Implement post-provisioning steps
You can follow the post-provisioning steps to finish the deployment and configuration of your e-Commerce environment. Site Builder is your environment where you create and manage sites and where you can upload and manage your digital assets.
Selecting the Site builder link for Lifecycle Services will take you directly to your Site builder environment. Notice that the landing page holds two sites. These sites are demo sites that are already pre-configured with pages, assets, fragments, and URLs. You can use these pre-created sites for reference purposes, or you can customize them and start building the site.
An example of a rendered site is shown in the following screenshot.
Site builder is the environment where anyone who has a role around creating pages, managing content, and managing images and digital assets will be working.
In this environment, you can define the URLs that customers will use to access pages by mapping them to pages rather than the pages that represent the URLs. Therefore, the URL for a page on a site is decoupled from where the page lives, acting as a pointer to a page so that you don’t have to maintain a page hierarchy in Site builder. As a result, you can swap pages without changing the URL.
An important concept to understand about Site builder is its relationship to the Commerce Headquarters and, by extension, the Commerce Scale Unit that it communicates with. When new sites are created, a binding is created between the Site builder and one or more channels for which that site will serve content or products, as shown in the following screenshot.
On the left side of the example are three online stores or online channels in Headquarters, and within Site builder, you can link the site to one or all of those channels. This feature is important because Site builder gives you the ability to look and browse through your products, and helps you navigate through the products for the channel that the site is linked to. By creating this link, you can implement a customization or a storytelling process where you can enhance a product to create additional marketing content, additional specialized sales, and persuasive messaging around a single product.
You have a lot of flexibility for linking a site and your URL’s specific channel. For example, it is possible to have a site that serves all locales and markets that uses a single channel. Consider the examples of Contoso.com, Contoso.uk, and other sites. These sites are global views or global sites for the Contoso company and they all point to one channel, one assortment of content, and one set of products. It's also possible to divide every one of those markets or locals into separate channels, having Contoso.com pointing to a single channel or a single assortment of products, whereas your Contoso.jp Japan site can point to a different channel or a different assortment of products.
Another important connection between Site builder and Commerce Headquarters (HQ) is around digital assets. HQ is your master for products, and it contains all information about the product such as its name, description, and attributes. It also knows which images are available for the products; however, the images are hosted by Digital Asset Manager and managed in Site builder.
When those images are uploaded in Digital Asset Manager and Site builder, Site builder will understand where the images are located and will determine that it is the base for your URL images, and HQ will understand what products exist for a channel. Bringing those two features together in HQ can serve the correct image URL for a product. This additional configuration step is one that needs to be done in HQ by setting the correct link to Digital Asset Manager.
An additional post-provisioning step will need to be taken if you want to use the Commerce Headquarters transactional mail capabilities. With an online store, you will receive continuous email communications as a result of making an online purchase, such as “Thank you for your order,” “We've received your order,” or in the case of in-store pickup, “Your order has shipped.” These emails would be sent to you as the consumer of a site who has made an online purchase.
Commerce HQ gives lets you create these emails and provides numerous capabilities. It provides an email template that you can configure with the content for that email. It also provides the mapping between the event and the template, so you can map every order received, an order that has been shipped, pick up in-store, order canceled, and all other events that are supported with individual templates. Additionally, you can configure the outgoing SMTP server that will send out those emails because it is not a service that Dynamics 365 provides out of the box. For this feature, the customer will need to provide their own SMTP service infrastructure for sending the emails.
The next step is to set up the flow for mapping events in HQ to individual templates. Every online channel and, for that matter, every retail channel can use the same mapping, which is referred to as the retail notification profile. You can share the same mapping with every channel by using the same templates, or you can mix-and-match them so that each channel uses their own mapping between events and templates.
An email template is the view that the customer gets. If you are using multiple channels that are across multiple locales, the templates can be localized to suit the different locales. Additionally, you can upload templates for each of those languages. As a result, when someone makes a purchase in that channel, they will get an email in the localized language for that channel. The template is composed of HTML, where you can configure placeholders or tokens where the dynamic data from a sales order gets inserted into the template. When an email goes out, the sales ID is retrieved from the sales order and that is inserted into the correct template placeholder and sent to the customer.