The WebSphere Commerce zone contains many resources to help you develop, enhance, and maintain your WebSphere Commerce site. These resources include articles, tutorials, code samples, and roadmaps. This page provides a brief introduction to IBM® WebSphere® Commerce and describes some of the resources available.
IBM WebSphere Commerce is an e-commerce solution for consumer direct, business direct and indirect business environments. It consists of a set of integrated software components that enables enterprises to build and customize e-commerce sites. WebSphere Commerce software uses an open architecture based on a Java™ programming model that allows you to customize the behavior of your sites. WebSphere Commerce is a complete commerce solution that includes WebSphere Application Server, DB2™, WebSphere Commerce Payments, and HTTP server. WebSphere Commerce comes in three editions: Express, Professional, and Enterprise. Depending on the edition, WebSphere Commerce also provides additional software to support live customer care, collaboration, and advanced business analytics. The following figure shows the key components of WebSphere Commerce. For detailed about each component, see WebSphere Commerce product overview.
YWebSphere Commerce Express meets the needs of most small and medium-sized businesses. It provides full consumer direct support and simple business direct support.
WebSphere Commerce Professional meets the needs of most consumer direct businesses. In addition to the features included with WebSphere Commerce Express, WebSphere Commerce Professional includes features such as workspaces and the promotions management system.
WebSphere Commerce Enterprise is the appropriate platform for most Business-to-Business businesses. It offers online commerce and collaboration with traditional and new customers, and partners through management of online trading relationships. Business Edition also provides B2B commerce functions, including accounts, contracts, request for quotes, purchase orders, requisition lists, and approvals.
WebSphere Commerce provides you with several starter stores on which you can base your own business (store or site). Starter stores shorten the time from installing WebSphere Commerce to going live with your site. Each starter store contains a composite store archive that contains all the assets to create a functional store. Because each starter store is packaged with WebSphere Commerce as a store archive, no further installation is necessary. To create a running store, you must publish one of the composite store archives. By default, WebSphere Commerce Developer is preconfigured with published starter stores.
Choose from these learning sources on the WebSphere Commerce zone to fit your
learning style:
Consult the WebSphere Commerce information roadmaps, which guide you through learning the basics, and the different areas in WebSphere Commerce development.
