HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. 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. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
Topics in the Administering category highlight tasks that are typically performed by the Site Administrator, to support daily operations of the HCL Commerce site.
In general, caching improves response time and reduces system load. Caching techniques are used to improve the performance of World Wide Web Internet applications. Most techniques cache static content (content that rarely changes) such as graphic and text files. However, many websites serve dynamic content, containing personalized information or data that changes more frequently. Caching dynamic content requires more sophisticated caching techniques, such as those provided by the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache, a built-in service for caching and serving dynamic content.
To improve marketing performance, use runtime caching to eliminate processing to and from the database.
Caching e-Marketing Spot JSP snippets can lead to a performance improvement.
HCL Commerce has different advantages for business users, administrators and developers. HCL Commerce targets each of these roles with a tailored set of offerings so that each of your users can get maximum benefit.
Learn how to install and deploy HCL Commerce development environments and HCL Commerce production environments.
Before you migrate to HCL Commerce Version 9, review this information to help plan and execute your migration. During the migration process, you can also upgrade editions.
Topics in the Operating category highlight tasks that are typically performed by business users, customer support representatives, to complete their day-to-day tasks in the operation of the HCL Commerce site.
Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using HCL Commerce in combination with other products.
Every time you deploy the HCL Commerce application, you are deploying a set of Docker containers that communicate with each other to run your HCL Commerce site. Each HCL Commerce application deployment can contain one or more stores.
In HCL Commerce the person who performs administrative tasks is called a Site Administrator. The Site Administrator installs, configures, and maintains HCL Commerce and the associated software and hardware. The administrator responds to system warnings, alerts, and errors, and diagnoses and resolves system problems. Typically, this person controls access and authorization (creating and assigning members to the appropriate role), manages the Web site, monitors performance, and manages load balancing tasks. The Site Administrator might be responsible for establishing and maintaining several server configurations for different stages of development such as testing, staging, and production. The Site Administrator also handles critical system backups and resolves performance problems.
an HCL Commerce staging environment is a runtime environment where business and technical users can update and manage store data and preview changes. The changes can then be propagated to the production environment.
You can enable and manage workspace assets and determine policies such as locking rules and commit and publishing options.
As a site administrator, maintain the HCL Commerce database and ensure that any HCL Commerce utilities and processes that load and retrieve data from the database is configured to connect to the database properly.
Before you use caching in HCL Commerce, ensure that you prepare. If there are major changes to your caching setup, repeat the preparation steps.
An administrator using caching in HCL Commerce should be familiar with full page and fragment caching, Edge Side include, and using the dynamic API not to cache.
In order to maintain the relevance of cached data, based on time, user or other variables, the data will have to be invalidated or removed from the cache. Dynacache provides different methods for performing cache invalidation. There are four methods to invalidate the cache.
HCL Commerce uses the Java Server Tag Library (JSTL) to create new JSP pages. If <% out.flush(); %> does not surround the <c:import> tag, using dynacache introduces strange behavior. The out.flush statement is required for all <c:import> statements, not just those for fragments. Even if the page is being cached using full-page caching, the out.flush tags are still required to surround the <c:import> tags.
If your store is using data defined in another store through a store relationship, you must use the request attributes specified by the cache filter to define the relationships. The cache filter is a servlet filter that defines request attributes from the session and store relationship information that can be used by the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache. The dynamic cache then uses this information to construct cache IDs and dependency IDs to be used for cache invalidation.
Cacheable commands eliminate much of the processor usage associated with running redundant database queries by storing results from earlier queries in a cache. The marketing services can retrieve data to display in e-Marketing Spots on store pages from the command cache instead of the database. This retrieval improves response time and reduces system load.
The most resource-intensive part of evaluating a marketing rule is processing the query to return the Service Data Object (SDO) business object. The SDO business object for categories, catalog entries, and marketing content displays in an e-Marketing Spot. Command caching stores the results of earlier queries in cache to take advantage of lower retrieval times in comparison to retrieving results from main storage.
A guide to each method used to generate the cache key. Fewer methods in the cache key results in fewer system resources required to cache the commands.
Business object caching eliminates querying of marketing database tables when you are evaluating the marketing rules for a customer. By managing the memory that is allocated to the cache you can fine-tune marketing performance.
You can improve performance by altering the size of the cache that is used to store marketing business objects. You can cache the marketing business objects for a store and cache the information for customers that participate in marketing activities.
The caching technique that is based on activity behavior is provided to aid in the caching of e-Marketing Spots and to help improve storefront performance.
You can improve performance by caching an e-Marketing Spot at the storefront based on the activity behavior, which includes web activities and marketing content.
You can avoid running the e-Marketing Spot snippet for each page load by enabling JSP snippet caching.
If you have a Web activity that uses either the Display Top Browsed action or Display Best Sellers action, you can improve performance with caching. The marketing services update best seller and top browsed lists only once a day. Take advantage of JSP caching so that the list displayed on the storefront is refreshed only once a day, after the list is updated.
JSP cache entries can be associated with one or more categories, catalog entries, and marketing content.
Two options are provided which can improve runtime performance regarding the recording of user behavior data.
You can clear the Web service cache to ensure that the content displayed in an e-Marketing Spot is current and relevant.
If your site uses catalog filters, you can set up command caching for catalog filter to help improve site performance.
To improve store function performance, use runtime caching to eliminate processing to and from the database.
There are two types of JSP components within the Commerce Composer solution. Each can be cached for improved site performance.
To improve SEO performance, use runtime caching to eliminate processing to and from the database.
To improve price rule performance, you can tune your business object caching and set up dynamic cache invalidation for prices generated by price rules.
HCL Commerce contains code to use the WebSphere Dynamic Cache facility to perform caching of lower level computation outputs such as CPU intensive operations, database query results, search query results, and REST request results.
HCL Commerce Search uses fragment caching in the storefront.
HCL Commerce provides utilities for preparing and loading data into a HCL Commerce database. The loading utilities are flexible and you can continue to use these utilities when you customize the HCL Commerce schema.
To configure a payment plug-in define payment and refund methods; payment and refund rules; and the payment protocols that you intend to use.
In keeping with HCL's commitment to current and open standards, HCL Commerce Search uses Apache Lucene as the basis of its Search framework. Lucene powers the Apache Solr search engine. This open-standards approach considerably eases the process of integrating Search with existing and third-party applications.
HCL Customer Service for HCL Commerce is a separately purchased product that provides a light-weight customer service solution that is embedded in the Aurora B2C and Aurora B2B storefronts. Even though this solution is a separately purchased product, it is not a separate application. Stores that are enabled with HCL Customer Service for HCL Commerce allow a customer service representative (CSR) to act on behalf of guest customers and registered customers. A CSR can manage customer accounts, cancel and reorder orders, and shop as customer. A CSR can also act on behalf of Buyer Administrators to help complete Aurora B2B tasks from the storefront, without having to access the Organization Administration Console.
Many aspects of the HCL Commerce runtime application are configured in an XML file. This XML file is located inside the HCL Commerce Java Platform, Enterprise Edition EAR.
An SSL Accelerator (or SSL Terminator) strips off HTTPS encryption at or before the Web server tier in a multitier setup. When you use an SSL Accelerator with HCL Commerce, you can use the SSL Accelerator option to configure HCL Commerce to correctly receive requests that require redirects.
You can administer the features for your store and site, such as attribute, catalog, promotion, marketing, order management features, and more. The administration tasks that you can complete differ depending on the type of feature and the tool that you use to administer your store and site.
HCL Commerce provides facilities for logging. For existing customers, ECTrace and ECMessage are still supported. For new implementations, use the WebSphere Application Server recommendation for logging and tracing.
Business auditing is the capturing of the business logic and objects during a HCL Commerce operation. You may want to audit your business for various reasons: generic, such as to review various tasks performed weekly; or specific, such as to track the steps involved in a particular Customer Service Representative's order. A report on business auditing is available in the Administration Console.
Each time that a command triggers a business event, a record is added to the BUSEVENT database table to persist data from the event. Event listeners and external systems (such as the Marketing component, a back end order management system, or an external analytics system) can use this data to perform further processing.
Applying limits on business operations reduces the risk of system attacks where unbound conditions might result in system failures.
HCL Commerce supports several different types of entities that are defined as stores. The assets of these store entities may be edited using the HCL Commerce Accelerator.
HCL Commerce users can access storefronts by virtue of having the role of Registered Customer in the organization that owns the store, or in any organization above it. The roles a user has access to during registration are defined within the MemberRegistrationAttributes.xml file.
In HCL Commerce, the Commerce Remote Store (CRS), otherwise known as the Store server, implements the Hystrix framework as a proxy for backend resources such as the Transaction server and Search server by default. This can be disabled, but does have performance implications that must be considered.
The topics in the Customizing section describe tasks performed by an application developer to customize HCL Commerce.
HCL Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your HCL Commerce instance and stores.
Topics in the Samples category highlight the various samples that are provided with HCL Commerce.
The following section describes how you can leverage HCL Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
These topics describe the security features of HCL Commerce and how to configure these features.
Topics in the Performance section describe the means by which to plan, implement, test, and re-visit the optimization of HCL Commerce site performance.
Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with HCL Commerce, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
Topics in the Reference section contain all of the HCL Commerce reference documentation.