Lessons learned from a “boring” Black Friday

This Black Friday, I was in a task force, ready to help high profile DXC Commerce customers to cope with a peak in traffic. It turned out to be boring – there was no moment I could be a hero and “save the day”. Things went surprisingly smooth, even for websites which were struggling with last Black Friday. I went home and was little dissatisfied, but deep down, I know it was a huge success. The hard work from us (Commerce development team), them (the partner development teams), and Managed Services has been well paid off.

Use the latest version

You have heard me saying this, and you will probably hear from me again: Please, use the latest version possible. There is no reason to stay with an old version. This is a little truth: I hurt a little deep inside whenever I read a question on world asking a question about Commerce 7.5, or even 8.x. You should be using at least 10.8 by now, if not 11.x.

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Please, rebuild your database indexes, now

I will make it quick and to the point: if you are expecting a lot of customers visiting your site tomorrow (and you should) for Black Friday, you should rebuild your database indexes, now.

On average, it will help you to serve more customers and they will be happier with a more responsive, faster website. On best cases it will help prevent catastrophes.

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Read only Catalog UI – part 1

https://world.episerver.com/forum/developer-forum/Episerver-Commerce/Thread-Container/2015/6/read-only-catalog/

A while back, we had this question on World. It’s not uncommon to update the catalog data by an external system, mostly from a PIM – Product information management system. In such cases, it might not make senses to enable editing in Catalog UI. You might need the new UI for the other parts, such as Marketing UI, but you wouldn’t want the editors to accidentally update the product information – because those would be lost, anyway.

Is there away to do it? Yes, there is.

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Beware of IContentLoader.GetChildren() for CatalogContent

This is more of a self-to-note.

If you are using IContentLoader.GetChildren<T>(ContentReference), one important thing to remember is this uses the current preferred language. Normally when you get children of a catalog, or a node, that would not be a problem, because a catalog entity – node or entry, will be available in every language supported by the catalog. So if you just want to get the children references, the language is not important. (Note that, if you just need the children references, IRelationRepository should be a faster, more lightweight way to go, but that’s another story). If you want to get children in a specific language – which is the most common case, you know that you can use the other overload of GetChildren<T>(ContentReference, ILanguageSelector) , where you can specify the language you want to load.

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Super charged Episerver Commerce performance

Well, that was the title of my talk at the last week Meetup in Lund – hosted by Avensia. My first time in Lund – it is a very beautiful (small) city. It was a very nice event with about thirty developers from inside and outside Avensia, and I hope I did give some good information to make your Commerce solutions faster!

Then it comes to my attention that some of you might be interested in the talk. Unfortunately I don’t think the talk was recorded (I’d have been famous on Youtube!), but here’s the slides from the talk:

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A curious case of SQL execution plan, part 2

Recently I wrote about how to look into, identify and solve the problem with a SQL Server execution plan – as you can read here: http://vimvq1987.com/curious-case-sql-execution-plan/

I have some more time to revisit the query now, and I realized I made a “small” mistake. The “optimized” query is using a Clustered Index Scan

So it’s not as fast as it should be, and it will perform quite poorly in no cache scenario (when the buffer is empty, for example) – it takes about 40s to complete. Yes it’s still better than the original one, both in non cached and cached cases. But it’s not good enough. An index scan, even cached, is not only slower, but also more prone to deadlocks. It’s also worse in best case scenario, when the original one can use the proper index seek.

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A curious case of SQL execution plan

I said this already, and I will say it again: SQL Server optimizer is smart. I can even go further and say, it’s smarter than you and me (I have no doubt that you are smart, even very, very smart 🙂 ). So most of the cases, you leave it to do whatever it thinks is the best.

But there are cases SQL Server optimizer is fooled by the engine – it gets confused and chooses an sub-optimal plan, because it was given wrong, outdated, or incorrect information. That’s when you need to step in.

Today I face one case like that, as reported here: http://world.episerver.com/forum/developer-forum/Episerver-Commerce/Thread-Container/2017/10/database-timeout-on-productvariant-update/

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Merging carts when a customer logs in

It’s quite common when a customer browses your site without logging in – either she/he intentionally does that, or just forget about logging in. The customer might add some items to carts and even checks out, but then is asked to log in or remember to log in. What would happen?

By default, Episerver Commerce will do as following:

Attach all orders made by that section to logged in customer. (I once placed an order in a famous retailer in Sweden without logging in, and then I asked their customer service to link that order to my account so I can track it easier. To my surprise, it cannot be done! That’s why I personally appreciate this feature.)
Merge all carts to existing carts, by name and market. So if I’m currently in US market and I added a item to that cart, and the US-cart linked to my account already have 2 other items, then when I log in, my US-cart will contain 3 items.
Merge all wishlist to existing wishlists, also per market. (The name for wishlist, by default, is fixed to “Wishlist”)

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Multisite in Episerver Commerce

It seems that we currently have an increasing number of questions regarding multisite feature in Episerver Commerce. It’s fully supported in CMS. You can have only one site, one database to serve multiple domains – which of course reduces the cost. But can it be done in Commerce as well?

The answer is (as almost always): it depends on your definition of “multisite”: multisite can be that customers see multiple domains, which probably different styles, but in the backend everything is the same – you share the same collection of orders and customers. Or multisite can be that there is a separation in backend: each site has its own collection of orders and customers.
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Can Episerver Commerce support our catalog size?

One of the questions customers usually raise during evaluation of Episerver Commerce is : “Can it support our catalog size? We have (a very big number of ) SKUs. Will it work?”

Definitely, maybe.

I’ve seen “big” catalogs. Some very big. Million and more products.

The correct term would be “Entries”, as in a standard implementation your catalog can contain products, variants (of those products, or standalone ones), bundle and package. However for the sake of simplicity, we will refer to them as “products”. So when we talk about 2 million products, it is the 2 million entries. (you can have 100k products, 1.800k variants and 100k packages)

Theoretically, Episerver Commerce can support up to ~~512 millions~~ 1 billion of entries (!), so you can have pretty much anything in your catalog until you reach a hard technical limit. Just for comparison, Amazon.com, which is arguably the biggest eCommerce site on the world, has about 500 millions SKU(s) in 2015. But the number of entries is not everything. There are several factors which determine your catalog “size”. the number of entries is an important factor, but there are several other factors as well.

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