Debugging Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.3 – A technical walkthrough of enhancements

Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.3 (SXC9.3) launched two weeks ago and I had the opportunity to install and discover the new features added first hand. The installation of SXC 9.3 took around 20 minutes, there were few new settings to be configured (like Redis information) but if you have the prerequisites installed, the installation is very easy. There are numerous scalability and performance improvements and in this blog post I am going to talk about the technical advancements made in SXC 9.3

Performance and Scalability Improvements

Centralized Redis cache – All commerce instances and CE Connect interact with a centralized cache. Redis cache for CE was introduced in 9.2 but with SXC 9.3 even CE Connect uses redis. The scalability improvement from this architectural change is immense. You can easily have multiple instance of the shops running and not worry about clearing the cache on all instances when you update the product information from Business tools
Indexing – SwitchOnRebuild feature for Commerce Index is now available. You can rely on a completely built index for the website for better site stability
Code/Architectural Optimizations – Certificates are not used for communication between Engine and Engine Connect anymore, instead a bearer token is used which is refreshed every 5 minutes. Many optimizations have been done to reduce the depth of calls, blocking calls have been removed. These changes have improved performance and scalability significantly.

Business Tools improvements

Search and Pagination have been added for Promos and Price Books. The interface overall is lightning fast. New index supporting business tools have been added.

Relationship for Sellable Items – With SXC 9.3 it is easy to change the parent of a sellable item. One can change parent association from the sellable item itself. Earlier the association had to be updated from the parent. This has improved the usability and productivity.

Additional Promo features

Category Level Promotions Qualifications are now available. You can create a promo targeting all products in a category
You can extend the end date of a live promo with just two mouse clicks. This is a much-needed feature for your marketing team.

New Marketing Automation Features

Generate very specific lists based on product purchase. For example, create a list of all customers who have bought item with product ID 4354546. This list can be used to send emails
Send product recommendations (Cross sell and UpSell) emails using the list
Guest users can be added to Marketing plans after taking their consent. New order and Abandoned cart plans are the most popular marketing plans for anonymous users
New cache for commerce interactions is available – improves performance during personalization

Quicker Storefront Front End Changes

SXC 9.3 gives the ability to change the layout, add new fields on the commerce pages using experience editor. Commerce Search Results component can now list product cards with price and stock info based on dynamic queries. (Scriban based) – these can be used on Category Page, Product Details Page, Search Results Page. Views can change using the template in experience editor. No code deployment required for formatting of pages.
Personalization can be done based on inventory (For example - if product has low inventory show banner, hide add to cart if 0 inventory)

Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.3 is definitely ready to take on even heavier traffic and still perform lightning fast. It can scale even better than before. I can't think of any other eCommerce platform out there that gives you a complete digital experience like Sitecore Experience Commerce does. You have the option to merchandise, enrich with content, personalize and individualize customer's experience, track user's activity, enable marketing automation, automate email experience and still scale to serve the kind of load we get during super bowl.

Sitecore Commerce MVP & Director