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

This article is brought by Robert Bull, Lead Solution Architect Introduction Back in March I wrote about how SAP had released Spartacus 5 in November 2022. I covered how it had been released as a commercial entity and I had analysed the release policy and then estimated that it would make sense for SAP to update the Composable Storefront package to use a newer version of Node.js during 2023 for ensuring a longer term support prospect. I was partly correct – but I had underestimated what would happen !. In fact as of end-November 2023: there have been 9 releases of the Composable Storefro ..read more

This past weekend, I quickly drafted a utility that could be of use to some of you. It has a somewhat strange purpose — to view and compare filesystem snapshots (“ls -lR”, “dir/S”, or “find .”) from different computers and to prepare a script for synchronizing them with each other or for creating an archive with the selected files from that snapshot. Technically it was a second attempt. About 20-25 years ago, I wrote a small program in Turbo Pascal for MS DOS for the very same purpose. Understandably, none of that work has survived. Then, over the past weekend, I found myself in need of somet ..read more

While implementing the price calculation mechanism we faced a need to reflect the price fluctuation over the previous 30 days in SAP Commerce solution. It was required by the EU Omnibus Directive legislation for e-commerce solutions to ensure transparent price reflection especially relating to promotions and discounts and to protect the clients’ interests. Our customer was operating in the retail optical industry with thousands of products. SAP Commerce out of the box price mechanism didn’t allow for a large number of calculations in the breakdown of big volumes of products. So, we faced the n ..read more