Facet Search: The Most Comprehensive Guide. Best Practices, Design Patterns, Hidden Caveats, And Workarounds.
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 »
Autocomplete, Live Search Suggestions, and Autocorrection: Best Practice Design Patterns
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 »
SAP CX LIVE Sessions You Shouldn't Miss in 2018
We’re several weeks away from the SAP CX LIVE, the main SAP Customer Experience event. It’s time to plan your agenda. There are about 350 sessions in two days and all had merit. In this article, I highlighted some of the sessions I’m most looking forward to. Read More »
"No customization" mantra doesn't work anymore
In many projects, I hear the same thing: minimize the number of customizations and stick to out-of-the-box. The rationale is clear: the more things you add or change, the more expensive and complex the further support is going to be. Systems are getting bigger, less transparent, comprehensive and changing the default behaviour creates unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects. The cost of errors is increasing too. However, there is a flip side to that, and that is the lack of flexibility and responsiveness. What is a greater evil? Read More »
Product Image Visual Search in SAP Commerce Cloud / Hybris Commerce
Visual search is one of the latest breakthroughs. It is truly making a mark, especially in the eCommerce arena. In 2017, Pinterest launched a visual discovery tool. Ebay launched image search capabilities for mobile devices. These systems use AI and machine learning, that makes this approach too complex for the simple task of grouping products by color. In this article, I explain the basic solution for the Visual Search, and the details on how to integrate it with SAP Commerce Cloud / SAP Hybris Commerce. You will see how image similarity can be used for product recommendations, such as “similar color products” and “similar shape products”, as well as displaying products whose images are similar to the uploaded one. Read More »
In this article, you will find a collection of the blogs related to hybris and e-commerce development.  They have been hand-picked by me personally during the last years. I use the list below as bookmarks for regular use: for me, it is more convenient than using the bookmark bar in the browser. If you see I missed something important, please let me know.   Read More »
SAP Commerce Cloud 1808 (Hybris Commerce 6.8) is released. What's new?
SAP introduced a new version of SAP Commerce Cloud (previously SAP Hybris Commerce). In this article, I explain the key changes, improvements and enhancements announced by SAP. The article is based on the official release notes and videos as well as a bit of experimenting with the new version. After examination of the materials, code changes and documentation updates, I have to say that this release is just a minor update. Among the enhancements, only a few deserve to be highlighted: Integration API and, at a stretch, SmartEdit Content Versioning. Let’s have a deeper look at the new features. Read More »