Enabling UTF8 encoding on websphere commerce

To use multiple language encoding support in the administrative console, you must configure an application server with UTF-8 encoding enabled.
Steps for this task

1. On the Application Server page, click on the name of the server you want enabled for UTF-8. (Servers > Server Types > Websphere application servers)
2. On the settings page for the selected application server, click Process Definition. (Server Infrastructure > Java and Process Management > Process definition)
3. On the Process Definition page, click Java Virtual Machine.
4. On the Java Virtual Machine page, in Generic JVM Arguments, insert the following value -Dclient.encoding.override=UTF-8 and click OK.
5. Click Save on the console taskbar.
6. Restart the application server.

Note that the autoRequestEncoding option does not work with UTF-8 encoding enabled. The default behavior for WebSphere Application Server is, first, to check if charset is set on content type header. If it is, then the product uses content type header for character encoding; if it is not, then the product uses character encoding set on server using the system property default.client.encoding. If charset is not present and the system property is not set, then the product uses ISO-8859-1. Enabling autoRequestEncoding on a Web module changes the default behavior: if charset it not present on an incoming request header, the product checks the Accept-Language header of the incoming request and does encoding using the first language found in that header. If there is no charset on content type header and no Accept language header, then the product uses character encoding set on server using the system property default.client.encoding. As with the default behavior, if charset is not present and the system property is not set, then the product uses ISO-8859-1.
Further documentation surrounding this can be found at:
http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/wsbroker/redirect?version=compass&product=was-nd-zos&topic=trun_svr_utf