Now a days the majority of software is cloud-enabled, if you are thinking of moving your on premise commerce in that direction and SaaS-ify in order to get high performance, scalable, extensible commerce platform Oracle Commerce Cloud is the best and reliable option.
Oracle Commerce Cloud is an API-first, cloud-native, SaaS application deployed within the Oracle Cloud. This SaaS application enables businesses to create commerce experiences while Oracle manages the hardware and operational components of the application.
This document helps you to understand the approach to consider while migrating your Oracle Commerce or any commerce on premise application to Oracle Commerce Cloud platform.
Before looking in to the approach let’s look at some key benefits of the Oracle Commerce Cloud.
- OOTB Widgets: Widgets are UI interface assets used to build very rich Storefront and Agent UIs, Oracle Commerce Cloud platform offers number of such OOTB widgets so that you can configure them in your layout with ease. If you are looking for uniqueness in your application UI developers can extend and create their own widgets.
- Applications and services: Oracle Commerce Cloud offers power packed application line which includes Commerce Administration using which you can configure and manage sites and merchandising, Agent application for customer support and web storefront. All these applications are backed by set of restful APIs.
- Webhooks: Webhooks allows to integrate external systems with Oracle Commerce Cloud platform such as order management system, payment gateway , shipping calculator, etc…
- Server-side Extensions (SSEs): Oracle Commerce Cloud provides freedom to customize your application with the help of SSEs (Server-side Extensions).
Let us look at the best approaches to migrate your commerce application to Oracle Commerce Cloud platform:
Based on requirements every commerce application’s implementation is unique. Considering the commerce site requirements and the level of customization, the level of efforts and approaches to migrate the commerce application vary.
The Oracle Commerce Cloud decouples the frontend from the backend, so if you can figure out the data objects (such as profile, catalog, order, etc.), integrations and the most important backend customizations you can then migrate one by one and then build your rich storefront UI using the widgets in order to render the content.
Data migration: For every commerce site user, catalog, order and inventory data is the backbone, the Oracle Commerce Cloud provides API support in order to import such data from source system. Once you review and verify the data model of the source and target system you can make use of the API to migrate the data.
For reference on import APIs: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/cx-commerce/21d/cxocc/op-ccadmin-v1-importprocess-post.html
Migrating integrations:
Integrations are very important in a commerce application in order to carry out major functionalities like payment gateways, external tax calculation, product / SKU import, CPQ etc…
- Payment and Tax: Oracle Commerce Cloud provides OOTB payment integrations such as CyberSource, PayPal, PaymentTech, PayU Latam, Avalara, and Vertex. If you are having custom payment and tax engines you can integrate them by leveraging the SSE functionality in Oracle Commerce Cloud.
- Order Management Systems: Oracle Commerce Cloud provides a very simple means of integrating the OMS by configuring the OMS URL in admin UI so that Oracle
Commerce Cloud generates an outbound REST webhook call for submitted orders to be routed to the OMS. - Product Catalog and Inventory: If you are having integrations daily product and inventory feeds, Oracle Commerce Cloud supports API for the same.
Backend Business Logic (Java code):
As mentioned earlier Oracle Commerce Cloud decouples the frontend from the backend so JavaScript is the primary language used when implementing Oracle Commerce Cloud, in order to integrate the backend business logic you can leverage the SSE functionality provided by Oracle Commerce Cloud.
Especially when you are migrating your Oracle commerce on premise you must be having lot of custom Form Handlers and Droplets to serve and render the data, you can migrate these to Oracle Commerce Cloud with the help of SSE and the droplets can be rewritten in JavaScript and either added to out-
of-the-box widgets or placed in custom widgets in Oracle Commerce Cloud.
Migrating Storefront:
Once you have all the data and integrations in please you can build your unique store front by implementing the widgets.
Reference:
https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/transitioning-to-oracle-commerce-cloud.pdf this particular document describes more Oracle Commerce on premise features like search, Personalization, etc.