possible to exclude products that aren't available to the buyer.
o It should be possible to create dynamic product groups based on some criteria (e.g.,
products with certain user ratings; products with certain features; etc.) in order to more
efficiently manage cross-sells and up-sells.
Supporting the modeling of information for all enterprise applications (CRM, pricing, ordering,
fulfillment, etc.).
Image management, including image production workflow and integration.
User-generated content (UCG). The product should support content supplied by users such
as ratings, reviews, and tags.
Ability to integrate with third-party repositories.
Support for multi-user environments, including providing role-based authorization, workflow,
and data access control.
Allowing users to preview changes made to the product catalog, including dynamic and
personalized content, and to stage deployment of the catalog.
Publishing the catalog, including support for schedule-based publishing, and the expiration of
catalogs, individual categories, and/or products.
Versioning and rollback capabilities. A full history of all changes should be tracked and
available for auditing.
Enabling easy integration with external systems.
Automatically updating search, campaign management, and call center tools with changes
made to the catalog.

In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the best practice is to use Oracle Commerce to manage
the majority of the content and presentation of the catalog. In general, the ATG Business Control
Center (BCC) is used to manage catalog information, and Endeca Experience Manager is used to
manage which catalog content is presented and the customer experience (CX) on the site.

Non-catalog content (e.g., content that is associated with a particular page, but not with a
particular product), such as an article, banner, etc., can be well-suited to being managed in
WebCenter Sites. WebCenter Sites provides a flexible asset model that developers can use to
create assets for these types of content, e.g., documents, images, videos, etc. WebCenter Sites
could be used to create the asset. Endeca Experience Manager can then retrieve the asset for a
particular page via an Experience Manager cartridge.

There are certain types of catalog content that can also be managed with WebCenter Sites and
integrated with the products managed in ATG. For example, you may have a document such as a
PDF, or an image, and that you want to associate with a product. Again, WebCenter Sites can be
used to create the asset. These assets can then be used with Oracle Web Commerce through
integration with ATG Web Commerce and selected by a user in the ATG BCC to associate with a
particular product.




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Promotions Management

In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the best practice is to use Oracle Commerce to manage
the bulk of promotions functionality, and WebCenter Sites to create imagery and other media to
associate with promotions.

There are a couple of different aspects to promotions in Oracle Commerce:

The actual promotions logic itself that performs calculations for the pricing of customer
orders. Promotions allow you to offer discounts on specific products or groups of products.
They specify options that define the conditions a customer must meet before qualifying for
the discount, and how the discount is applied. For example, you may specify that in order to
be eligible for a discount, a customer must purchase an item from the Outerwear category,
that they spend more than $50, or that they make their purchase during J uly. This
functionality is provided by ATG Commerce.

Imagery and other media that are used to notify a customer that they are eligible for a
promotion. For example, you might decide to promote a range of products for Mothers Day
by highlighting them with an image on your sites Welcome! page and offering a 10 percent
discount if customers order them by a specific date. Or you might want to e-mail new
customers a promotion to encourage return visits. This imagery can be managed within
WebCenter Sites.

It is important to note that these aspects are not inherently related. When you create a promotion
including defining the requirements for qualifying for the discount, how the discount is applied,
for how long, etc. then that promotion will be granted to any customers who qualify for the
promotion. This will occur whether or not any imagery is included on the site that notifies the
customer of the promotion. Typically, however, media items such as images or banners will be
created for promotions in order to entice the shopper to use the promotion.

Oracle Commerce also provides support for coupons. A standard coupon has a single associated
code that can be used to claim that coupon, which is often widely distributed to customers (a
common example is a coupon that grants free shipping to users during the holidays). In other
situations, you may want to restrict the use of coupons, which can be accomplished through the
use of a coupon batch; the coupon batch generates a random authentication code for each
individual coupon, to ensure that the coupon cannot be passed on to other customers.
Page and Customer Experience Management

A growing requirement for commerce enterprises is the ability for business users to create new
pages and edit existing ones, for customer-facing web sites. Pages are created using templates
that have been created by site developers that preserve the key design features of the site, while
allowing business users to control which content is presented on every page, as well as its layout
and presentation.

In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the best practice is to use Oracle Commerce to manage
and deliver sites.

In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the best practice is to use Oracle Commerce and in
particular Endeca Experience Manager for page and customer experience management. This is
due to the fact that the page and customer management features for each solution are tightly tied
to that solution actually delivering the site. In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the ATG
application server will own the session, runtime, and rendering (when applicable), and there are
already productized integration points between ATG and Endeca. Endeca Experience Manager

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page authoring capabilities do not interfere with ATGs session, runtime, and rendering
capabilities as Experience Manager separates the content assembly from the presentation
delivery and rendering. Experience Manager returns a semantic model of all the assembled
content for a particular context (e.g, landing page, search term, category page, etc.), and hands
this over to the ATG runtime environment.

In addition, in order to personalize the shoppers experience including presenting the right
content, applying the correct promotions, etc. information must be known about the shoppers
state (their profile, their cart, etc.) which can then be passed to Endeca. ATG maintains all of this
information, which can be used to personalize shoppers experiences, including multistage
scenarios that are triggered from specific customer actions on the site.

Endeca Experience Manager employs templates of pre-built templates which determine where
content and data is placed and how it should be rendered. Experience Manager uses prebuilt,
modular components called cartridges that pull in content and data from the Endeca engine, as
well as (optionally) from external systems.

Cartridges contain information about content to be displayed in the application, but also typically
encapsulate the configuration for a particular feature, such as a Guided Navigation component,
spotlight, or results list. The configuration model for a cartridge is defined by a cartridge template,
which describes the properties that can be configured as well as the interface through which the
content administrator can specify their values in Experience Manager. Cartridges typically have
configuration options specific to the cartridge's function, such as the number of refinements to
display (and the order in which to display them) for a Dimension Navigation cartridge; the records
to promote for a Spotlight cartridge; or the sort options and records per page for a Results List
cartridge. (See image).




Image 2

Experience Manager comes with several out-of-the-box cartridges that perform various functions.
It also provides an SDK that allows a customers technical staff to build their own cartridges,
depending on the specific needs of their business.

Here are some examples of cartridges and the functionality that they provide.


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Search Box cartridge. The Search Box cartridge provides site visitors with an interface for using
keyword search in an application. The Search Box cartridge can also be configured to display
auto-suggest results. The user can enable this feature by selecting the appropriate option that is
available to them when they open this cartridge.

Dimension Navigation cartridge. The Dimension Navigation cartridge displays dimension
refinements for Guided Navigation, i.e., the properties that are used for guided navigation on a
web site (size, color, price, etc.). There are several configuration options for this cartridge, such
as the order in which to show the selected dimensions; the ability to set a limit to the number of
dimension refinements shown and to then display a More link that allows customers to display
additional refinements; and the ability to boost or bury certain refinements, e.g., perhaps the
customer wants certain brands to be returned when users either search for a product, or when
they navigate to a certain section of the web site; etc.

Record Spotlight cartridge.

The Record Spotlight cartridge highlights featured or dynamic records to a site visitor. The
cartridge can be placed in the sidebar to show special deals, highly-rated products, or any other
category of featured record results. It can be configured to display the same items across the
entire site by including it in a dynamic slot cartridge, or set to restrict results to the current
navigation state by tailoring the list of featured records based on the landing page that the
cartridge appears on.

These are just a few examples of the out-of-the-box cartridges provided with Experience
Manager, and they illustrate the variety of functionality and business logic that may be
encapsulated in a cartridge.

There has also been a substantial amount of product-supported integration done between ATG
Web Commerce and Endeca Commerce in recent releases of each product. This has included
the creation of multiple ATG-specific cartridges that can be used in Experience Manager.
Examples of these cartridges include:

Category Products Grid cartridge. This cartridge retrieves the ordered list of products from a
category that has been created and populated in ATG Merchandising. This ensures that the
products will appear in the exact order that they have been set by the merchandiser in
Merchandising, as opposed to being retrieved dynamically based on a rule.

Product Spotlight Targeter. This cartridge returns the content of a targeter defined in the ATG
Business Control Center (BCC). In this way, users able to use ATGs powerful personalization
capabilities, but control the placement of content on pages in Experience Manager.

Category Related Products. This cartridge displays an ordered list of products to be displayed
on a category page as related products (typically used for cross- or up-sell purposes), by
retrieving the Related Products for a category that have been populated by a user in ATG
Merchandising.

Again, this is not meant to be an exhaustive list but is referenced to show the variety of cartridges
that have been created, including cartridges built specifically for use with ATG Web Commerce.


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Image 3
Personalization


In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the best practice is to use the personalization
capabilities of Oracle Commerce (both ATG and Endeca).

Since both ATG and Endeca Commerces solutions provide personalization capabilities,
decisions also need to be made about when to use the features of each product. Each solution
provides a set of tools to determine the content to show, with each tool having slightly different
capabilities.

For details about when to use which technology (ATG or Endeca), please refer to the document
ATG-Endeca Integration Best Practice Recommendations.
Mobile

In the context of commerce is it critical to align the mobile and desktop sites in order to deliver
consistent shopper experiences and minimize operational and deployment requirements.

In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the best practice is to use Oracle Commerce to manage
and deliver sites and therefore, it is recommended to use the Oracle Commerce mobile solution.
Non-catalog Content Authoring

WebCenter Sites provides the best business user tooling for authoring non-catalog content; thus
our recommendation is to use WebCenter Sites for the authoring of such content.

As noted previously in the document, WebCenter Sites provides a flexible asset model that
developers can use to create assets for various types of content, such as documents, images,
videos, etc. The content to be managed depends on the nature of the organization: e.g., you may
create articles, photos, and video clips; manage job postings; etc. Developers can create many

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different asset types, giving a company an appropriate range and type of content to create and
publish. Each asset type has its own content entry form, with a unique set of fields.

Asset types created in WebCenter Sites can utilize native WebCenter Sites functionality such as
an image picker, which allows the user to visually choose an image asset from a list of thumbnails
to associate with the asset they are creating or editing.

WebCenter Sites also offers the Clarkii Online Image Editor, which allows you to edit an image
directly in an asset in Form Mode. For example, you can use Clarkii OIE to crop and rotate an
image.

These assets can then be used with Oracle Web Commerce through integration with an
appropriate Endeca Experience Manager cartridge. For example, an article created in WebCenter
Sites might be placed on a page managed by Experience Manager. The business user would
select a cartridge in Experience Manager that was created to handle this asset type; place the
cartridge on the page; and configure it to retrieve its content from the appropriate article.

Content that is created in WebCenter Sites can also be dynamically retrieved and placed on a
page by virtue of indexing any meta data that is associated with a WebCenter Sites managed
asset.

Summary
Oracle has made significant investment in best of breed technologies focused on delivering
differentiated customer experiences. In addition to continued investment in each of these product
platforms, Oracle will continue to further integrate the capabilities to provide a seamless business
user experience and simplified operation environment.

As evidenced by this best practices document, Oracle is also committed to providing customers
with guidance on how to best leverage Oracle products in a manner which is consistent with the
product strategy and roadmap. Given the strength and flexibility of both the Oracle Commerce
and WebCenter Sites solutions, customers can choose to leverage the products in many different
ways and in different environments. The approach defined in this document is focused on
providing guidance when customers are engaged in commerce and driving compelling customer
experiences via digital channels.

For additional information on Oracles Customer Experience solutions, please visit
http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/customer-experience/overview/index.html.