Rameez Akram

Rameez is a Sitecore MVP, Software Architect & Tech Lead with over 9 years of experience in the digital, investment banking and high tech startup spaces.

Sitecore OrderCloud

How to Seed Sitecore OrderCloud with Sample Data and Anatomy of a B2C Solution

If you want to quickly get up and running with some test data in OrderCloud, you came to right place. In this post, not only will I show you how to seed OrderCloud with sample data, but I'll also walk through all of the individual data elements created by the

Sitecore OrderCloud

Product Catalog Management in OrderCloud

OrderCloud provides a robust set of features to allow you to implement a solution that meets a diverse range of business requirements. In earlier posts, I discussed high level architecture and the key entities that make up the OrderCloud data model and enable this flexibility. In this post, I'll dig

Sitecore OrderCloud

Ecommerce Business Models Supported by OrderCloud

In an earlier post on key entities in OrderCloud, I touched on how a flexible data model allows you to design a solution based specifically on the needs of your unique business. Here I'll dig deeper into some of the most common business models OrderCloud supports. B2CI'll start with the

Sitecore OrderCloud

OrderCloud Data Model and Key Entities

OrderCloud provides a very flexible data model to support different ecommerce strategies and models based on the business type and complexity. This can range from a simple B2C model to a more complex B2B marketplaces. At the heart this data model are the following key entities that you need to

Sitecore OrderCloud

OrderCloud Platform Architecture

This post provides a high level overview of the key components of the OrderCloud platform and typical layers of an ecommerce solution built with OrderCloud. Ecommerce FeaturesOrderCloud provides a complete set of core commerce functionality that is exposed through RESTful APIs: Product and Catalog management Buyer and Seller management Order

Sitecore OrderCloud

MACH Architecture for Ecommerce

OrderCloud is a MACH certified product. If you don't know what OrderCloud is, head over to my post here containing a quick introduction to the platform. So what is MACH?MACH stands for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless. MACH technologies support a composable architecture that allows for best of bread

Sitecore OrderCloud

Introduction to OrderCloud

Following on from the acquisition of Four51 by Sitecore, this is the first part of a series of posts where I'll walk you through the OrderCloud platform. So what is Four51 OrderCloud?Four51 is a B2B-first ecommerce company headquartered in Minneapolis that was founded in 1999 and was recently acquired

Sitecore OrderCloud

Say Hello to Four51 OrderCloud & Boxever

As you may have heard recently, Sitecore has been on a buying spree with a series of acquisitions of SaaS based products following the announcement earlier this year of a $1.2B investment plan to accelerate growth. Coming off the heels of that announcement is the acquisition of Four51 OrderCloud-

Sitecore Experience Commerce

The future of voice commerce with smart displays powered by Sitecore Experience Commerce

This year, I had the opportunity to speak at the Sitecore Symposium 2019 alongside my co-speaker Kendell Patrice in the Commerce track. I was very excited and honoured to present on a topic that is very much on trend and cutting edge- personalized voice commerce. The presentation and live demo

Sitecore Experience Commerce

What is a Minions Boss in Commerce Engine?

When you look at the Commerce Engine minions environment json config, you might notice an interesting policy called the MinionBossPolicy which looks like this: You might have wondered to yourself- what the #!@$# is a Minions Boss Policy? Boss Minion As the name suggests, a boss minion is a minion that

Sitecore Experience Commerce

All you need to know about Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 - Part 4: Commerce Service API

This is Part 4 of my series on all you need to know about Sitecore Experience Commerce 9. You can read Part 1 on XC9 architecture here, Part 2 on configuration of XC9 here, and Part 3 on customization & plugins here. In the post, we'll be lookin the Commerce

Sitecore Experience Commerce

All you need to know about Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 - Part 3: Customization & Plugins

This is Part 3 of my series on all you need to know about Sitecore Experience Commerce 9. You can read Part 1 on XC9 architecture here and Part 2 on configuration of XC9 here. In this post, I'll be explaining how you can customize Commerce Engine. Key Extension Points

Sitecore Experience Commerce

All you need to know about Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 - Part 2: Configuration

This is Part 2 of my series on all you need to know about Sitecore Experience Commerce 9. You can read Part 1 on XC 9 architecture here. In this post, I'll be going through the core building blocks for configuration of XC 9. Core Concepts The key concepts that

Sitecore Experience Commerce

All you need to know about Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 - Part 1: Architecture

Last week, I gave a presentation on Sitecore Experience Commerce 9, covering quite a few topics all the way from architecture, extension and plugins,to Commerce APIs. I'll be covering these in a series of blog posts with the same title, with this being the first part on Experience Commerce

Sitecore Experience Commerce

Error rebuilding Sitecore Commerce ServiceProxy in Sitecore Commerce 8.2.1

When rebuilding the Sitecore Commerce ServiceProxy, you may get an error similar to the following: Compiling transformation: The type or namespace name 'Values' does not exist in the namespace 'Microsoft.OData.Edm' (are you missing an assembly reference?) At first I thought I hadn't installed the OData v4 Client Code

Sitecore Experience Commerce

How to change the type of a field in Sitecore Commerce 8.2.1

I was in a pickle recently when I created a new field in Sitecore Commerce 8.2.1, but accidentally set the wrong type (string instead of bool). I thought getting rid of the field, and starting from scratch with the right type would do the trick. But I was

Sitecore Experience Commerce

Commerce Indexes: Sitecore Commerce 8.2.1 vs Experience Commerce 9

In Sitecore Experience Commerce 9, the way you rebuild Commerce indexes (used by Order/Customer/Catalog Manager in Commerce 8.2.1 and Business Tools in XC9) has changed. Here's a quick rundown of the difference: Sitecore Commerce 8.2.1 Commerce indexes are defined in Sitecore and can be

Sitecore Experience Commerce

How to disable stock level check in Sitecore Experience Commerce 9

Recently, I had a requirement to disable stock check for all products (Sitecore XC 9.0 Update 2). After going through OOTB policies, I found the GlobalInventoryPolicy with a CheckStockLevel property that I set to false: After bootstrapping, I found that it didn't make any difference and inventory checks were

Sitecore Experience Platform

Awarded Sitecore MVP 2019

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. - Ralph Waldo Emerson After being awarded Sitecore MVP for Commerce in 2018, I'm excited to announce that I have received the award again in 2019 -

Sitecore Experience Commerce

Extending Business Tools in Sitecore Experience Commerce 9

Sitecore XC9 offers a new rich & responsive Business Tools UI that allows merchandisers and CSRs to manage products, orders, customers, and promotions among other things with ease. It is built on SPEAK 3 which is Angular based & is hosted in as a separate app on IIS or Azure

Sitecore Experience Commerce

Configuring Business Tools Settings in Sitecore Experience Commerce 9

After a vanilla install of Sitecore Experience Commerce 9, you will see the following icon to access Business Tools in the Sitecore Launchpad: If you need to override the default settings for this link- no sweat, I'll show you how. Switch to the core database and navigate to: /sitecore/client/

Sitecore Experience Commerce

Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 Installation Timeout Errors

During the intallation of Sitecore XC9, you may encounter timeout errors on tasks such as pulishing to web, installing large modules or packages, reuilding indexes or other long running processes. In my case, I got the following timeout error when generating catalog templates with the GenerateCatalogTemplates task: Fix In order

How to Change Logging Level in xConnect

In order to change the logging level for xConnect you need to update the following file in you xConnect instance: \App_data\Config\sitecore\CoreServices\sc.Serilog.xml The default level can be changed by updating the value here: Here's a quick reference on possible values [1]: https://github.com/

Sitecore Experience Commerce

Sitecore Experience Commerce Minions Log File Madness

Recently, I realized that a lot of new log files were being generated in my Commerce Minions instance. Upon further inspection, I noticed that they were being generated at 20 min intervals. I immediately realized that the IIS application pool must be resetting. I went over the application pool settings

Sitecore Experience Commerce

Sitecore Experience Commerce 9: Add Cart Line Error- Item is Not Purchasable

Recently, I encountered the following error when adding a line item to the cart: Item 'x' is not purchasable. After inspecting the out of the box XC plugins, I found that there could be a quite a few blocks where this error could originate from since validations are happening at