IBM Commerce Service is a cloud-based e-commerce platform that helps companies deliver consistent brand experiences across channels. It provides tools for business users to manage online stores, catalogs, content and more without IT involvement. The platform offers starter stores, integration with third parties, and options for customization within defined standards to ensure performance and scalability. Implementation services are available to help set up the platform for new customers.

1. Solution Guide
Cross IndustryIBM Commerce
IBM Commerce Service
Offering Summary
Deliver a seamless and consistent buying experience
across all channels
Digital commerce is no longer simply about selling online. It’s about
delivering a personalized, more compelling, more engaging buying
experience—an experience that extends beyond the web to multiple
channels, including mobile, social, call center and in store. As
technology plays a bigger role with on and off line shopping,
consumers have become more informed and knowledgeable by gaining
access to ever-increasing sources of information. This represents a new
set of challenges to managing brands both online and offline. Which
increases the need for customer convenience and nothing short of a
delightful experience is acceptable. Now with leading technologies
companies can deliver a consistent, integrated experience as they cross
channels and interact at different touch points, facilitating a more
personalized and seamless customer buying experience.
IBM Commerce Service
IBM Commerce Service is a powerful and agile customer engagement
platform for omni-channel commerce, that helps deliver seamless and
consistent brand experiences. With powerful capabilities for
personalized customer engagement and easy-to-use business user tools,
IBM Commerce Service offers reliability and flexibility that can scale to
address digital selling requirements—in virtually every industry,
company size or selling model. Brands can easily build and manage
online stores and enable business users to manage catalogs, content,
and merchandise products without IT involvement.
Solution Details
IBM Commerce Service offers a starter store to help B2C and B2B
brands get to market quickly. There are pre-built integration
capabilities to selected third-party vendors, as well as an open
architecture so you have the flexibility to easily integrate with other
ISV solutions for added capabilities. This provides for an end-to-end
web store process. The solution also includes business user tools to
manage product catalog and online merchandising activities.
Benefits:
• A single customer engagement
platform making it easier for both B2B
and B2C buyers to do business
• Deliver an engaging omni-channel
experience and accelerate time to
market
• Empower business users with easy to
use tools for more control over content,
product catalogs, price lists and
promotions.

2. Solution Guide
Cross Industry
2
IBM Commerce
The application is delivered under the SaaS model which
includes: a branded online store that presents products and
categories in an organized and compelling way along with the
ability to navigate, filter and search so shoppers can easily find
the products they are most interested in. The online store is
also the place where transactions for an online business occur
with an easy to use and navigate checkout process.
Additionally, business users have access to IBM Management
Center, a suite of tools that support catalog management,
merchandising and marketing tasks for business users. The
application also offers the flexibility to easily customize the
storefront to fit unique needs and connect with a multitude of
payment, tax, social and email solutions within prescribed
limits to manage optimal performance. You also have the
option to further integrate the application with external back
end systems such as order management, fulfillment and
financial systems. Integration capabilities are provided for
IBM Order Management, IBM Digital Analytics and
BazzarVoice for ratings and reviews.
The following section describes various aspects of the solution
in more detail:
Web storefront
The web store for IBM Commerce Service offers a full set of
B2C and B2B e-commerce features, including:
• Multiple starter stores for B2C and B2B
• Catalog browsing and searching
• Registration and account management
• Shopping cart
• Checkout and order functions
• Marketing and promotions
• Search engine optimization
• Contracts and Entitlements
Management Center tools
Management Center is a web-based application that provides
your company with a suite of tools for managing your store.
For example, you can manage your catalog, create
promotions, schedule ads to run on your store pages, add
custom content pages, and upload product and marketing
images.
Workspace Management tool – Used to organize, schedule,
and publish changes to the store. You can track the progress
of store changes, and ensure that the changes go through the
required checkpoints before being published to the live store.
Catalogs tool – Used to manage master and sales catalogs and
all the products they contain.
Promotions tool – Used to create and manage promotions for
orders, categories, and products. Includes support for
promotion code and coupon promotions.
Marketing tool – Used to create and manage activities that
support the store’s marketing campaigns. You can use the
tool’s extensive precision marketing features to deliver
targeted marketing messages to customers on store pages,
create customer segments, and fine-tune search results.
Assets tool – Used to upload product images, marketing ads,
and other files to Management Center so that the files can be
used on the storefront.

3. Solution Guide
Cross Industry
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IBM Commerce
Solution Standards
IBM Commerce Service provides powerful capabilities packaged to ensure optimal performance and adequate scalability. To
ensure high quality and consistent performance the offering has predefined standards for store design, business logic, and external
system integrations. Examples of the standards are shown here:
A comprehensive list of the offering standards can be provided upon request.
The Commerce Service Subscription Includes:
Environments
Category Standard Offering Includes
Business user changes Changes that are made on the authoring instance for the production environment are propagated
to the live instance and site once per day.
Page design and layout CSS Changes and new page templates are allowed, page elements can be repositioned.
Mobile support Support for mobile web applications and offer a responsive web store.
Fixes and upgrades Upgrades are installed on IBM timetable to ensure all customers are on same version. By adopting
the Externalized Customizations (xC) programming model, clients are guaranteed compatibility with
upcoming fixes and releases.
Upgrade Schedule Minor releases with 30 day notice, major releases with 90 day notice.
Order History Guest Carts kept for 7 days, Registered User Carts for 30 days, Order History kept for 2 years.
Integration with back-end systems Flexibility to integrate with select back-end systems via pre-defined integration patterns and formats.
For Catalog, Pricing, Orders Out, Order Update In, Inventory Updates.
Change management Operational changes via Management Center tools are supported; changes requiring code
modifications will require implementation services.
Category Standard Offering Includes
Production environment • An environment where the final application is deployed and service is made available to the end user
• This environment has 24 x 7 IBM Support
Disaster Recovery environment • An environment that takes production traffic in the unlikely event of a irreversible incident within the
primary production environment
• Available with different RTO and RPO options:
- 48-hour RTO and 24 hour RPO
- 4-hour RTO and 2-hour RPO
Pre-Production environment • An environment where the IBM Commerce on Cloud Operations team or System Integrator does a
final validation before deployment to production
QA environment • An environment where you and your implementation team perform QA testing and user acceptance
testing (“UAT”)
• Additionally, you and your implementation team perform integration and scalability tests in this
environment
Integration test environment • An environment where your implementation team installs SaaS Extensions through self-service
tooling and executes module testing
• Supports developer integration testing

4. Security
The Service is hosted in a secured data center and operated in
compliance with ISO-27001 standards, compliant with EU
Privacy Law and Attestation of Compliance for PCI. The
Service is operated with Data-in-Motion-Encryption (DIME)
Data-at-Rest-Encryption (DARE). The Service does not
store sensitive personal information (SPI) or PCI data. If
customer payments collection is required your implementation
team should use a punch-out payment or iFrame based
mechanism where IBM Payments Gateway or any other PCI
compliant payment server provider for processing payments
and storing payment data. Tokens referencing the payments
can be held within your IBM Commerce on Cloud service.
Backup and Disaster Recovery
A daily backup of the production environment is retained off
site. Non-production environments are backed-up at your
control as are retained off site. The Service provides disaster
recovery to restore the production environment from a
catastrophic failure.
Monitoring
The Service is monitored to ensure up time of the
infrastructure and the application. IBM treats any detected
production application unavailability as a Severity 1 support
case and then triage the issue.
Maintenance windows
The Service has a weekly scheduled maintenance window that
is taken as needed for any infrastructure and application
updates. There are additional windows for customer use, also
taken as needed, available for new business release updates to
the solution. A daily processing window is available for
processing larger customer specific data feeds during periods
of low activity on the solution.
Infrastructure and Support
The Service provides case management for support requests.
IBM Commerce on Cloud Software Support engages the
appropriate implementation team for any issues with
customizations.
Updates and Availability
The Service provides monthly security patches and quarterly
feature enhancements. The service provides guaranteed
backward compatibility of your extensions with upcoming fixes
and releases, if your extensions are built according to the
Externalized Customizations (xC) Programming Model. The
Service provides an uptime SLA of 99.9%.
IBM Client Success Manager
The Client Success Manager (“CSM”) is a named IBM
resource with this service that provides post implementation
relationship management, with a focus on helping you meet
your business goals. The CSM’s primary goal is to ensure your
client experience is consistent and rewarding.
The IBM CSM develops a deep understanding of your
environment, business objectives, operational metrics and stays
with you throughout your lifecycle as a client, helping you
improve product usage and successfully grow your business.
Other solution features /
Add on components
IBM Commerce Insights
IBM Commerce Insights empowers merchandisers, product
managers and marketers with powerful ecommerce analytics
to deliver customer and market insights right where it’s
needed: on your site, embedded with your products and
categories. Business users can then take direct action on the
page, making informed online merchandising decisions to win
business, build customer loyalty and drive profits.
IBM Call Center for Commerce Service
Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce offers better
customer service and support experience. The Customer
Service Representative (CSR) can utilize the same buying
experience that customers use to provide assistance with site
activities, for example, assist customers to manage their cart
content and assist with the checkout process. As a part of the
buying experience, the CSR can look up customer accounts and
orders, and help customers with their account management.
IBM Payments Gateway
IBM Payments Gateway is a cloud consumer payments
acceptance solution for merchants, billers and acquiring
banks. Enabling organizations to accept hundreds of payment
types in a security-rich environment in nearly 100 countries.
IBM Payments Gateway provides:
• Global payment acceptance that allows you to accept any
payment with a deployment-ready software as a service
(SaaS) device.
• A security-rich, consistent retail shopping experience across
channels and devices; it takes all payment credentials,
alleviating your business from onerous, expensive compliance
responsibilities.
• A single view of settlement and accounts by automating
settlement of payment transactions, resulting in a
straightforward data feed with no settlement burden.
Use of IBM Payments Gateway is an optional add-on and
requires a separate contract.
Solution Guide
IBM Business Unit Identifier Cross Industry
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Integration with order management
IBM Commerce Service is capable of connecting to customers
preferred order management systems. Specifically, IBM
Commerce Service includes the capability to integrate with
IBM Order Management. IBM Order Management provides
robust cross-channel functionality that can intelligently
broker orders across many disparate systems and provide a
global view of all inventory across the supply chain. IBM
Order Management would require a separate contract or
additional subscription fees.
IBM Digital Analytics
IBM Digital Analytics is a platform for near real-time digital
analytics, data monitoring and comparative benchmarking. It
analyzes and reports on your visitors’ digital journeys—across
marketing touch points and channels—to provide customer
insights that help marketers deliver more personalized,
relevant and effective marketing. You can expand the IBM
Digital Analytics platform with options to analyze multiple
sites, offline customer behavior, ad relevancy, impression
attribution and social media channels. IBM Digital Analytics
is not included in the base offering and requires a separate
contract.
IBM Digital Experience
IBM Digital Experience solutions empower users with instant
access to the information they need — when they need it.
Accessibility is based on the user profile and is supported by all
device types. The digital experience yields greater overall
organizational efficiencies from target marketing, to
anticipating customer issues, to breaking down communication
barriers, and more. IBM Digital Experience is not included in
the base offering and requires a separate contract.
Akamai
Akamai provides edge-caching services for dynamic content to
improve storefront performance. The customer is required to
contract with Akamai to ensure optimal performance of the
storefront.
Other Third-party integrations
IBM Commerce Service is flexible to enable external
integrations with various payment, tax, social commerce,
email, fraud check and other ISV solutions. You can also
choose to integrate with other external back end systems like
an ERP or fulfillment systems and front end solutions such as
a call center. The integrations must follow certain standards.
IBM reviews and provides recommendations on the
implementation specifications as part of our Solution
Assurance Review process prior to implementation.
Implementation Services
You have the option to engage with either IBM Services or an
IBM Business Partner for implementation assistance. The
offering implementation outlines a sequence of well-defined
and prescriptive steps to easily design, create, and launch an
ecommerce offering. The implementation activities are
performed by IBM Services or an IBM Business Partner via a
statement of work. The key implementation activities include:
• Requirements gathering design
• Store branding
• Data and Content loading
• Configure and Customize store
• Customize third-party integrations
• Testing and deployment
• Training
• Store launch
• Upgrade deployment and testing including modification of
customizations
For more information
To learn more about the IBM Commerce Service Offering,
contact your IBM sales representative or visit: ibm.com/
marketplace/cloud/commerce-on-cloud/us/en-us.