Prepare technical plan and design

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Phase objective: Prepare a technical plan and provision your product instance.

Key tasks

What you do

Mobilize the project team to kick off the implementation.
You walk us through your site, giving in-depth details on parts that affect integration.

What Bloomreach does

We provide guidance and integration resources to help you get started.

What we do together

We map out the integration process, including a timeline and milestones.

1. Mobilize project team

Kick off the project by meeting with the Bloomreach integration team. Before the kickoff meeting, Bloomreach sends you an integration package to help you get started with the process.
Key Bloomreach roles

Service Delivery Manager: manages Bloomreach deliverables and resources and oversees planning, delivery, and project requirements.
Technical Consultant: guides the project implementation.
Any other key Bloomreach team members will be brought in as necessary to help implement the project.

Mobilize your team members, discuss the integration roadmap, and define who owns each step. Team members may handle multiple roles and responsibilities. Here’s a list of the important roles:
Key roles from your team

UX Designer: designs the customer website user experience.
Frontend Engineer: builds the website's visual user interface.
Backend Engineer: builds the server side of business applications.
Merchandiser: manages the eCommerce product catalog display.
Quality Assurance: tests and validates the product.
Solution Architect: analyzes product requirements and designs the solution.
Business Stakeholders: business sponsors or other team members responsible, accountable, supporting, consulting, or informed with key project decisions.

2. Define project scope and technical design

The next step is to define the scope of the integration project. To implement a meaningful search experience, we start with a thorough technical scoping session with the project team by discussing the following:

High-level scoping

Business goals
Discovery products (modules) to integrate
Development and production workflows required
Product catalog(s) and/or content catalog(s) required
Server-side and client-side integration

Low-level scoping

Regions, locales, countries, languages, currencies for conducting business
Desired UI/UX of the website
Infrastructure details such as firewalls, caching, and proxies
Website details like brands, pages, subdomains, hostnames (domains), price lists, inventory tracking, customer segments, and data restrictions
User event tracking requirements

This information is crucial for setting up the correct organization, account, site, catalog, and view structure. Getting it right upfront is key! Certain configurations, like organization, account, and catalog views, can be difficult to modify later.

Bloomreach's experts will guide you through this process, ensuring a smooth and accurate implementation. Your Bloomreach Technical Consultant can help draft the technical plan.

Click to open in-depth reading: Scope session agenda items

Read this section to get a thorough understanding of the standard agenda items for the scope session. Your agenda might have different or additional items.

Endpoints and environments
We ask you questions about your testing and staging environments. We need to know the endpoints for these environments and your login credentials.
Browsers
We ask which browsers your site supports. The most common browsers are Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.
Products
We ask many questions about your products to ensure we target the right pages and products. Here's a sample set of such questions:
1. How many products are on your site?
2. How many SKUs are on your site?
3. How often do prices change on your site?
4. How many category pages are on your site?
5. How many brand-specific pages are on your site?
6. How often do products go out of stock?
7. How do you flag out-of-stock products on your site?
8. Do you include out-of-stock products in your product feed? If so, how do you denote them?
9. Do you always put out-of-stock products on backorder?
10. Do you have products that can't be back-ordered when they go out of stock?
11. What is your process for discontinued products, both before and after they are out of stock?

Scope of pages
Together, we scope the pages for your integration project. Here's a sample list of pages that are usually in or out of scope. Your pages may differ.

Usually in scope	Usually out of scope
High-level category pages Subcategory pages Product feed URLs Product family pages Product detail pages Brand pages Manufacturer pages Promotional and sale pages	Out of stock pages Unavailable pages Discontinued product pages About page FAQ and similar pages

3. Set delivery timeline and milestones

Coordinate with your Bloomreach Service Delivery Manager to identify project milestones and define a delivery timeline. A confirmed Go-Live date sets clear deadlines for your team.

4. Create instances and provision resources

4.1 Create environment, users, and roles

The Bloomreach team creates a product environment for you.
Bloomreach also assigns an Identity and Access Management (IAM) administrator for the dashboard who can give the other team members access and permissions.

4.2 Create API Key, set up catalogs and SSO

A new API Key is needed to connect your catalog data with Bloomreach. The API Key Management dashboard application allows you to create and manage all your API keys.
If you need additional sites, accounts, catalogs, or views, Bloomreach creates them for you. This step may be done at a later stage, but we generally recommend discussing these needs as early in the integration as possible. Some setups may be difficult to change if further along in the integration roadmap.
If you want an SSO set up, Bloomreach helps configure the SSO authentication.