Liferay have a best-in-breed portal capability and in order to expand its horizon they recently came up with the new platform called Liferay Commerce. In order to make themselves stronger in the digital experience sector, Liferay comes up with a content management system for the eCommerce sites that can also use the extensive capabilities of Liferay Portal.
Let’s go through a few of the key features provided by Liferay in this platform and will also see how it will be helpful for the eCommerce business by giving an edge over their competitors in this segment.
What are the Key Features of Liferay Commerce?
Catalog Management
One of the key features of Liferay commerce is catalog management. It maintains the list of products and all its related information that is required for organizing, displaying them and it also maintains the inventory level for the particular product.
Catalog Management provides Product Category to organize the products. For example in the medical store one can create categories like Tablets, Capsules, Ointments, Injections, and others. Catalog Management supports 3 types of Products as Simple, Grouped and Virtual.
- Simple Product is any physical item that has been offered by the store.
- Group Product is any two or more products that should be sold as a single unit.
- Virtual Product is a non-physical product like File, Digital License, Electronic Publication. Catalog Management also supports Options for the product.
For example product available in different colors or sizes. In addition to this, it also allows providing the Specification feature that will store product related information like dimension, weight, capacity and other.
Pricing & Tax Calculations
Whenever a product is there in the picture one more thing that comes along with it, is the price. Liferay commerce has taken extra care for the pricing and makes that process easy to use. By simply assigning one price to the one SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) is all you have to do in the product catalog and it will take care of the rest.
In order to provide interesting offers to the customers, they also provide two more features with this and they are Price List and Discount. Price List is a separate list of products that have alternate prices for specific customers.
It is useful when you want to give price benefit to some of your preferred customers and for the rest of the customers, the price will remain the same. Another feature for pricing is the Discount. One can provide a fixed amount or percentage based discount. It can be applied to the specific product as well as to all products to the specific customers or all customers.
In addition to Pricing, Liferay commerce is also taking care of tax calculations by using Tax Category and Tax Calculation entities. Tax Category is used to contain one or more Tax Calculations. Tax Calculation is further divided into two categories as Fixed Tax or By Address.
Fixed Tax will apply the same rate of tax to the products every time. By address is used when you want to calculate address on the basis of geographical location. For example, we commonly see the price of the dairy product is different between the state it gets produced and other.
Payment Support
Liferay Commerce supports 3 types of payment methods. They are Money Order, Purchase Order, and PayPal. Money order requires payment to deliver through email while in the Purchase Order invoice has been generated on the basis of order form submitted by the buyer. It also provides easy integration with PayPal for online payments.
Shipping Methods
One of the key features of eCommerce is shipments. Liferay Commerce also works on it and come up with multiple options for it. It allows to calculate shipment on the basis of below three methods :
- Flat Rate: Same rate of shipping for all the products
- Variable Rate: Calculate shipping rate on the basis of factors like weight, product or price.
- Carrier: It aligns shipping process closely with shipping process company in order to charge customer closely to the actual shipping cost.
Inventory Management System
It automates the management of inventory from the catalog as soon as an order is placed. Only the initial inventory level should be entered manually. In order to automate the inventory levels once must have to integrate the warehouse that stores the inventory. Warehouse management is available in multiple options as mentioned below :
- Single Warehouse: In this case, one has only warehouse available for your store.
- Multiple Warehouses: In this case, one has multiple warehouses for the store. Along with managing the inventory, it also has to take care of which warehouse product should be shipped to make it cost effective.
- Geocoding Warehouses: It works the same as multiple warehouses but nearest warehouse selection is done automatically. For this, it allows integrating with Microsoft Developer Network by providing Bing API key which takes care of this automation.
Special eCommerce Templates
Liferay Commerce comes up with specialized site template named Accelerators for the store. It comprises of theme, required pages for an eCommerce site, sample catalog of the products and other. It provides the in-built accelerator named Breccia that provides cart, product page, ready to use them, catalog, settings and such others.
Take a deep dive into Liferay Commerce
How it will be helpful for eCommerce Business?
Here we had gone through the key features of Liferay commerce. As we all know Liferay is a leader in Liferay’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platform. By entering into eCommerce sector they had tried to expand its a horizon in the Digital Arena.
Along with the above-mentioned features, Liferay commerce is also able to use the best-in-breed portal capabilities of Liferay. Like user management, roles and permissions to control the site / portal access, site management, Liferay supportive authentication and authorization for the security perspective.
One can also use the Liferay feature of the workflow when you want approval process before making the purchase order so that specific person can approve the order before it gets placed.
In this way, one can cover all the aspects to make the complete eCommerce website by using Liferay Commerce which will make the eCommerce business stronger.
This blog has been written by our Consultant Kuldeep Acharya
