This chapter covers the following topics:
This chapter describes the integration of Oracle iStore with Oracle Sales Contracts to provide Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) functionality in the Customer Application.
Oracle Sales Contracts, through its integration with Oracle Order Management, allows sales representatives and others involved in the sales cycle to create short- or long-term customer contracts, including terms and conditions (T&Cs), for use in Web-based stores, Oracle Quoting, and other Oracle E-Business Suite applications. The functionality leverages integration into Oracle's contract management system, and includes formal negotiation, complete with internal approval and customer acceptance processes. Oracle Sales Contracts users not only benefit from the fundamental capabilities required for sales negotiation, but from the additional contractual capabilities, such as T&Cs, price holds, and the capability to enforce the agreed upon-terms for future customer purchases. See the Oracle Order Management implementation and user documentation for more information.
Set up Oracle Sales Contracts according to the latest version of the Oracle Order Management Implementation Manual.
Note: To use the Terms and Conditions functionality, you must integrate with Oracle Quoting. See the chapter, Integrating Oracle iStore with Oracle Quoting, for more information.
Merchants can make it mandatory that terms and conditions (T&Cs) get attached to an order during checkout in Oracle iStore's Customer Application. In the Checkout: Review Terms and Conditions page, implementers can give customers the option to view T&Cs in HTML format, and then let them accept or reject the terms of the order. The T&Cs are contracts set up through Oracle Sales Contracts module. Each of your customer responsibilities can be tied to a different standard contract. In Oracle Quoting, sales representatives can alter the standard contract and then publish the cart/quote back to the customer for review.
In addition, the Contract Expert feature of Oracle Sales Contracts provides the ability to dynamically add additional pre-approved clauses to a contract, based on attributes of an Oracle iStore shopping cart or quote.
The T&Cs process flow (also known as the contract negotiations process flow) is initiated when a customer disagrees to the T&Cs on an order. The following is the high-level process flow for T&Cs:
A customer creates a shopping cart, or retrieves a published quote, and proceeds through the checkout pages, arriving at the Checkout: Terms and Conditions page.
The Checkout: Terms and Conditions page displays just before the Checkout: Review and Place Order page, which is the final page in the checkout flow. For the actions that a customer can perform in this page, see the section, "Terms and Conditions Page", in the chapter, Implementing Carts and Orders. The T&Cs are presented in HTML format, with system variables -- such as customer and order information -- resolved into the T&Cs through APIs. In this scenario, the T&Cs attached to the order are the standard contract specified by the Oracle Quoting parameter, Default Contract Template.
If the customer accepts the standard T&Cs, the order proceeds as normal. The T&Cs are attached to the sales order when the order is placed in Oracle Order Management.
To reject the T&Cs, the customer selects the I Disagree button in the Checkout: Terms and Conditions page. This action initiates the Sales Assistance flow -- see the section, "Sales Assistance Process Flow" in the chapter, Implementing Customer Assistance. The only difference between this flow and the Sales Assistance flow is that the e-mails sent in this flow are related to Contract Negotiations instead of Sales Assistance. See the chapter, Integrating Oracle iStore with Oracle Workflow, for more information about the Contract Negotiations e-mail notifications.
In a typical Contract Negotiations flow, the sales representative would launch the Contracts authoring tool via Oracle Quoting to change the T&Cs attached to the order. Once an order is placed with the quote, the T&Cs attached to the quote get passed along to Oracle Order Management with the sales order. See the chapter, Integrating Oracle iStore with Oracle Quoting, for more information on quote publishing. In addition, any contract documents that the sales representative has attached to the quote also are submitted with the order. Note that the customer will not be able to view contract documents attached to the order.
When customers submit orders for Express Checkout, they can preview the standard T&Cs associated with the shopping cart where they placed the items into their express checkout queue. If the customer doesn't agree with the T&Cs, they should cancel the express checkout order. See the chapter, Implementing Carts and Orders, for more information about Express Checkout.
In addition to setting up the contract authoring tool (and any other related setups), the following steps are required to set up the T&Cs functionality for use with Oracle iStore.
Note: The system maintains reference to the T&C standard contract at the quote header level.
Comments associated with a T&Cs rejection scenario are stored in Oracle CRM (JTA) Notes; therefore, this module is a required dependency for the T&Cs functionality. See the Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide for information on how to set up the Notes module.
Set the following profile options:
Set OKC: Enable Sales Contracts to Yes.
Set OKC: HTML Layout Template to Contract Terms Layout Template for iStore.
Set IBE: Enforce Terms and Conditions Review by User to Yes.
Set IBE: Use Sales Assistance Feature to Yes.
Set the Oracle Quoting parameter, Default Contract Template, to the default template for Oracle Quoting. See the "Oracle Quoting Integration Parameters" section in the appendix, Profile Options, for more information.
Refer to the appendix, Profile Options, for more information on settings of these profile options.
For Oracle iStore T&Cs to function properly, ensure that the contract template document is enabled for the document types, Sales Order and Quote.
The Contract Expert feature of Oracle Contracts provides the ability to dynamically add additional pre-approved clauses to the T&Cs, based on attributes of a cart. This allows contract departments to minimize the number of standard clauses contained in a contract – the standard clauses appearing in the contract are only those that apply to the specific order. For example, rather than showing all clauses for database, applications server, and application when the customer is only buying database products, Expert would provide only the terms related to the database products and could be displayed in addition to any other standard terms.
Implementers set up a Contract Expert-enabled contract and set it as the default contract for Oracle iStore T&Cs. In the Customer Application, as a customer proceeds to review the T&Cs, Contract Expert runs in the background, and, using APIs, gathers attributes of the shopping cart and sends pre-defined contract clauses back to the terms and conditions page based on the cart attributes. If a customer requests help or disagrees with the T&Cs, the cart or quote is retrieved by the sales representative in Oracle Quoting. The sales representative initiates Contract Expert during the quote update process in order to pull in any additionally needed clauses. The sales representative then publishes the quote back to the customer. Other than the display of clauses in the Checkout: Terms and Conditions page, there is no user interface change with this functionality on the part of Oracle iStore.
Also note the following:
If an error exists when Contract Expert is run in the Oracle iStore flow (such as an invalid configuration), the user will see an error message, and the checkout flow terminates.
When the system runs Contract Expert, the contract clauses available get persistently associated with that shopping cart. For example, if a cart was created in a given site (for example, Site 1) but was checked out with in another site (for example, Site 2) the Contract Expert clauses will be based on those associated with the cart from Site 1. This behavior is due to the fact that Contract Expert retains the original Site ID stored at the cart (quote) header level.
When a customer places an Express Checkout order with Contract Expert enabled, following is the behavior:
T&Cs are instantiated when a Contracts Expert-enabled template is used and the user views the T&Cs in the Pending Express Checkout Orders page. The T&Cs are not saved in the system at this point.
When the Oracle iStore concurrent manager program runs to convert express checkout orders into sales orders, Contract Expert runs again to generate T&Cs. This time, the T&Cs are attached to the order.
Following are the cart attributes supported for Contract Expert:
Site (cart-level)
Ship Priority (cart-level)
Item
Item Category
Following are the steps to set up Contract Expert for Oracle iStore. For additional setups not covered here, see the Oracle Contracts Implementation and Administration Guide, the Oracle Sales Contracts Implementation Guide and the Oracle Quoting User Guide.
In Oracle Contracts, set up a contract with the proper layout and numbered sections for Oracle iStore.
Ensure that the contract has its Contract Expert flag enabled.
Set the profile option, OKC: Use Contract Expert, to Yes at site level. This profile option determines whether Contract Expert can be used by an organization in the Oracle E-Business Suite. If set to No, Contract Expert is not enabled in Oracle Contracts.
Set the contract as the default contract template for Oracle iStore, using the Oracle Quoting parameter, Default Contract Template. See the "Oracle Quoting Integration Parameters" topic in the appendix, Profile Options, for more information.
Terms and Conditions must be made mandatory in Oracle iStore to use Contract Expert. Set the profile option, IBE: Enforce Terms and Conditions Review by User, to Yes.
Sales representatives in Oracle Quoting have the ability to download the structured contract terms to an .rtf file, make modifications as required and upload the document back into the system where they are considered contract terms (or a portion of the contract terms) on a publishable quote. Sales representatives also can upload a new document (of any file type) and have that document be considered the contract terms. This functionality is known as Unstructured Contract Terms, and the newly added terms are also called unstructured contract terms.
Additional Information: The rules and functional descriptions in this section assume that Oracle Sales Contracts is enabled (the profile option, OKC: Enable Sales Contracts, is Yes), and that Oracle Quoting is implemented.
A published quote is considered to have contract terms if the contract source is Structured Terms or an Attached Document. If the source is Attached Document, Unstructured Contract Terms functionality is being used. When the contract source is Structured Terms, there is no change in the behavior of T&Cs.
If Unstructured Contract Terms is being used, but no attachment has actually been uploaded to the contract, then the following occurs in the Checkout: Review Terms and Conditions page:
The system displays a message that no T&Cs exist.
The I Agree and I Disagree buttons are disabled.
The customer can select Cancel to return to the shopping cart page.
With Unstructured Contract Terms functionality, in order for the T&Cs page to display as intended in HTML format, an attached document must exists on the contract, and the following must be true of the attached document:
It is flagged as the Primary Contract Document.
Its category is Contract.
Its authoring party is Internal.
It is in .rtf format.
It is generated from Oracle E-Business Suite.
If the above conditions are true, the attached document is considered mergeable. If the contract source is Attached Document and any of the above conditions are not satisfied, Oracle iStore will show a hyperlink to the attached document in the T&Cs page; selecting the hyperlink will retrieve the document using the default application on the customer's computer (e.g., Microsoft Word). Oracle Contracts APIs evaluate the above conditions (which is done whether or not the contract attachment is considered mergeable).
When an Express Checkout cart is submitted to the express checkout queue, the system does not validate the presence of any attached documents at that time. It is when the customer selects the review terms and conditions link that the validation is done, with the following behavior:
If the attached document is mergeable, the T&Cs are shown as intended in HTML format.
If the proper conditions are not right and the terms can't be shown in HTML format, the customer is taken to the T&Cs page and must select the Click here to Review Terms and Conditions link to open the document using the default application on his computer.
Note: With Express Checkout, contract terms are associated at the time of converting the cart to an order. The terms and conditions are not checked when the Express Checkout button is clicked.