Enabling "Browsing History" in Madisons Store

My Account: Browsing history

The browsing history page displays all the products that have been viewed by the customer, so that they can keep track of their recently viewed products. Recently viewed product lists can encourage customers to purchase items they might be interested in, and helps compare those items with other similar products in the store. The number of items stored in the browsing history is configurable, and contains paging support when viewing many items in the browsing history.

By default , you will not find the "Browsing History" link in the "My Account" page.

Step 1 : Enable the "Browsing History" link in the My Account

1. Login to Management Center
2. Select the "Store Management" menu and work on the Store you want to enable the feature for.
3. Enable the "Browsing History" option as shown in the screenshot below - 
  
4. Click on "Save" and "Close" to save the changes. 
5. Lauch the store and login to go to the "My Account" page. You will find the link appear in the My Account left navigation.

Though the link is enabled , the functionality might not work. Try clicking on few products and then go the the "Browsing History" page. But you will find it blank always. Follow the next steps to complete the setup and enable the feature.

Step 2 : Enabling Management Center marketing features

 Follow the steps to enable the persistant session features , personalization id features and marketing listeners.

Step 3: Creating "BrowsingHistory" espot and "BrowsingHistoryActivity" webactivity

1. The name of the espot is important and has to be "BrowsingHistory" only and nothing else because the AjaxBrowsingHistory.jsp expects an espot with this name only. If you want a different name , make the necessary customizations in the code base.
2. Follow the below sample configurations to display the "viewed products"

3. Next Step is to configure a web-activity of the type "Display Recently Viewed Products". The name of the web-activity can be anything.


           

4. Save and Activate the web-activity.
5. Now , browse few products and return to the "Browsing History" page and you will find that your products show up. The max number of products that will show up as configured in the screenshot above.

Important Notes:

• By default, the server stores the list of recently viewed items for the current shopping session only, for a maximum of 30 minutes. When the customer's session ends or when 30 minutes elapse, that customer's recently viewed list is lost. When the customer returns to the store for another session, the server starts a new recently viewed list. Retention of the recently viewed list is also affected by the marketing user behavior cache configuration. If you want to retain customers' recently viewed lists from one session to the next, then a developer can customize the Marketing tool to store customers' recently viewed lists in the database.
• For the Display Recently Viewed action in a Web activity, the server stores the list of recently viewed items in the marketing user behavior cache only; the list is not stored in the database by default. When the customer's user behavior cache entry is removed from the cache, that customer's recently viewed list is lost. A customer's user behavior cache entry is removed from the cache after not being modified for 30 minutes, or it might be removed when the cache is full. The default size is 10,000 cache entries. You can configure the user behavior cache to hold more entries by increasing the size of the cache and by enabling disk offload. 

Happy Exploring! :)

Incorrectly mapped the extended site store to parent organization?

When you create a store using the Extended Sites Hub, you are prompted to select the Store organization under which your store will be created.

You can decide what should be value for this parameter by understanding the Extended sites organization structure.

However, in case you choose the wrong organization, please follow the simple steps below to map the store to a new organization.

For the purpose of demonstration, I created a B2C- Madison based extended sites store under the Root Organization. If we go through the Extended sites organization structure, we will understand that we should have selected the Seller Organization instead.

Tables we will update:

MBRREL

ORGENTITY

Step 1 : Modify the Store Organistation relationship in MBRREL 

1.  Query the ORGENTITY table to get the descendant_id for your store – Lets call it orgentityId
2.  Query MBRREL to study the current  organization entity relationships. We will find one record mapping your store to Root Organisation (-2001) and sequence = 1
3. Update the SEQUENCE for the current record to 2.
         update mbrrel set sequence = 2 where descendant_id = < orgentityId >;
4. Insert a new record mapping your store to Seller Organisation ( In my DB , orgentity_id for the same is 7000000000000000001
   insert into mbrrel values (< orgentityId >, 7000000000000000001,1,0 );

Step 2: Update the DN in ORGENTITY to reflect the new Store Organization relationship

1. Study the current  DN of the store, it will be something like the following –
   ou=root organizationmyretail,o=root organization
2. Modify it to reflect the new organization structure as follow
ou=root organizationmyretail,o=seller organization,o=root organization
3. Update the ORGENTITY table –
update orgentity set dn = 'ou=root organizationmyretail,o=seller organization,o=root organization' where orgentity_id=< orgentityId >;

Understanding the Extended Sites the easy way

Extended Sites is a widely known feature and I am sure a lot of us have done a lot of reading on the same. We know the concept theoretically but are at times unable to visualize its real power and capabilities.

While exploring more about the concept, I came across some really nice videos on youtube which I have collated below. I hope these videos will help you understand Extended Sites concepts and capabilities in just couple of minutes. It really helped me :)

Know the concept

Microsites and Subsites with IBM WebSphere Commerce




Now, lets get some hands-on

WebSphere Commerce - Extended Sites Part I




WebSphere Commerce - Extended Sites Part II



Happy Learning!

References -
IBM WCS 7 Infocenter

Bob Balfe - blog.balfes.net