Developing an International Commerce Server Application

  • Article

For your Commerce Server 2009 R2 Web application to be international, it must support multiple languages, multiple currencies, and so on. This topic summarizes the various aspects of the application that must take such international considerations into account, organized by Commerce Server Core Systems.

Commerce Server Core Systems

Feature

Summary Information

Catalog

Multilingual catalogs

You can share a common product catalog that has information in multiple languages by adding multilingual properties for every language you support on your site. For example, you can define a multilingual property for a product description. The Display Name field for this property would contain "Description" in English, and, in German, "Beschreibung" (which means "Description" in German).

Catalog

Multicurrency catalogs

You can define a base currency per catalog. To price products in other currencies apply a pricing rule or add extra currency properties.

Dd328040.alert_note(en-us,CS.95).gifNote:
The MONEY data type that is used for currency supports only four decimal places.

Profiles

Site terms

You must create unique site terms for each language you support. For example, if you create a site term for "Favorite Sport" in English, you must also create a site term "Deporte Favorito" in Spanish, if you are supporting Spanish on your Web site. Alternatively, you can use the Site Term value as a key into a localized resource string loaded from a Satellite Assembly (using the .NET Framework ResourceManager class).

Profiles

Profile properties

You can create multilingual profile properties by adding custom attributes to property definitions. For example, if you have a "City" property for your English address profile, you could create a custom attribute that uses the following values:

  • Name: City_Fr

  • Display Name: Ville (City in French)

  • Description: Votre ville (Your city in French)

  • Value: Paris

The Profiles System supports Unicode for its data store.

Business Analytics

Data Warehouse

You can create a single Data Warehouse that imports data from multiple language-specific applications. For example, you can import transaction data from a French application and a Japanese application into a single Data Warehouse.

In order to create a single site that supports international users by using multiple code page settings (for example, both Western European and Japanese), you must set your log file code page and URL encoding settings to UTF-8.

Business Analytics

Analysis

You can generate reports that summarize data from multiple languages and currencies. For example, if you have a site that has multiple language-specific applications, you can generate the Top Requested Pages report that is supplied with Commerce Server 2009 R2, to summarize the most popular pages across all language groups. The language settings for the user’s browser will affect the appearance of the data in the report.

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Commerce Server 2009 R2 provides no predefined reports that summarize data on a per language basis.

Marketing

Ads

You must create separate advertising content for each language.

Marketing

Discounts

You must create separate discounts for each language.

Marketing

Direct mail

You must create separate Direct Mail campaigns for each language.

Orders

Order Processing

The converted line items displayed on the site may not match the total cost billed to the user because exchange rates change over time. Prices must be marked as approximate when they are displayed.

Commerce Server 2009 R2 assumes that the prices for each item in the cart are in the same currency.

The Commerce Server 2009 R2 discounts feature is not designed to handle multiple currencies.

If you want to use ads and discounts in multiple languages, you must re-create each ad/discount in the appropriate language.

Pipelines

All

You can localize the messages in your pipelines by using the MessageManager feature. For more information about international issues with pipelines, see International Considerations for Developing Pipelines. For more information about MessageManager, see What is MessageManager?
Dd328040.alert_caution(en-us,CS.95).gifImportant Note:

If the authorization policy files are localized, the corresponding claimSet definitions in the metadatadefinitions.xml file must also be localized. See Managing Authorization Policies for more details.

See Also

Other Resources

Developing with Commerce Server Core Systems

International Considerations for Developing Pipelines

What is MessageManager?