IBM WebSphere Commerce
Professional Edition.

Robust online selling environment enables B2C and B2B companies to offer personalized customer buying experiences, streamline marketing, sales and order processes, optimize operational efficiencies and accommodate high transaction volumes.



  • WebSphere® Commerce helps companies of all sizes enable their customers to do business on demand -- when they want, where they want and how they want.


  • In today's business environment, customers are more demanding and their loyalty harder to gain and keep. It no longer sufficient simply to offer products and services for sale online. To compete, companies both B2C and B2B must build closer customer relationships, maximize revenue opportunities and quickly respond to market developments. All while keeping costs under control.


  • WebSphere Commerce uniquely supports these goals:
    • Supports all of a company's business models and e-commerce sites - whether B2C, B2B or both - on a single platform
    • Provides the best balance of out-of-box readiness and complete adaptability
    • Delivers rich, seamless customer experience across channels
    • Leverages the industry's most complete middleware platform for end-to-end integration
    • Fully exploits the power of the underlying platform for maximum performance, scalability and adaptability

Features & Benefits

IBM WebSphere® Commerce Professional Edition provides enhancements over previous versions and supports the following enterprise capabilities:

New in v5.6.1

  • Marketing Experimentation - an A/B Testing solution allows business users to test customer response to site content, promotions, navigation and more in a controlled manner before deploying new site changes broadly. Marketing Experimentation has multi channel implications as sellers can lower costs of testing new marketing concepts by rapidly and cost effectively testing concepts on the web and using knowledge gained in less dynamic media such as print catalogs and store displays. Now business users, with no involvement from IT, can create A/B Split tests called Marketing Experiments and evaluate the results rapidly and cost effectively. Sellers leveraging Marketing Experimentation will be better positioned to optimize site marketing campaigns, promotions, creative content, navigation, targeted product recommendations and other factors for maximum response.
  • Search Engine Optimization - Search engines, such as Google, have become an integral tool in the customer buying process. Many customers start their product search by going to a search engine and doing a search on the product they are interested in. Sellers who take steps to gain the highest rankings in a search engines natural (free) results can dramatically improve the volume of customers finding their way to the sellers site. There are a number of steps sellers can take improve their rankings in search engines results. WebSphere Commerce provides functionality as well as guidelines to help improve the results of search engine indexing.

Core Product Capabilities:
  • Analytics and business intelligence - WebSphere Commerce Analyzer (WCA) is now integrated with Tivoli Web Site Analyzer (TWSA), allowing you to create reports based on its powerful click-stream analysis capabilities. WCA also includes redesigned installation and configuration components, decreasing install time.
  • Marketing and merchandising - Deliver enhanced targeted e-mail campaign, advanced rules-based discounts or promotions and improved tooling for merchandising associations such as cross sells and up sells.
  • E-mail support:
    • E-mail delivery of news and promotions
    • Manage e-mail activities at store level instead of site level and view statistics on e-mail activities
  • Marketing campaigns
    • Support e-mail as a campaign delivery mechanism
    • Time sharing of multiple initiatives on same spot
    • Advanced discounts and promotions
    • Rules-based discount supports complex promotion models such as shipping discount and buy one get one free
    • Supports tiered discounts, product level discounts, category discounts, order level discounts and shipping level discounts
    • Supports advanced scheduler for upcoming promotions
  • Coupons
    • Allow guest shoppers to capture and redeem eCoupons and manage eCoupons using a coupon wallet
    • Allow merchandiser to create eCoupons promotion, and manage eCoupon promotion and modify eCoupon promotion terms
  • Promotion Codes
    • Tie promotion codes to one or more promotion. Distribute promotion codes via multiple channels and track channel effectiveness.
  • Dynamic Cross-sells and up-sells
    • Enhancements in merchandising and campaigns tooling allow target product to be recommended at runtime based on the content of the current page, shopping cart and previous purchases
    • Predefined merchandizing associations in catalog to support cross-sell, up-sell, replacements, accessories or any other product association needed
  • Guided Selling - an interactive online product catalog that provides customers with different ways of finding what they want, called shopping metaphors.
    • Creating a search space - optimized parametric search with focus on categories and base search space
    • Creating the Product Exploration metaphor - view a list of product which has matching parameter values within a given category.
    • Creating the Product Comparison metaphor - view the related products side by side for similarities and differences vCreating a Guided Sell metaphor - Provides a customer a series of multiple choice questions to guide the customer to refines their search to a smaller list of products.
  • Catalog Management Tooling - Simplify product content management:
    • Content Creation and Management - Allows user to perform product and editorial content creation and management task quickly and effectively.
    • Sales Catalogs - A flexible display structure that allows the business user to manage multiple catalog hierarchies.
    • Bulk File Aggregation - Enhance bulk file management tools provide out of the box support for importing content from trading partners and bulk file import support to catalog manager
  • Integration - for enterprise needs:
    • IBM WebSphere Business Integration support - Provide a new transport mechanism used by subsystems to interact with external systems through WebSphere Business Integration collaborations.
    • WC Messaging system - existing WC Common Connector Framework (CCF) is enhanced to support Java 2 Enterprise Edition Connector Architecture (J2EE/CA) standard including JavaMail Connector, JMS Connector and File Connector
    • MQ Transport Adapter - upgrades to support J2EE/CA compliant
  • Live Help/Customer Care Collaboration - Offers an integrated "live help" and customer care function integrated out-of-the-box and based on Lotus® Sametime.
    • Support multiple queues and provide enhanced capabilities on queue management
    • Support monitoring of customized customer attributes in a store
    • Support customer requests to be routed into queues
  • Analytics and Business Intelligence - enables WebSphere Commerce customers to analyze information related to their customers' e-commerce activities. WebSphere Commerce customers can improve the effectiveness of their company's marketing campaigns and promotions.
    • A Business Intelligence (BI) infrastructure integrated with the following IBM Data Management programs:
    • DB2 Universal Database® (UDB) Enterprise Server Edition V8.1
    • Intelligent Miner for Data V8.1
    • A documented and customizable datamart.
    • Extraction, transformation, move and load (ETML) functions to extract and transform WebSphere Commerce operational data sources using aggregation and summarizing techniques. This now includes support for Coupons, Discounts and multiple stores.
    • Data mining models, which enable the analyzing of complex data characterizations, relationships, and projections with regard to customer segmentation.
    • End-user Web analytical reporting enablement for WebSphere Commerce's Reporting Framework.
  • Operational Reports - based on WebSphere Commerce Reporting Framework, generates reports in real time. These reports can provide useful information about the sales, traffic, and customers from your site.
  • Tivoli Web Site Analyzer - helps turn raw web data into valuable e-business intelligence. It provides you with a clear picture of the over-all health and integrity of your e-business infrastructure supporting business impact management.
  • WebSphere Commerce Payments - provides a secure electronic payment process for Internet merchants through a single, unified interface. Based on open standards-based technology, WebSphere Commerce Payments works with plug-ins called "payment cassettes" to support multiple payment protocols.
  • System Management - WebSphere Commerce provides the following:
    • Organization and User Administration
    • Problem Determination - automatically validates the correctness of WebSphere Commerce Installation and instance creation and JRas, the WebSphere Commerce logging infrastructure consolidated with WebSphere Application Server to allow for use of common tooling and to correlate logging data throughout the system
    • Performance Monitoring - Integrated use of WebSphere Application Server PMI (Performance Monitoring Interface) enabling WebSphere Commerce data to be viewed through the Tivoli Performance Viewer.
  • Installation - installation and configuration to ensure a system is installed correctly and pre-requisites are available:
    • WebSphere Commerce and all its associated software is installed through the WebSphere Commerce Install Shield based on Install Shield for Multiplatform Edition (ISMPE).
    • Configuration Manger supports remote machine configurations and an addition of Password Manager Tool which lets you to manage their WebSphere Commerce passwords from a single location.
    • A new Problem Determination (PD) Tool: a Java base tool that analyzes the up and running logs and generates reports for troubleshooting problem.
  • Web Services - WebSphere Commerce can be the service provider by enabling its business functions as Web services that can be accessed by external systems. Also, WebSphere Commerce to be the service requester by enabling it to invoke Web services hosted by external systems.