Customer-facing stores are stores that provide a Web storefront that customers can access directly. These stores are the main components of your site. WebSphere Commerce supports the following types of customer-facing stores:
- Consumer direct
- A store that supports commerce transactions involving products, services, or information directly between businesses and consumers.
- B2B direct
- A store that supports commerce transactions involving products, services, between two businesses or parties.
Hub
- A site that enables its customers or partners to access products or services available from one or more partners or clients of the hub owner, through the use of other stores on the site.
Hosted store
- A store that is hosted by the site operator for the owner of the store. The store owner may have the option of administering the store. A hosted store can be a B2B direct or consumer direct store.
Extended Site
- A site that allow your selling organization to provide unique storefronts for different enterprise customers or showcase a number of branded storefronts. Creation and management of the B2B direct Extended Sites is through the hub. These Extended Sites may share much of the data, such as master catalog and list prices, and presentation information.
For direct sales (whether consumer direct or B2B direct) stores or hub sites, you must create storefront assets, business logic and store data for each store. These assets can be created traditionally, by creating the assets for that store only, or by creating the assets to be used by other stores. This is done by creating the storefront and business logic assets either in an asset store or as data that can be used across stores. You may also want to use assets from other stores to create portions of your direct sales (whether consumer direct or B2B direct) stores or hub sites.
In the samples provided with WebSphere Commerce, the majority of the hosted and Extended Sites stores are created by sharing assets from existing asset stores. For example, rather than creating the storefront or catalog assets for each store you are hosting, you use the storefront and, depending on your business, the catalog from another store. In order to facilitate creating hosting stores, WebSphere Commerce uses asset stores. The following diagram illustrates how hosted stores use the assets from the hosted storefront asset store and the catalog asset store. The hosted storefront asset store can be either a consumer direct or B2B direct store and resellers select the store type when they create a hosted store.
Your hosted business administrators then have the option of making cosmetic changes (such as a new look and feel, their own new logo and some of their own text) to customize their store, as well as changing certain data (filtering the catalog, changing prices and so on).
You can also create hosted stores traditionally, that is by creating the storefront assets, business logic, and store data separately for each hosted store.
Store Creation wizard
The Store Creation wizard provided with WebSphere Commerce allows you to create stores quickly and easily. The wizard asks a customer to provide some basic data about their store (name, description, and so on), allows the customer to select the storefront or catalog they want to use, and then creates the store for them. The resulting store has some unique data (basic store data that makes it a unique store), but uses the storefront and catalog data from existing asset stores.
The Store Creation wizard's behavior is governed by a template, which determines what options are available for creating the hosted store, including store relationships, shipping modes, messages, and shared fulfillment center. WebSphere Commerce provides several templates for the Store Creation wizard, one for each supported business model. These templates are located in the WC_installdir/xml/trading/xml directory.
A template is associated with the Store Creation wizard, based on the type of storefront asset store chosen in the wizard. For example if you choose to use assets from the reseller storefront asset store (identified as RPS in the STORETYPE field in the STORE table) the Store Creation wizard uses the TemplateHostingContractRPS.xml.
Note: It is also possible to create hosted stores or Extended Site stores by importing an XML service agreement. WebSphere Commerce provides templates to assist with this task.
To change the assets that the hosted store shares, you must change the asset store.