In one of my projects, it was crucial for me to monitor data volumes and some specific e-commerce system parameters and alert the technical team if there were any abrupt or unexpected changes in them. These fluctuations occasionally (though not always) signaled potential existing issues or an increased likelihood of future problems. I am focusing on operational parameters (orders, shopping carts, customers, logins, product data quality), not technical (page load time, timeouts). Due to the lack of built-in solutions in SAP Commerce for this function, I had to design and implement a custom solu ..read more

This is a deeply technical article, complete with snippets of code, machine learning, algorithms, and all that jazz. We’ll get to that in a minute, but first, let’s start with a bit of “lyrical” introduction. It all started with Norman Rockwell. I’m generally into painting and try to dabble a bit myself, but in my tastes, I am very conservative, even old school, you might say. Shortly before that day, a friend and I were reminiscing about famous American illustrators, and I became engrossed in a collection of Rockwell illustrations in the Saturday Evening Post magazine. They were extraordinari ..read more

Last night, a spark of inspiration on my evening drive turned into a monumental achievement by the early hours: I successfully migrated 6,000 posts from Facebook to my brand-new WordPress blog and later translated them to English and published at RaufAliev.com. So now I have two blogs, in Russian and English, having the same content as my Facebook (I don’t post anything on Facebook that isn’t meant for others to see, and I don’t write or say anything that I wouldn’t say publicly, so from a privacy perspective, everything is okay. Also, I don’t transfer comments to the posts, only the posts the ..read more

For large B2C and B2B marketplaces, searching for individual products, especially when the information comes from independent suppliers, is a very challenging task. Marketplaces cannot always influence what comes from suppliers, and when they can, it is quite expensive to do so with large volumes of products, and such costs are not always justified. However, if the search function is poor, it is typically associated with the marketplace, not with the suppliers’ inadequate product descriptions. The typical hierarchy of a product catalog contains two district groups: categories and products, wh ..read more

Almost seven years ago, I contemplated the future interface for human-computer interaction. Rather than confining the possibilities to a single mode, such as voice or a combination of keyboard and screen, I pondered the integration of multiple inputs. Imagine typing text and speaking simultaneously, prompting the system to adjust its responses based on what it hears—or perhaps even sees. Now, in 2024, with the advancement of multimodal large language models (LLMs), this concept has been revitalized. A particular focus on audio interfaces by Humane AI Pin has received mixed feedback, highlighti ..read more

When exploring any topic, I tend to focus more on limitations than on capabilities. This is because capabilities are widely promoted—everything from documentation to marketing materials talks about them. But limitations have to be gathered bit by bit. When I interview developers, I often ask not about what can be done with the e-commerce platform but about what cannot be done easily or what is difficult or what is expensive to implement. Such questions significantly better reveal the potential and capabilities of a candidate. And now, having recently delved into CommerceTools, I make notes in ..read more

In this article, I want to share an interesting experience. It has nothing to do with SAP Commerce and might even be unrelated to eCommerce, but it could be useful for Solution Architects when tackling a task similar to mine. And the task was interesting. And was part of a big e-commerce project. It was a huge Excel file for generating estimates for B2B customers. A manager entered a bunch of parameters according to customers’ needs and get a printable quote. This Excel spreadsheet was really old, already about ten years old, and all these ten years, different people have been adjusting it, co ..read more

In this article, I want to talk about my experience with how to make a website or online store search more responsive to business requirements and user expectations. It’s common to give too much attention to technical issues, especially now, with the advent of machine learning/AI in this field. But more often than not, the deepest problems are on the surface and their solution is much simpler than a functional refinement. One of the main challenges in managing e-сommerce websites is ensuring the product search feature works effectively. Imagine this: you notice an issue with how products are b ..read more

SAP Commerce Cloud has a custom code generation mechanism for creating DTOs using declarative syntax. Declarative syntax alone makes DTOs management easy, but its modularity is the greatest thing about it. You can have multiple beans.xml configurations in separate extensions, each adding its portion of the config to the final DTO class. In this article, we are going to explore how to utilize an undocumented hints mechanism to add custom logic to DTO generation. In most cases, you only need to configure the list of fields and their types. However, in some cases, you may want more control over t ..read more

This article is brought by Robert Bull, Lead Solution Architect Introduction A number of customers have been talking about the upgrade policies defined by SAP for SAP Commerce Cloud and the Composable Storefront. I mentioned the upgrades last year in the hybrismart.com article. Historically, since I first met hybris 4 in 2009 I have seen clients who did not upgrade their versions of SAP Commerce for years. However, that all changes with latest policy SAP have with the CCV2 environment.  These policies require that the merchant needs to keep on top of the upgrades which are currently ..read more