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module from the very first version, but it was obvious to everybody that the solution was terribly old-fashioned and outdated.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 »
In this article, I structured the main concepts, best-practices, design recommendations, interaction patterns and visual design considerations for the faceted search. I believe this work covers every aspect of the facet search UI: everything you need to know to create facet search component from scratch or using the ready building blocks from the SAP Commerce Cloud out-of-the-box search module. At the end of the article you will find a summary explaining what features are implemented in the default SAP Commerce Cloud Accelerators; for those which are not implemented, you will find my ballpark estimations of the efforts needed. 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 »
Groovy Scripting allows you to access server objects directly from your browser. It is an essential tool for troubleshooting and debugging. This article is 7th part of the series. Read More »
This article continues a series “Takeaways from SAP CX LIVE Barcelona”. This time I share my notes and thoughts based on the great presentation given by Axel Großmann, an enterprise architect for New Commerce Cloud. Read More »
Last week concluded SAP Customer Experience Live, a gathering of bright minds and change-makers working in the field of customer-facing solutions powered by SAP. For those of you who didn’t make it to the annual event in Barcelona, I’ve pulled together a few takeaways. Read More »
