Markets

Markets are designed to help you target merchandising and create more personalized user experiences. For example, you create a 20% off promotion to mark Independence Day in Canada. Only products in the Canadian market are eligible.

A single site can have multiple markets, each with its own product catalog, language, currency, and promotions. The market determines which products and prices a customer sees on the website. When creating a market, you can define a geographic entity (such as region, a country, a group of countries).

Developers implement markets during site creation, and each implementation can be different. Some sites let the customer choose the market (see example below). Others use different URLs for different markets, for example yoursite.uk and yoursite.de. As another alternative, a site can extract a customer's geographic location from the IP address to determine the appropriate market.

Image: Selecting a market

How markets are used

Browsing markets

Go to Commerce ManagerOne of several main user interfaces in Optimizely Commerce. This UI area, available from the top menu after logging in, provides screens for managing markets, customers, catalog, orders, and so on. You can manage the information on some Commerce Manager screens in other, newer user interfaces. Where possible, we recommend using the newer ones. > Market Management > Markets and expand the markets. The market overview displays existing markets with their languages, currencies and status (active or not), and whether the prices include tax.

The Default Market defines the language and currency used as a fallback for markets that are not specified.

Creating or editing a market

  1. Go to Commerce Manager > Market Management > Markets. The markets list appears.
  2. Select Create New > New Market, or select an existing market from the list. The Market Overview tab appears.

    • Market ID. Enter an identifier for the market.
    • Market Name. Enter the name that appears in the markets list.
    • Market Description. Enter free-text notes about the market.
    • Is Active. Yes to activate; No to deactivate. Only active markets can be used by visitors when shopping.
    • Prices Include Tax. Check Yes to indicate that the prices returned for this market include tax. You would typically do this for markets where customers usually see and shop with prices that include tax (for example, most EU countries).

      You might want to do this to send a tax-included price to the front-end site, so a customer can see the price including tax when shopping. At checkout, when the Optimizely Commerce system has enough information to accurately calculate the tax, you can implement business logic to subtract the included tax amount from the actual tax.

    • Countries. Select each country you want and click Add.

      A developer can use a market's country to build site features. For example, you define a Nordics market that includes all European Union countries. If a site visitor’s IP address belongs to Sweden, he or she belongs to the EU market.

    • Languages. Select each language you want and click Add.

      A developer can use a market's language to build site features. For example, in the Quicksilver sample site, a site visitor's market determines the default language for that user.

      A website can support several languages. By defining a market's language, you allow a market to display content in that language.

      For example, if you select English as the preferred language, it does not automatically mean that a visitor belongs to the US or UK markets. You can provide content in English for a Swedish market, for non-Swedish speaking visitors in Sweden.

    • Currencies. For each currency you want, select the currency and click Add.
    • Default currency. Set the default fallback currency.
  3. Click OK.

Deleting a market

  1. Go to Commerce Manager > Market Management > Markets. The markets list appears.
  2. Check the box next to the market you want to delete.
  3. Select More Actions > Delete Selected.
  4. Click OK.