Documentation

• The help system for WebSphere Commerce has been replaced by an information center, featuring advanced search, bookmark function and roles-based information retrieval.

Integration

• Reference applications for CRM, ERP, and call center applications.

Promotions

• The promotions system has been completely redesigned and now it also supports redemption limits and promotion codes.

Sales Catalogs

• A flexible display structure that allows you to associate products to more than one category to suit the requirements of your store.

Business User Interface

• Main menu interface enhancements, efficiencies around managing bundles and kits and merchandising associations.

Starter Stores Improvement

• The starter store models for WebSphere Commerce have been re-written to make them smaller and easier to customize, greatly improving your project time to value.

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 support
• 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.
• Marketing campaigns
• Support e-mail as a campaign delivery mechanism.
• Time sharing of multiple initiatives on same spot.
• Advanced discounts and promotions
• Rules-based discount supports complex promotion models such as shipping discount and buy one get one free.
• Supports advanced scheduler for upcoming promotions.
• Coupons enhancements
• 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.
• Cross-sells and up-sells
• 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.
• Predefined merchandising associations in catalog.

Guided Selling
An interactive online product catalog that provides customers with different ways of finding what they want, called shopping metaphors.

• Creating a search space - optimized parametric search with focus on categories and base search space.
• Creating the Product Exploration metaphor - view a list of product which has matching parameter values within a given category.
• Creating the Product Comparison metaphor - view the related products side by side for similarities and differences.
• Creating a Guided Sell metaphor - Provides a customer a series of multiple choice questions to guide the customer to refines their search to a smaller list of products.

Catalog Management Tooling
Simplify product content management:

• Content Creation and Management allows users to perform product and editorial content creation and management tasks quickly and effectively. 

• Bulk File Aggregation enhances bulk file management tools to provide out-of-the-box support for importing content from trading partners and bulk file import support to catalog manager.
  Integration

For enterprise needs:

• IBM WebSphere Business Integration support - Provide a new transport mechanism used by subsystems to interact with external systems through WebSphere Business Integration collaborations.
• WebSphere Commerce Messaging system - existing WebSphere Commerce Common Connector Framework is enhanced to support Java 2 Enterprise Edition Connector Architecture (J2EE/CA) standard including Java Mail Connector, JMS Connector and File Connector.
• MQ Transport Adapter - upgrades to support J2EE/CA compliant.
• Live Help and Customer Care Collaboration
• Offers an integrated out-of-the-box "live help" and customer care functions based on Lotus Sametime (optional product).
• Support multiple queues and provide enhanced capabilities on queue management.
• Support monitoring of customized customer attributes in a store.
• Support customer requests to be routed into queues.

Operational Report

• 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 and JRas, 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) enabling WebSphere Commerce data to be viewed through the Tivoli Performance Viewer.

Installation
Installation and configuration to help ensure a system is installed correctly and prerequisites are available:

• WebSphere Commerce and all its associated software is installed through the WebSphere Commerce Install Shield based on Install Shield for Multiplatform Edition.
• Configuration Manager supports remote machine configurations and an addition of Password Manager Tool which lets you manage your WebSphere Commerce passwords from a single location. 
•  A new Problem Determination Tool, a Java-based tool that analyzes the up and running logs and generates reports for problem trouble shooting.

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.