History of Sitecore Experience Commerce..

Here is the high-level architecture view -

Previously known as Microsoft Commerce Server, it is now developed, sold, and supported by Sitecore, Sitecore acquired commerceserver.net in late 2013 and released the product as Sitecore Commerce Server in 2014.

Sitecore Commerce Server has the following components:

Core Systems:

1. Catalog
2. Inventory
3. Order Capture
4. Discounts
5. Profiles

Integration Points:

1. Orders Web Service 
2. Catalog and Inventory Web Service + BizTalk Adaptor
3. Profiles Web Service 
4. Marketing Web Service

Desktop Business Tools:

1. Catalog Manager
2. Marketing Manager
3. Customer and Order Manager

Commerce Server
Merchandising Manager (replacement of Catalog Manager)
Sitecore Experience Platform Integration
Integration – Oracle E-Business Suite
Sitecore Experience Commerce - SAP Integration

With the latest release, Sitecore commerce has below core components -

1. Shopping Cart The ability to add/remove/update products stored in the cart
2. Inventory Edit and control each Products inventory
3. Orders Manage an order through its full lifecycle.
4. Checkout Capture all of the necessary information required to complete an Order
5. Entitlements Entitlements track ownership and are used for things like Digital Downloads
6. Pricing Powerful pricing functionality to enable flexible,dynamic pricing for your products 
7. Shops Create multiple online shopping experiences, defining currency, language & payments for each.
8. Fulfillment Complete fulfillment management, whether this is for digital or physical goods.
9. Promotions Flexible & extendable promotions functionality.
10. Catalog The ability to create and manage the catalog of items on sale in your shops.
11. Payments Simple to integrate with 3rd party payment providers

Small issue and fix for at least one object must implement icomparable.

 Recently, I was adding a check for order by and found this issue.

It was because of I put the order by field as  Item["FieldName"] it should be on value like Item["FieldName"].value

Sitecore® Experience Commerce™ 9 - Certification 100, 200 and 300

There are basically three main courses for the Sitecore commerce

Sitecore® Experience Commerce™ 9 100: Overview

Getting Familiar with Sitecore® Experience Commerce™
Managing the Catalog
Tracking Customers and Their Orders
Increasing Sales with Marketing

Sitecore® Experience Commerce™ 9 200: Essentials

Gaining an Insight into the Sitecore® Experience Commerce™ Architecture
Developing Storefronts Using Sitecore Commerce APIs
Developing Sitecore® Experience Commerce™ Storefront Pages Using SXA
Working with Sellable Items etc.

Sitecore® Experience Commerce™ 9 300: Developer

Create & configure a new Storefront Site
Creating a Site Page Framework – you go through how you create the header and footer components and assign those to a page layout for all the page.
Creating pages for the Storefront for displaying sellable items like category pages and product pages.
Creating account management pages for registration, login, my account page, addresses page, etc.
Creating the order flow pages for cart, billing, shipping, payment and confirmation.

I got a chance to get all understand of 9.0 300 certifications full training session, and received all required documentation, tutorials and sample projects.

Reference -

Sitecore commerce- Steps to update the search bar text and Top Bar Links

Here is the simple step to update the SXC search bar text and top bar link -

Content path:- /sitecore/content/Sitecore/Storefront/Data/Commerce/Search Bar/Search Bar

and for top bar link - /sitecore/content/Sitecore/Storefront/Data/Commerce/Top Bar Links/Top Bar Links

We can customize here -

The Sitecore commerce contact structure is well defined and easy to navigate and update.

Certificate of Completion Sitecore Experience Commerce™ Essentials 9.0

Certificate of Completion Sitecore Experience Commerce™ Essentials 9.0.

A lot of learning and understanding of basic foundation. I'm impressed with the latest training model by the Sitecore team.

Certificate of Completion Sitecore Experience Commerce

I got an understanding of below modules.

• Gaining an Insight into the Sitecore Experience Commerce™ Architecture
• Developing Storefronts Using Sitecore Commerce APIs
• Developing Sitecore Experience Commerce™ Storefront Pages Using SXA
• Working with Sellable Items
• Testing the Checkout Process
• Extending the Sitecore Commerce Engine
• Sitecore Experience Commerce™ Documentation and Support

Sitecore XC - Certification for adding a new plugin.

Today, I have completed a certificate to add a new plugin in Sitecore XC, I have been working on a few projected and wanted to make sure that we are following the best practices.

I got full marks :)

Here are the details and take away points -

Basically, I would suggest to see this document - link this has all the required details for developing a new plugin,

Sitecore XC - Skip installation modules

During the deployment, if we want to skip a particular module, We can simply do this by following below steps -

In the folder where you deployed the SIF.Sitecore.Commerce package, open the
Configuration/Commerce/Master_SingleServer.json

Remove the reference - As an example below

to remove a complete task - Access the folder where we deployed the SIF.Sitecore.Commerce package, open the
Configuration\Commerce/, and locate the "Tasks" section.
The following shows an example of the "tasks" section in the Configuration/Commerce/
CommerceEngine/CommerceEngine.Initialize.json file. Remove completed tasks, and save your changes. Now run the Deploy-Sitecore-Commerce.ps1 script again. The script performs the remaining deployment tasks.

We can simply skip the task by passing parameter like

Install-SitecoreConfiguration @params -Skip ModulePowershellExtensions_CheckPaths,Module-PowershellExtensions_InstallModul

Sitecore Commerce 8.2.1 - Add a new field to Unique Catalog.

Here are a few simple steps to add a new field in Sitecore Commerce 8.2.1.

Navigate to - /sitecore/templates/Commerce/Catalog Generated

navigate to the builder tab in content editor and add a new field and add the appropriate definition.

Map a Sitecore Field Type to a Commerce Server Property Type.

Create a new .config file in the Website\App_Config\Include directory of your Sitecore site.

Create a configuration section that overrides the sitecorename attribute for the Commerce Catalog type you want to change.

For example, the following configuration changes all Commerce Catalog DateTime properties to be edited using the Sitecore Date control:

       

After saving the file, We need to restart the IIS.