Seller assets

A Seller is a user within HCL Commerce. The Seller supervises the overall store objectives and management, in addition to tracking the store sales. A Seller sells the goods and services to the customer. The Seller role is equivalent to a merchant and has access to all HCL Commerce Accelerator capabilities.

The following diagram illustrates the assets that a Seller requires to maintain a store and to sell to customers.

Seller assets that illustrate the types of assets for a member that is defined as a Seller within HCL Commerce and their relationships.

Users
The HCL Commerce system contains members. Each member is assigned a role, such as Customer Service Representative for the store, or Receiver at a warehouse. The Seller role can maintain the following assets to sell to customers:
  • Stores
  • HCL Commerce Enterprise Accounts (optional)
  • Contracts (or at least the HCL Commerce default contract)
  • Product sets
  • Price lists
  • Catalogs
  • Fulfillment centers
  • Inventory items

The diagram highlights the relationship between a member (Seller) and the Seller assets. A Seller can have the assets that are listed previously to maintain a store and the assets need to have a Seller for deployment.

Stores
an HCL Commerce online store consists of a set of HTML and JavaServer Pages files, and the store contains tax, shipping, payment, catalog, and other database assets. These assets are contained in a store archive. A store also contains store data, which is the information that is populated into the HCL Commerce database to allow a store to function.
HCL Commerce Enterprise Accounts
HCL Commerce Enterpriseaccounts for customers to allow them to purchase from the store. An account contains the following information:
  • The account name, which is often the name of the organization with which the customer is associated. This organization has contracts that are defined with the store, stipulating terms for the customer to shop at the store. For example, the organization IBM can have contracts with the ABC Office Supplies Company.
  • The representative name, which is the name of the representative organization within the Seller organization that is responsible for the account.
  • The number of contracts that belong to the account.
Contracts
Typically, in HCL Commerce, all customers must shop under a contract. Each account between the customer and the Seller must be associated with one or more contracts. At a minimum, an account should be associated with a default contract that allows guest customers or registered customers to shop at the store; the default contract is also needed if you want customers to be able to purchase products that are not covered by other contracts. A contract allows the customer to purchase products from a store at a specified price for a specified time, under terms and conditions, and business policies, stipulated in the contract. The Seller deploys the contract so that customers can buy from the store.

The Buyer in a contract can be a user, an organization, or a member group. For the user, the Buyer is considered the customer. For an organization, which is defined as a Buyer in a contract, then any child of this organization can act as a Buyer for the contract. For a member group, any user in the member group can act as a Buyer for the contract.

Product sets
Product sets provide a mechanism for a Seller to categorize online catalogs into logical subsets so that a Seller can allow various customers to take advantage of different catalog views. A Seller can create a contract for a customer and stipulate that the customer can purchase only the products that within a predefined product set.
Price lists
A price list is associated with the price a Seller offers or presents to a customer. A Seller can list different prices for the same product to different customers. In HCL Commerce, a price offer is also known as a trading position and represents the price of a catalog entry and criteria that the customer must satisfy to qualify for that price.
In HCL Commerce, an Offer object is part of a trading position container, which is owned by a member. A trading position container contains trading positions, and can be made available to all customers, or to only customers in certain groups through the trading agreements or contracts. Sometimes a trading position container is called as a price list. There are two kinds of price lists:
  • A standard price list which contains the base prices for the products in the store catalog
  • A custom price list which specifies the list of products and their customized prices.

In some business models, you can have multiple standard price lists, which could be based on either cost, or on list prices.

Catalogs
an HCL Commerce store uses at least one online catalog to showcase the goods and services that the Seller offers for sale. Typically, an online catalog contains prices, images, and descriptions of the items for sale. An online catalog can also present merchandise into distinct categories to facilitate navigation.

Each store in the HCL Commerce system must have a master catalog, which is used for catalog management. The master catalog is the central location to manage the merchandise of a Seller. The master catalog is the single catalog that contains all products, items, relationships, and standard prices for everything that is for sale in the store. If a Seller has more than one store, the master catalog can be shared between these stores.

Fulfillment centers
Fulfillment centers are used by stores as both inventory warehouses and shipping and receiving centers. A Seller can have one or many fulfillment centers.

From a HCL Commerce Server perspective, a fulfillment center object is separate from the Store object. It manages product inventory and shipping. To ship an order, the fulfillment center relies on a shipping mode object that is specified by the customer. The shipping mode object indicates the shipping carrier and method of shipping for fulfilling orders. In a fulfillment center, the shipping arrangement object indicates that a Store object is arranged with a fulfillment center object to ship products by using a certain shipping mode.

Inventory items
Inventory items include anything that can be physically accounted for in a Seller fulfillment center. The HCL Commerce system defines specific types of inventory that can be fulfilled. For example, items, products, SKUs, bundles, and packages; but these types are all considered inventory. Products are configured for fulfillment by using the Product Management tools on HCL Commerce Accelerator.
Seller address information
Information about the Seller address is important for several parties within an order. For example, fulfillment centers require this information for shipping inventory. Likewise, customers require this information to contact the Seller of any order inquiries.