I want to focus on a requirement I have met on several projects over the years where the merchant has multiple instances of SAP-Commerce (hybris) and they want their non-production environments to be “more representative” of the production environment in terms of the data.Many merchants have 3 such environments typically defined as development, staging and production and as time passes by, the production environment receives multiple BAU changes to core data areas such as web content, products/categories/classifications undertaken by merchandising teams or product management and of course a lot of data is generated through customer registrations and orders placed.
However, the non-production environments are frequently not kept in line in terms of web content, product data or representation in terms of quantities of customers or orders. I’m not referring here to the code and core configuration related data that is included in builds.
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Taking advantage of back-in-stock notifications, customers are informed that a product they were interested in recently has become available again. Alternatively, a customer may want to get subscribed to the product price updates and get notified when the price drops on a product.
As a result, customers are more likely to return to make a purchase. These two features are often considered as must-have for almost any marketplace solution.
Their implementation and design are also considered to be quick and easy. In fact, it is not so — there are many points for consideration easy to miss in the design phase. In this article, I focus on the potential pitfalls and best practices in implementing “Back-in-stock notifications” and “Price drop alerts”. Read More »
Recently, our team successfully completed a CCv1 (SAP private cloud) to CCv2 (public cloud on Microsoft Azure) SAP Commerce Cloud (Hybris) migration project for one of our manufacturing customers. Though this was not a new experience for EPAM in general, there are always new things to be learned as unique circumstances, customizations, configurations, etc. generate new problems & challenges to solve. In this article, we summarize the lessons learned and obstacles encountered. Read More »
There are dozens, even hundreds of test automation frameworks available, and we developed our own. Why? Why? Was it worth the effort?
This article describes our needs and our solution, E2E CLI: the architecture of the API testing tool which has been used by our team for about 2 years. Back in 2020, it was developed by me from scratch over the course of a weekend — In other words, it is a very simple piece based on very simple ideas. That first version was supporting 80% of the functionality available today in the last version (and described below). We don’t add features without good reason.
We use this tool to end-to-end test all our services and integration flows. Whenever we make changes to a software system, we need to ensure that they do not break what was already working.
As the architect and lead developer, I designed and developed it from the ground up, so, of course, I am very proud of my brainchild. But the field cannot be well seen from within the field. You know, reinventing wheels is not always bad. When you build something on your own, you are in full control over what is being built, what its purpose will be, and when it is finally conceived and executed as you wish. It has been two years since I have encountered any alternative to our solution.
To reach a wider audience, I found it beneficial to share key concepts hoping to get some feedback from the community and enhance the product.
Technically, the tool has nothing to do with SAP Commerce; it’s for testing. However, our entire team, which uses this tool daily, is focused mainly on SAP Commerce development. And the tool is tailored to be used with SAP Commerce.
While the client (for whose benefit the tool is being used) has authorized me to share high-level details, I cannot disclose names or code. In spite of this, the conceptual view should be useful on its own and might become a good foundation for your own solution.
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A shopping cart is the centerpiece of almost every e-commerce website.
In fact, this component is the first thing that makes an e-commerce store different from just an online catalog. Working with issues and challenges related to the cart is something you’ll never forget.
The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, at the opening of his novel Anna Karenina, writes ‘All Happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ You know, the diversity of cart-related issues I have been observing in the SAP Commerce projects, made me think that Tolstoy meant the developers as well. The diversity of the issues and challenges in this component is so vast that every case is different. However, when it comes to building or optimizing the shopping cart processes, understanding the limitations, pitfalls, and peculiarities is a huge plus.
Let’s have a look at how a shopping cart works in SAP Commerce under the hood and how to avoid making mistakes in shopping cart customization.
Read More »It all started with the idea of making the built-in flexible search console more convenient for a developer. It is common to find ourselves forgetting the name of an attribute or its type. Imagine my surprise when I found the traces of this feature in the HAC source code. SAP left them unfinished and probably abandoned. For example, for the Impex console, suggestions are basically implemented and almost ready, but for some reason, they have not been finished and not enabled.
In this article, I’m filling this gap and document how to enable autosuggestions in the Impex console. Additionally, I introduce my custom solution for Flexible Search suggestions and autocomplete. Read More »
The essentials were thoroughly explained in the first part of the series. Since the topic is controversial and should be used with caution, we highly recommend reading the introductory part before going further with this piece.
You need to be aware of the potential risks, limitations, pitfalls, and caveats of the ORM engine. In this work, we are explaining those details. We’d like to touch upon a few elements or aspects, you need to take into account when considering using native SQL in your SAP Commerce code. In this part you will learn more about the SAP Commerce L1 cache, multitenancy aspects, service layer direct, and performing faster bulk updates.
Come take a look into the v2005 release of SAP Commerce Cloud. I’ll cover cool and interesting new features, enhancements, and changes, and offer some commentary on what I like and what I like… less. Judge for yourself what SAP did well and what might warrant some extra polish.
Some say they believe they won’t be able to use the knowledge and experience anywhere else in their careers.
Some of them see this move as ‘boxing’ themselves in.
It is generally believed that focusing on the niche product may cause taking a lot of time in the future to get re-trained for a different product or technology if the current market conditions change and SAP Commerce will fade in relevance and popularity. Proprietary platforms come and go, and developers feel afraid to find themselves with useless knowledge and meaningless experience.
Even though I generally share the view and arguments above, I also believe that SAP Commerce is a special case. What I want to leave you, then, is with the explanation of why I think so.
Read More »On May 19th, 2020, Forrester released their Forrester Waves™ for B2C Commerce Suites and B2B Commerce Suites. Find out how SAP Commerce Cloud (Hybris) fared. Would you score it the same?Read More »
In a continuation of my previous research article on insights into the usage history of various SAP Commerce Cloud (Hybris) versions over a period of years, let’s see how the recent release of SAP Commerce Cloud v2005 impacts my previous commentary.
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This research article takes a look at the usage history of various SAP Commerce Cloud (Hybris) versions over a period of years, garnering insights into how the ecosystem of SAP Commerce Cloud (Hybris) solution owners react and respond to new releases and if/how they opt to upgrade to those newer versions. Will these insights match your expectations & experiences?
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If you need to create complex behavior from the simulated virtual users in the load test, the built-in capabilities of out-of-the-shelf products may not be sufficient. For example, parsing output formats from an API response to create the formatted inputs for an API request may be difficult for a particular load testing tool, but a quick and easy exercise for a high-level programming language.One of the possible ways is using designated libraries to write our own simple load generator from scratch. For our project, this approach has proven to be a faster and reliable way to address the concurrency issues in the SAP Commerce Cloud custom code. In this article, we explain how to write a load generator from scratch with Python.
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When the coronavirus outbreak happened in China, it boosted local e-commerce as many stuck at their homes forced to buy their goods online. Sales of fresh food on JD.com reportedly jumped 215% during the 10-day period and counting. The ability to serve a large number of customers is growing every year. The traffic may be doubled in a week. How to make sure your system is capable to serve high traffic demand? In today’s article I’m sharing my experience with Tsung, a high-performance testing framework.
The SAP Commerce Cloud APIs are highly customizable, and even smallest changes in configuration, data model or Java code may result in performance degradation. Performance testing is especially important in cases where concurrency may be the source of the problem. To recognize and fix such issues timely, it is recommended to perform regular performance testing, ideally integrated into the build and deployment pipelines. This article is devoted to Apache JMeter, one of the well-known tools for automated (and) performance testing.
Any SAP Commerce Cloud setup is based on a multi-server setup organized as web cluster. This product comes with clustering support out of the box since very early versions. However, many years in a row, it is still one of the most challenging topics.
JGroups is an essential component of SAP Commerce Cloud. It is widely used as an embedded solution for distributed messaging and eventing in the cluster. It is hard to say that it is underdocumented or it has some quirks that nobody knows how to encounter. However, almost every large project stumbles with JGroups. This article is aimed to shed some light on the internals of the SAP Commerce Cloud clustering and JGroups.
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SAP Commerce developers everywhere face the problem speed of building/restarting hybris. Probably everyone knows this is a long time waiting for the project to build and waiting for the server to start. In cases when the developer makes frequent changes in the code and wants to see the result immediately, the work is significantly slowed down. Many developers use JRebel and similar tools, but unfortunately, they are not suitable for everyone and don’t work for a number of cases. This article explains how to make the compile time shorter.
Product data is a core of e-commerce and integral part of the customer experience and customer journey. The well-organized product data drives customer acquisition, sales and eventually results in the increasing lifetime value of a customer.
SAP has recently announced a new SaaS offering, SAP Product Content Hub, a cloud-based solution for product and information management (PIM). The new product relies on the SaaS model only.
In this article, I’m basically just going to give a little bit of an introduction to what SAP Product Content Hub is as well as shed some light on what is under the hood in terms of architecture and customizability. Read More »
What content management system you use is of a much higher importance today than it was years ago. Today’s CMS needs to contend with a multi-device world with a wide variety of tablets, mobiles, laptops, and be architecturally ready for new not-yet-existing channels in the consumer’s universe, such as AR/VR and the Internet of Things.
A CMS typically consists of a frontend part, or a «head», and backend. The headless CMS, as their name says, don’t stick to a single predefined “head”. Theoretically, you can develop your own if it is good for your case. Another name for headless CMS is API-first because this interaction is based on APIs.
For example, the old hybris CMS Cockpit had both parts built with ZK Framework, which orchestrates both the HTML/Javascript “head” and was the essential part of the CMS backend. These parts were tightly connected and intertwined into a single unit called CMS Cockpit. Later, SAP announced Smartedit, which has been a big bet and a quantum leap for Commerce Cloud’s content management. Spartacus, the open-source Javascript storefront from SAP, well complemented Smartedit. I published the comprehensive reviews of both products in the blog earlier.
There are a number of headless content management systems that are mature enough to efficiently replace the built-in Smartedit CMS. Among them, I would highlight Contentful, Prismic, DotCMS, Cloud CMS, Amplience, and Contentstack as well-established and innovative products with a clear roadmap and good integration capabilities.
One of my recent research projects was aimed at using Contentstack as a headless content management system for SAP Commerce Cloud. This article uncovers the key highlights of the research. As a result of that work, I also created a data migration tool for moving existing CMS content from Commerce Cloud to Contentstack.
What is Contentstack? Contentstack is a SaaS headless CMS with an API-first approach that offers the approach known as Content-as-a-Service. It focuses on managing structured content into data feeds that other applications, such as Commerce Cloud, can consume. You can design a content data model interactively or via the Contentstack API and populate the structures with the content interactively or via the same API.
In this article, I pay special attention to the data migration from Commerce Cloud’s CMS to Contentstack. This exercise helped me to see the complexity in all its glory. Because when you design a system from scratch, you can evade the platform’s constraints by designing the structures compatible only with the new CMS. When you need to migrate data, you have to find a solution on how to adapt concepts and data models to get them compatible with Commerce Cloud.
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Payments is a critical part of any e-commerce system. Integrating with a new payment processor is often full of unknowns for developers, and the documentation is either too cumbersome and time-consuming or, on the contrary, scanty and, to the extent it is available, tends to focus only on technical details.
In this article, we would introduce “SAP Commerce Developers Toolset” as a free open-source solution for IntelliJ IDEA IDE. Read More »
SAP Commerce Data Hub is an ETL integration platform introduced by SAP back in September 2014 as part of Hybris 5.3. Today it is being decommissioned because of better alternatives but many are still using it and may benefit from these insights.
In this article, I am going to dissect Data Hub and turn it inside out. It is more or less a post-mortem at this point but for those who are still using Data Hub, it may be a good complement to the official documentation.
I must say that nobody liked Datahub despite all the efforts being made by SAP. I think we’ve put up with it for too long. It was the only SAP-aware integration platform that comes with Hybris/SAP Commerce, and later SAP Commerce which was recommended by the vendor for master and transactional data replication. Read More »
There are different ways to integrate SAP Commerce Cloud with SAP and non-SAP systems. The choice would depend upon the capabilities and limitations of the systems involved. These are related to the integration interfaces, data formats, extensibility, cost of changes, strategic plans and many other factors.
Right now we are facing to a kind of uncertainty because one solution, SAP Commerce Data Hub, is declared retiring, and another, Cloud Platform Integration, is defined as strategic and developing that may create an impression that the product is immature and in beta (it is not so!).
In fact, SAP Cloud Platform Integration is not too young as many from SAP Commerce/Hybris community think. The platform has been continuously evolving since June 2013. It went by another name, SAP HANA Cloud Integration (SAP HCI). The product was renamed at the beginning of 2017 as part of a general rebranding of SAP’s cloud offering. In 2018, SAP SCPI started showing up in the context of Commerce projects.
In this article, I want to address the most common myths and objections associated with this product and explain the fundamental concepts behind the solution. Read More »
Back in 2016, EPAM released an Eclipse plugin that makes it easier for developers to work with SAP Commerce code. It was released in January 2017. Recently we introduced a second version of the plugin. In this article, Maxim Bilohay, one of the plugin developers, describes new features and improvements. Read More »
Today SAP officially released a new version of SAP Commerce Cloud, 1905. “05” stands for “May”, today is 30th, so SAP barely made it on time. What is new?
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In this article, I give a technical overview of hardware security key based authentication and take you through a worked example of SAP Commerce and hardware security key integration. Read More »
Last week, the 30th annual SAP SAPPHIRE NOW conference took place March 7-9 in sunny Orlando, FL. This year, it was three in one: SAPPHIRE NOW, ASUG conference and CX LIVE. All three brought no fewer than 30,000 attendees to the Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center. More than 2400 sessions were held during the three days, spread throughout more than 1,5 million square feet of exhibition space, meeting rooms and halls. For those of you who didn’t make it to SAPPHIRE NOW and CX LIVE, I’ve pulled together key takeaways from both. Read More »
When it comes to your overall website usability and providing good user-experience to your site visitors, the login component plays a very important role. This article explains how it should be built to provide the best customer experience. I am focusing on how to implement login forms and authentication process in the e-commerce systems built on top of SAP Commerce Cloud, but general recommendations and findings are applicable for other platforms too. Read More »
Will you be attending the SAPPHIRE or SAP CX Live events in Orlando next week? As usual, I am highlighting some of the sessions seem interesting to me and hopefully to you also, the reader. Read More »
Non-product content management has for many years been the weakest link of the SAP Commerce platform. Formally, the suite had a WCMS module from the very first version, but it was obvious to everybody that the solution was terribly old-fashioned and outdated.
Already back in 2016, SAP Hybris Commerce was extended with a new solution, SmartEdit. On the one hand, SAP released it too early. Many commented that the product is underbaked to replace WCMS Cockpit. Even two years later, Smartedit had drawn much criticism from the users and developers. On the other hand, it was long overdue. We had been waiting for a replacement for years.
In the search of the truth, in 2018, I was examining Smartedit in detail and shared the findings here on Hybrismart. There hasn’t been a lot of water under the bridge since 2018, but the situation with Smartedit has taken a definite turn for the better. However, being a “non-mandatory” component during two years, it was generally ignored by the community. After all, why should we use Smartedit if there is a good old WCMS Cockpit, time-tested and proven, albeit with known issues and poor customizability? This is why only a small percentage of developers are aware of Smartedit from the technical perspective. I hope this article will help them to move forward. Read More »
When an anonymous customer has a non-empty cart and wants to log in, what shopping cart should they see? The question is about what should happen to the items in the account-linked carts versus the items in the anonymous carts. There are different options, and some of them come with SAP Commerce Cloud. In this article, I will review the existing implementations and propose a new one to consider as a possible alternative. Also, you will see why the merging cart strategy implemented in SAP Commerce Cloud requires additional optimization for high traffic and large volume websites. Read More »
Come take a look into the 1811 release. We’ll cover cool and interesting new features, enhancements, and changes, and offer some commentary on what we like and what we like… less. Judge for yourself what SAP did well and what might warrant some extra polish. Read More »
In the various sources, the terms like Autocomplete and Suggestions are not defined clearly. They turned out to be too wide to avoid confusion when defining design patterns and software requirements. The customers use the wrong terms in the RFPs, the partners try to use the RFP language and mix that with their own terminology. In this article, I review these topics in depth. Read More »
Have you ever thought about a top 3 things you wanted to change in the platform? I guess Ant would hit almost 100% of your made-up lists. This article outlines details about an offline project done by a group of EPAM’s hybris enthusiasts who made a great step forward with migration from Ant to Maven as a primary build system for a platform.
We are the ones who work with SAP Commerce Cloud day to day. Are we the ones who can help improve platform for the best? Read More »
