Episerver Commerce Certification – Exam Tips for Developers

There are at the time of writing 117 Commerce Certified Developers (at 40 companies) in the world. And that´s not many, so by being a Certified Commerce Developer it will boost your career and make you attractive on the market.

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Published 18th of January 2018

The commerce exam is not that easy I can tell, and I find that a good thing. In this case the certification really means something, that is that you probably know your Epi Commerce. Here comes some tips of what to study before writing the exam.

Episerver Commerce is a product that Episerver bought through acquisition of Mediachase in 2012 to ensure that Episerver could redo the product freely. A lot was great with the product but Mediachase didn’t know about SOLID principles and therefore never used Dependency Injection. It makes old parts of Commerce hard or imposible to UnitTest, that is something that Episerver is slowly changing by rebuilding different parts by adding new abstraction APIs over the old, or replacing some. So it is getting better and easier for developers every year, more like the CMS. So in the exam, you get some of both worlds.

I have been working with Episerver Commerce a lot during 6 years. I had to upgrade from 5.2 to 9, and that was quite hard work, therefore I learned the hard way. I spent a lot of hours trying to understand what happened under the hood when things gone wrong in upgrades. I also went on a commerce course at Episerver back in 2011. Even after years of experience the exam was surprisingly harsh. So therefore I understand why Episerver highly recommend previous practical experience working on several Commerce development projects before you take the exam.

The exam is composed of 72 questions, and you get 120 min to answer them. The questions are of different types, some multi choice, some radio buttons, some with pictures where you need to choose the right picture, and one type where you need to sort the answers. Also note that the questions are randomly scrambled on each exam AND if you write the exam twice, don’t think that you’ll get the same questions, no no, some you recognize, and the rest are new.

You need to answer 62% of the questions correct to pass the exam.

All questions are not about the product, about 5% are about patterns and technics in general. I can reveal that there is a question regarding performance tools in general, another one on scalability.

The exam is very detailed, like knowing what return objects a method have or what method parameters to use. Or which extension methods or properties on an object, which probably is no problem IRL, and in my opinion nothing that I need to know by heart, since Visual Studio Intelisence helps me with that.

TIP: The answers that you are absolutely certain of, do answer directly, but if you´re not, pass the question and read through all the questions before answering. Some times similar question on same topic are prompted, and therefore you may easier figure out the answer.

Knowledge areas

Episerver CMS Integration

  • Integration in general and UI-wise
  • Media and Assets

Installation, Operation & Configuration

  • Installation
  • Performance
  • Deployment

Catalogs

  • Catalog management
  • Catalog structuring and modelling
  • Using catalog related APIs
  • Search with the provider model
  • Markets

Discounts and pricing

  • Pricing calculations
  • Promotion configuration and calculations

Order management

  • Order system concepts
  • Cart and purchase order structure
  • Systems Integration
  • Inventory and warehousing
  • Payments and Shipments

Preparing for the exam

Episerver encourage you to go their courses, and that’s probably a good idea if you´re not experienced.

Go through all the official documentation, it is big, but you will learn some by doing that. And you learn where to find what. The documentation is good, and devs should look more often for answers there.

I also bought and read “Pro Episerver Commerce” by Quan Mai (Episerver employee). I do recommend reading the book, it gives you good inside and background knowledge of the system, though it has not much in common with the exam questions.

The questions are quite detailed, therefore use your customer solutions and the Quicksilver solution and learn the details.

Following list is parts you need to learn: (Commerce 10 exam 2017-12)

  1. How to use a promotion and when, and what engine
  2. How to extend PurchaseOrder
  3. Difference between Products, Variations, Bundles, Packages
  4. Performance surveillance tools in general (not epi related)
  5. Scalability in general (not epi related)
  6. Search Facets, filter, how to use, config
  7. Rates and pricing
  8. How to use associations and relations
  9. Dependency Injection patterns in Episerver
  10. ISynchronizedObjectInstanceCache
  11. In general detailed question about what kind of methods are using cache
  12. How to config Cache
  13. Cart handling
  14. Language handling
  15. Warehouse handling
  16. Best practice catalog handling
  17. Beware of the different configs and what they include
  18. All about price, extension methods and engines
  19. How UI works, image handling and catalog handling, deletions
  20. Handling credit cards
  21. How to do stuff with InventoryService
  22. How to save objects
  23. How to activate new features

So I´ve now informed you about 40% of the content in the exam without revealing the correct answers. But remember, if you don´t get questions on all the parts in my list, it is because the exam is made of many more questions, and is blended in a mixer before displayed for you.

TIPs Writing the exam remote

Before runing the remote exam, check the requirements https://www.episerver.com/services/education/episerver-certification/remote-exams/

Test your flash and camera in browsers. Google “flash online camera test”. Especially if you are on a Surface Pro 4, you may need to install the Firefox version of Flash in order for it to work. Yeah crasy.

Test you Microphone.

Your award

After a couple of weeks you get your diploma by mail and your blue decoration on World, yeay!

Good luck and welcome to the group of Certified Commerce Developers

Need a Certified Commerce Developer? call me or find one on this list: https://world.episerver.com/Search/SearchPeople/?searchQuery=commerce%20AND%20developer&peopleFacet=Certified%20Commerce%20Developer 

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About the author

Image of Luc GossoLuc Gosso
– Independent Senior Web Developer
working with Azure and Episerver

Twitter: @LucGosso
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/luc-gosso/
Github: github.com/lucgosso