HCL Commerce product overview

E-commerce is no longer simply about presenting and selling products online. It is about delivering a smarter shopping experience that is seamless and integrated across all customer touch points. It is about providing a rich, relevant, personalized experience across multiple channels of your business. But ultimately it is about doing more to leverage the power of your brand and present its value consistently to your customers.

HCL Commerce provides a powerful customer interaction platform for omni-channel commerce. It can be used by companies of all sizes, from small businesses, to large enterprises, and for many different industries. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels. HCL Commerce is a single, unified platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce is a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to use open standards. It uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation easy and efficient.

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Product portfolio

HCL Commerce ProfessionalHCL Commerce Professional
Provides a comprehensive business-to-consumer (B2C) cross-selling solution that midsized companies can use to deliver a personalized and consistent shopping experience. The capabilities of the Professional edition include precision marketing and merchandising, configurable business processes, A/B testing and multivariate testing, search engine optimization, and personalization. Businesses can use these capabilities to attract, motivate, transact, and understand their customers throughout the customer's journey. The Professional edition now enables limited use of the Extended Sites architecture, previously only available in HCL Commerce Enterprise.
HCL Commerce EnterpriseHCL Commerce Enterprise
Is an omni-channel, e-commerce platform that enables business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) sales to customers across all channels, which include web, mobile, social, store, and call center. The Enterprise edition allows brands to engage shoppers in a personalized and consistent way with merchandising tools, precision marketing, site search, customer experience management, catalog and content management, and social commerce capabilities. Organizations can go to market quickly and easily with an advanced starter store for B2C and B2B that is responsive to optimize content for various device types and formats, which include web, mobile, and tablet.
HCL Commerce Enterprise and HCL Commerce Professional help:
  • Drive sales and revenue with personalized experiences, content, offers, and merchandising to more effectively sell products and services.
  • Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by strengthening relationships and delivering a rich and differentiated brand experience across all customer touch points.
  • Enlighten and empower marketers, merchandisers, and product managers with easy-to-use business user tools to and analytics to create, manage, and personalize marketing, promotions, and catalogs without relying on IT resources.
  • Create multiple branded sites and storefronts on a single platform in an efficient and cost effective manner by leveraging a common set of assets and infrastructure.
  • Maximize performance and minimize downtime with a flexible and extensible e-commerce foundation.

In addition to the capabilities included in HCL Commerce Professional, HCL Commerce Enterprise enables B2B business models with buyer administrator and approver administrative and operational functions. With HCL Commerce Enterprise, businesses can use multiple Extended Sites. Only one Extended Site is allowed in HCL Commerce Professional.

HCL Commerce Developer

Get a quick start on developing your HCL Commerce storefronts with HCL Commerce Developer Enterprise or HCL Commerce Developer Professional. They include tools to:

  • Create, test, and deploy an HCL Commerce site under the test environment and workspaces that are provided by Rational Application Developer (RAD) .
  • Build and extend HCL Commerce functionality.
  • Customize Management Center for HCL Commerce.

HCL Commerce Developer provides an integrated development environment in which you can build and test your customizations to extend the business logic or change the appearance of your site. HCL Commerce Developer Editions are available for HCL Commerce Enterprise, and Professional. Since HCL Commerce is a highly customizable solution, HCL Commerce Developer includes everything that you need to develop and test end-to-end e-commerce sites. The HCL Commerce Developer provides an all-in-one platform which can interact with different test servers, including the Transaction server, Search server, Store server, and Customization server. A developer can work with only one or more parts of the servers in a modern development organization, without having to depend on another team for build and deployment.

HCL Commerce Developer uses IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software as the foundation of the Java IDE. Rational Application Developer extends the Eclipse environment with visual development features.

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Open standards support

Built on accepted, industry standards like Java technology, JavaServer Pages, Java Persistence API, XML, and RESTful web services. HCL Commerce can be easily integrated to your existing middleware and systems.

HCL Customer Service for HCL Commerce

HCL Commerce provides customer service enhancements with Customer Service for HCL Commerce that enable a customer service representative (CSR) to resolve common issues and capture orders. These capabilities are built into the HCL Commerce storefront of the Store server and it enables a CSR to perform key tasks on behalf of a guest, registered customers, and for both B2B and B2C business models. Customer Service for HCL Commerce is offered for both Professional and Enterprise editions.

Because the customer service enhancements are built into the storefront, site owners benefit from:

  • A cost effective solution that uses a single and centrally maintained web application that delivers a common user interface for both customers and CSRs.
  • An intuitive customer service interface for the storefront that CSRs can quickly use with little training.
  • A common experience for customers and CSRs that helps CSRs solve customer issues faster.
  • Personalized content and promotions that are presented to CSRs to help drive increased sales.
  • Powerful HCL Commerce site search to quickly find the right products for customers.

With the new customer service enhancements, CSRs can:

  • Work with customer accounts for both B2B and B2C business models.
  • Find products through catalog navigation or through powerful faceted search that provides detailed product information.
  • Work with customer orders so they can create new orders, view order history, and cancel orders.

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Payments that use a payments plug-in architecture

The Payments subsystem contains three main parts: Payment rules engine, Payment plug-in controller, and payment plug-ins.

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Distributed servers

HCL Commerce is modularizing into loosely coupled components. In this release, the Store server and Search server are decoupled from the larger HCL Commerce server, now called the Transaction server. This separation is along well-defined service interfaces that allow for better horizontal scaling of your e-commerce system.

HCL Commerce Version 9 evolves the traditional architecture into a microservices architecture with separate servers as Docker images. In this version, the Transaction server is separated into five major functional servers:
Transaction server
Runs the transactional business logic and APIs that serve other HCL Commerce servers. The Transaction server container where all transactional operations run. For instance, the server is used for completing the following operations:
  • Processing transactions from your storefront.
  • Processing REST calls from the store, and, if needed, routing calls between servers.
  • Hosting all business user and administrative tools.
  • Processing database and utility operations, such as to load data or rebuild the search index.
Utility server
A WebSphere Application Server-based server that runs application administration utilities. Unlike the other servers, the Utility server does not exist in the development environment.
Search server
A WebSphere Application Server V8.5.5 Liberty-based server that provides search engine capabilities for front end applications.
Customization server
A WebSphere Application Server V8.5.5 Liberty-based server that runs custom business logic in the form of xC extensions for supported components.
Store Server
A WebSphere Application Server V8.5.5 Liberty-based server that runs the storefront for all stores. It includes all custom storefront assets, such as JSP pages and widgets.
The separation of servers allows developers to work in parallel with fewer dependencies.

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Customization techniques

Externalized customization is a new programming pattern that introduces a separation between the core application components and your customizations. By using this new pattern HCL Commerce can deliver innovation more quickly. More importantly, the new programming pattern allows you to deploy innovation more quickly. Developers create customization code external to HCL Commerce. When the business logic is called that you customized, there is a reference to fetch the customized instruction instead of running the HCL provided code. This isolation of customization also improves security, and the stability of your application, the e-commerce store.

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If an xC extension point is not available for the component that you want to customize, then you can use other customization methods. For example, you can extend the Transaction server on the persistence layer, extend business logic on the REST service layer, or the Store server for store application customization.

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Utility Docker image and Administration tools

The Utility Docker image can be deployed in a staging or production environment to run a Utility Server. The Utility server holds tools to service HCL Commerce operations such as loading access control policies, loading store data, and cleaning the database of obsolete objects. The server provides a familiar experience for previous HCL Commerce users since the tools are still run from a command line interface. With certain customization, it can become a full-fledged administration center for an HCL Commerce application.

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The Data Load utility provides an efficient data load solution for catalog, inventory, and pricing information into your HCL Commerce database.

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Globalization and localization support

The HCL Commerce architecture is designed to support globalization. Globalization is the proper design and execution of systems, software, services, and procedures so that one instance of software, running on a single server or end-user machine, can process multilingual data and present culturally correct data in a multicultural environment such as the Internet.

Order Management System integration

This integration provides comprehensive coverage of the order lifecycle across channels, from capture to fulfillment.

Sterling Order Management integration offers further integration of HCL Commerce and IBM Sterling Order Management This order management-enabled commerce integration strengthens both products, providing a complete end-to-end solution.

Business user tools for managing catalogs, promotions, campaigns, prices, page layouts, and stores

The Management Center for HCL Commerce, is a suite of tools to support store management, merchandising, and marketing tasks for business users (Sellers, Marketing Managers, Product Managers, Catalog Managers, and others).

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Marketing

Marketing Managers can use web activities and dialog activities to deliver brand or promotional messages to customers through various methods. Methods include: displaying the message on store pages, or sending a message with email or mobile text messaging.

Precision marketing capabilities allow marketers and merchandisers to create, manage, and deploy personalized marketing campaigns across direct and extended brand touch points according to customer behavior: Target customers with relevant marketing information based on their personal browsing and shopping habits. Other approaches include marketing experiments, targeted marketing, campaigns, and e-Marketing Spots.

automatically generates personalized product recommendations for each visitor. Recommendations are based on current session and historical browsing, shopping, and purchasing data through a powerful set of proven and configurable algorithms. Marketers can create marketing campaigns to control when, where, and to which customers to display these relevant product recommendations.

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Promotions

Using promotions, you can offer customers incentives to purchase. HCL Commerce supports numerous types of promotions. Examples of price promotions include simple discounts; merchandise specials such as gifts with purchase and buy-one-get-one; and service promotions that include reduced shipping costs.

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HCL Commerce Accelerator

With the HCL Commerce Accelerator, you can maintain online stores, hubs, and catalogs by completing various store operations. Managing business operations includes maintaining the presentation of your store to creating and maintaining orders, to tracking store activities.

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Analytics

HCL Commerce provides a framework and tools to simplify the process of setting up your site to use . IBM Digital Analytics is an industry leading hosted web analytics solution. The framework is implemented as a tag library designed to act as an intermediary layer between HCL Commerce and IBM Digital Analytics. The tools include an auto tagging utility to place analytics tags in your store pages. The tools also include a utility to generate a file that contains your catalog hierarchy for IBM Digital Analytics. This solution can significantly reduce the time that is required to deploy web analytics

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Workspaces

A workspace is an access-controlled work area where you can make and preview changes to managed assets, without affecting what is currently running on your site. Working in the context of a workspace is similar to having your own private copy of the managed assets. You can make and preview changes without affecting managed assets outside the workspace. You can commit the changes that you make in a workspace to the production database, and see the effects of your changes on your site.

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Contracts and entitlement

By using this system, you can entitle customers to various aspects of a store such as what products they can purchase, the price they pay, and what payment methods a store accepts.

Customer entitlement is controlled by business accounts, contracts, and business policies.

The Catalog Filter and Pricing tool in Management Center can be used to filter by product, category, or product attribute. Filters can be assigned to contracts to support B2B, or to stores to support Extended Sites.

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Copyrights

Licensed Materials - Property of HCL Limited.

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2017, 2019.

© Copyright HCL Technologies Limited 2019.