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Overview of Managing Purchases and Processing Orders
The process customers go through when making a purchase from your Web site is one of the most common but complex aspects of an e-business. To help you get to market faster than your competitors, the BEA WebLogic Commerce Server provides out-of-the-box Managing Purchases and Processing Orders services. These services contains default implementations for the most common e-business order-related functions, such as shopping cart management, taxation, payment, and so on. Moreover, these services allows your site designers to customize the order process without the need for advanced programming skills. Additionally, it is easily extensible for those with advanced technical knowledge. This topic provides you with some background information about purchase management and order processing. It also introduces you to the types of services that are available.
This topic includes the following sections:
What Are Managing Purchases and Processing Orders Services
Managing Purchases and Processing Orders services is a collection of services used to facilitate the online ordering process. There are services for shipping, payment, and so on. Together, these services handle all of the tasks necessary to process your customers' orders, from the acceptance of items in their shopping cart to final order confirmation.
As shown in Figure 1-1, each service consists of one or more JavaServer Pages (JSPs) templates and the business logic associated with them. Some of these templates may collect information from your customers, while others will simply display dynamic data your customer previously supplied. Some JSPs may do both. The logic is implemented as a combination of input processors and Pipeline components, each of which can be customized to suit your needs. You can also incorporate the input processors and Pipeline components you create into the Managing Purchases and Processing Orders services.
Figure 1-1 Structure of Managing Purchases and Processing Orders Services
Because all the business logic is managed by a Pipeline and accessed within a Pipeline session, the state of your customer's ordering experience can be maintained. For detailed information about Pipelines (including Pipeline components and Pipeline sessions), see the Guide to Managing Presentation and Business Logic: Using Webflow and Pipeline. In addition to the services available for order processing, the WebLogic Commerce Server also contains services for browsing the product catalog and registration/user processing. For information on services related to the product catalog, see the Guide to Building a Product Catalog. For information on services related to registration and user processing, see the Guide to Registering Customers and Managing Customer Services.
High-level Architecture
Managing Purchases and Processing Orders services is essentially an application that utilizes the Webflow/Pipeline infrastructure. Before you begin to customize or extend this application, however, it is important that you have a high-level understanding of how all the JSP templates in this service work together in the default Webflow. It is also important that you understand how this functionality works in conjunction with the JSP templates in the Registering Customers and Managing Customer services.
Figure 1-2 shows the ways in which your customer might move through the JSP templates in the Managing Purchases and Processing Orders services. It also shows where Registering Customers and Managing Customer services comes into play. Only customers who have registered and have a valid username/password combination can browse the order-related pages (any page in the /order subdirectory). Additionally, customers who have registered can modify their user profile, check the status of their current order, or even check their order and payment history in the customer self-service pages (using pages in the /user subdirectory).
Figure 1-2 Default Webflow for Order Processing
Note: All JSP templates include other templates, making it easy for you to create new pages with the same look and feel. Whether you are customizing or extending this architecture, everything you need to know about functionality in Managing Purchases and Processing Orders services (including the JSP templates, input processors, and Pipeline components associated with them) is provided in this document. This includes detailed information about the database schema, for those advanced programmers who want to take their e-business site to the next level.
Development Roles
This document is intended for the following audiences:
Next Steps
Subsequent chapters of this document describe Managing Purchases and Processing Orders services in detail, and provide you with information you need to customize or extend the default implementations to meet your requirements. These chapters are as follows:
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