WebSphere Commerce – Express provides customer with:

• A license that allows installation by platform (which can also be installed in support of preproduction staging activities).
• A single seat of the development tools found in WebSphere Commerce – Express Developer Edition (supports Windows platform only).
• Customers can purchase up to two licenses of WebSphere Commerce – Express. Customers who need to have additional seats of the developer tools can purchase WebSphere Commerce Developer Express.

Quick and Easy Installation
Designed to get you up and running fast so you can begin creating your store right away, WebSphere Commerce – Express includes the following install features:

• Quick Install allows you to quickly perform a single processor install and create a WebSphere Commerce instance in a few steps with minimal user interaction.
• Custom Install is available for multitier installations or when you want more control over how the specific elements of the WebSphere Commerce – Express software stack are installed.
• WebSphere Commerce Install Shield, based on Install Shield for Multiplatform Edition (ISMPE), is used to install all bundled software and helps provide for silent install of key elements such as WebSphere Application Server (WAS) and DB2 Express.
• Java-based Problem Determination Tool analyzes the up-and-running logs and generates reports to help you quickly troubleshoot any problem.
  

Affordable, Complete Solution

• With WebSphere Commerce – Express, you'll get a complete e-commerce software solution that addresses your needs for production, preproduction staging, and development - all at one affordable price. There are no additional licenses to buy for the customer and catalog database or to support your QA staging needs. This means that you won't have to pay more at every step of the way as you build your site and its support environment. You may purchase up to two licenses of WebSphere Commerce – Express.

Streamlined Starter Stores

• Designed to help get your production store up quickly, the starter stores in WebSphere Commerce – Express include the core capabilities required for a complete end-to-end e-commerce site. Stores designed for B2C and B2B are included and can be customized to meet your specific needs now and extend to utilize more advanced features as you need them. The latest starter stores have been re-designed to be smaller and easier to customize. For example, business logic and presentation logic in the store models are now kept separated and page-friendly Java-data beans are utilized.

Catalog Import Utility

• This utility makes it quick and easy for you to import a pre-existing product catalog, stored in a spreadsheet in comma-separated values (CSV) format, into the WebSphere Commerce – Express database.

Easy to Use Tools
WebSphere Commerce – Express comes with a broad collection of tools, many of which are wizard-based, for easy administration and management of your site. Most are built into an intuitive Web-based framework called WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, which can help you with everything from managing the look and feel of your store to catalog management to creating and maintaining orders and tracking store activities. Here are just a few of the many supported features:

• Product Management Tools - Easily create, update, delete and modify attributes and prices of your catalog entries with this powerful, yet intuitive Web-based tool. You can manage your catalog quickly and directly, easily finding and listing products to change by making simple or mass edits. The simple catalog tree structure makes it easy to add or delete product categories. Sales catalogs, which have a flexible display structure that allows you to associate products to more than one category to suit the requirements of your store, are also supported. You can create one or more sales catalogs for display purposes or for seasonal or clearance merchandise.
• Store Style Editor - This tool makes it easy for you to change the basic look and feel of your store, including colors and location of action buttons, without special technical skills.
• Change Page Text Editor – Non-technical persons can easily change the descriptive text that is included in the site pages and store flow with this editing tool.

Fast-path Documentation

• Get the information you need fast from the Information Center Help System that is built into WebSphere Commerce – Express. The Information Center Help System includes advanced search and bookmark capabilities that make it easy to use. It also includes useful process models of the business processes supported in WebSphere Commerce – Express, created with the WebSphere Business Integration Workbench. In addition, specialized documentation such as the Easy Start Guide is provided. This document picks up right after installation and steps you through the store publishing and customization process, providing tips and techniques that will get you in production quickly.

Open Standards Support

• Built on accepted industry standards like Java technology, JavaServer Pages, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and XML, WebSphere Commerce – Express can be easily integrated to your existing, in-house developed middleware and systems including IBM CICS, IBM MQSeries, IBM IMS products and SAP R/3.

Broad Platform Support

• WebSphere Commerce – Express supports your platform needs today and tomorrow, with support for Windows, Linux (for Intel only) and the operating systems for System i servers.

Marketing and Merchandising

• Deliver enhanced targeted e-mail campaign, advanced rules-based discounts or promotions and improved tooling for merchandising associations such as cross sells and up sells.

• E-mail delivery of news and promotions.
• Manage e-mail activities at store level instead of site level and view statistics on e-mail activities.

• Support e-mail as a campaign delivery mechanism.
• Time sharing of multiple initiatives on same spot.

• Rules-based discount supports complex promotion models such as shipping discount and buy one get one free.
• Supports advanced scheduler for upcoming promotions.

• Allow guest shoppers to capture and redeem eCoupons and manage eCoupons using a coupon wallet.
• Allow merchandiser to create eCoupons promotion, and manage eCoupon promotion and modify eCoupon promotion terms.

• Predefined merchandising associations in catalog.
• Enhancements in merchandising and campaigns tooling allow target product to be recommended at runtime based on the content of the current page, shopping cart and previous purchases.
  

• A Search Space metaphor - optimized parametric search with focus on categories and base search space.
• A Product Exploration metaphor - Allows viewing a list of products with matching parameter values within a given category.
• A Product Comparison metaphor - Allows viewing related products side by side for similarities and differences.
• A Guided Sell metaphor - Provides a series of multiple choice questions to help customer refine their product search.
  

Integration

• The IBM WebSphere Business Integration support provides a transport mechanism used by subsystems to interact with external systems through WebSphere Business Integration collaborations.

• The WebSphere Commerce Messaging system and existing WebSphere Commerce Common Connector Framework are enhanced to support Java 2 Enterprise Edition Connector Architecture (J2EE/CA) standards including JavaMail Connector, JMS Connector and File Connector, and MQ Transport Adapter upgrades to meet J2EE/CA standards.

Operational Reports

• Based on WebSphere Commerce Reporting Framework, generates reports in real time. These reports can provide useful information about products, inventory, orders, returns and more.

WebSphere Commerce Payments

• Provides a secure electronic payment process for Internet merchants through a single, unified interface. Based on open standards technology, WebSphere Commerce Payments works with plug-ins to support multiple payment protocols.
  

System Management

WebSphere Commerce provides the following:

• Organization and User Administration.
• Problem Determination - automatically validates the correctness of WebSphere Commerce Installation and instance creation of the WebSphere Commerce logging infrastructure consolidated with WebSphere Application Server to allow for use of common tooling and to correlate logging data throughout the system.
• Performance Monitoring - Integrated use of WebSphere Application Server PMI (Performance Monitoring Interface) enables WebSphere Commerce data to be viewed through the Tivoli® Performance Viewer.

Web Services
WebSphere Commerce can be the service provider by enabling its business functions as Web services that can be accessed by external systems. Also, WebSphere Commerce can be the service requester by enabling it to invoke Web services hosted by external systems.