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? Read More »
Authentication with Hardware Security Keys and WebAuthn in SAP Commerce Cloud
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 »
Document-level access control ensures that the search results have only those products that a logged customer is authorized to see. This is a common request for B2B solutions with a large and sophisticated product and customer models. Many manufacturers and suppliers want to provide exclusive or restrictive access to products for particular partners. Such an approach reduces the number of incorrect or incomplete orders and makes navigation easier. In this article, we are discussing in detail how to support product whitelisting/blacklisting per customer in SAP Commerce Cloud for large product sets and large customer base. We also present our solution and possible alternatives. The tests showed that the solution is capable to process millions of documents, tens thousands of customers and millions of access rules saying what product is blacklisted/whitelisted for what customer. Read More »
Takeaways from SAP SAPPHIRE NOW AND CX LIVE 2019
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 »
Merging Carts When A Customer Logs In: Problems, Solutions and Recommendations
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 »
Over the last years, there has been a huge boost in the popularity of headless eCommerce. Many chose this approach to give more flexibility and freedom around the front-end of their site and how their product catalog is showcased. Creating the storefront from scratch is challenging and full of fun, but very risky if your team doesn’t know this topic inside out. Vue Storefront is known as an open-source mobile-first Progressive Web App storefront, one of two free PWA-ready storefront frameworks available on the market. In this article, Rauf Aliev and Timofey Klyubin explained how Vue Storefront and SAP Commerce can be integrated together. Advantages, limitations, technological “pitfalls”, rejected and chosen solutions, and a demo of what was accomplished. Read More »