AEM Ecommerce Unleashed

Why Ecommerce in AEM?

Let’s start with basics, why Ecommerce?

To ease shopping experience by bringing your choice of market at your laptop, search for discount and get delivery at your doorsteps without any extra effort.

How to develop Ecommerce?

Imagine if you are a leading businessman and you want to improvise your business by allowing your products sale online. What kind of site would you’ll be looking for? Take a minute to think on this and come with an answer:

My Basic approach would be to develop an ecom site in AEM which is User Friendly, author friendly and most importantly developer friendly.

It’s most important that a developer should create it in a systematic way with a cleaner approach and using simple logics but in most optimized way to have the best performance and if it’s a clean code then in future any developer can proceed with it as well as for the same developer too it’s better to maintain the code anytime in future. Also if your logics are straight forward and simpler then in future too there won’t be much requirement to change them.

Then comes the point that for Author it should be very straightforward to author and create ecom site as per requirement, hence component should work as expected and should not be confusing in behavior. E.g. Component should be used in order of product, shopping cart and checkout.

Last but not the least, End user for whom you’ve created this Ecommerce site and who are actually going to use it and increase your business. So, to get most of it your website must be user friendly, dynamic, smooth in performance and an eye pleasing design will obviously win more hearts.

Now Question arises, Why Ecommerce using AEM?

Answer is AEM provides pre built codes to handle ecommerce in very professional way which is also easy to maintain and customize. Hence, developer’s efforts get reduced, Testers can test the working smoothly, Authors get better experience and finally organization get a best product to handle their business.

Also, it has multiple tested payment gateway integration. So far one of the best CMS and hence that makes it a perfect choice for Ecommerce website. Who doesn’t want a drag drop set of component for creating important features like product list, shopping cart, checkout and order details, vouchers etc.

1. What all I require from AEM : You require commerce components for creating ecom site in AEM, if your site is huge then you may require a third party ecommerce engine like Hybris, Elastic Path etc. Go through adobe’s official page for more information https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-3/administer/ecommerce.html 
2. What all commerce components I need to create for a simple ecom site: Before moving further, make sure you’re having your AEM installed properly. If yes, then you will find commerce folder under libs/cq. This folder will comprise of all AEM out of box ecommerce components. Post this, you can download my code and install as a package in your instance. Once it's done then you can proceed through below ones.
3. Product: http://localhost:4502/content/aem1/t1/ecom-testpage.html / http://localhost:4502/content/aem1/t1.html , on these pages I dragged dropped product component and browse products one by one.
4. Shopping Cart: To perform all activities in your cart: http://localhost:4502/content/aem1/t2.html , on this page I dragged dropped shopping cart component and this page will have data only if we add any product to our shopping cart from above mentioned pages.
5. Checkout: To finally place an order. : http://localhost:4502/content/aem1/t3.html , on this page we dragged checkout , address , shipping method, payment method components one by one according to our UI design. To change any design in these component, we can overlay these components and make changes in our css.  Address, Shipping method, Payment method, Form (For submitting final order and provide output window)

I’ve not created anything new in this article, I used all existing components only but in a way to prepare entire ecommerce site, in my next article I would be covering steps to create a customized commerce provider and to create our generic Ecommerce site.