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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.
Operating
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.
HCL Commerce Accelerator
Use the HCL Commerce Accelerator to maintain online stores.
Business relationship management
To customize what a customer can do in a store use the business relationship management system. 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.
Contracts
Contracts enable a customer organization or a customer group to purchase products from a store at a specified price for a specified time under specific conditions.
Creating contracts
There are two methods to create contracts in HCL Commerce. You can use HCL Commerce Accelerator or XML format to create contracts.

Documentation
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.
- Getting started
  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.
- Installing and deploying
  Learn how to install and deploy HCL Commerce development environments and HCL Commerce production environments.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to HCL Commerce Version 9, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
- Operating
  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.
  - Management Center for HCL Commerce
    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).
  - HCL Commerce Accelerator
    Use the HCL Commerce Accelerator to maintain online stores.
    - HCL Commerce Accelerator user interface
      The HCL Commerce Accelerator interface consists of several notebooks, wizards, dialogs, and lists to help you complete your tasks.
    - Opening HCL Commerce Accelerator
      Use HCL Commerce Accelerator to maintain online stores by completing various store operations such as creating and maintaining orders and tracking store activities.
    - Changing an HCL Commerce password
      If you have the appropriate authority, you can change the HCL Commerce logon password for an HCL Commerce user or for yourself from any of these tools.
    - Managing the store
      The Seller sets up store-level functions within the site. The Seller can access all menu items under the Store menu.
    - Customer information
      If customers register with the store, you can maintain their registration profiles to track information. Maintain information such as the customer's logon ID, logon password, authentication information, store account status, title, name, preferred language, or currency.
    - Order management
      A typical order includes one or more products, billing and shipping addresses, payment details, and the total cost (including shipping charges and taxes, as applicable). Comments or price adjustments can also be included in an order.
    - Inventory
      Inventory includes anything that can be physically accounted for in a fulfillment center such as items, products, SKUs, bundles, and prebuilt kits.
    - Inventory returns and dispositions
      Customers return products to a fulfillment center for many different reasons. Returned inventory might be reintegrated into the pool of inventory available for order, or it might be discarded. This process is called disposition.
    - Returns and refunds
      A return is a record of a customer's request for a refund, to return merchandise, or both. The term is used whether an RMA is issued in advance of merchandise receipt or the transaction is begun at the time of merchandise receipt. You can use the return merchandise authorization (RMA) function in both available to promise (ATP) and non-ATP inventory-enabled stores.
    - Viewing account reports
    - Viewing contract reports
    - Request for Quote (RFQ)
      A buyer can create a Request for Quote (RFQ), by using the HCL Commerce Accelerator, for unique variations of goods and services that are offered in a catalog. If buyers cannot find a product or category that match their needs within a catalog, they can select attributes from the personalized dictionary to precisely define the product specifications. A buyer can also create an RFQ by using the contents in their shopping cart, or add a shopping cart to an existing RFQ.
    - Business relationship management
      To customize what a customer can do in a store use the business relationship management system. 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.
      - Business relationship model
        The key elements in the business relationship model include the different kinds of contracts, the various buying units, and the distinct customers who have access to your site.
      - Case Study: HCL Commerce contract modeling
        HCL Commerce contracts are the foundation for determining what customers can purchase in an online store, and at what price. The contracts functions are flexible in that it can support many types of e-commerce business models and their complex business requirements. This flexibility is powerful, and an optimal contract design can minimize the amount of effort that is required to manage business accounts and contracts. As well, an optimal design can minimize the amount of system resources that are required and thus enhance system performance.
      - Managing business accounts: an overview
        Managing a business account involves tasks that create and modify business accounts. The various tasks that are involved in managing a business account are performed by different roles.
      - Contracts
        Contracts enable a customer organization or a customer group to purchase products from a store at a specified price for a specified time under specific conditions.
        Contract states
        A contract passes various states from the time it is created until the time it is deleted. In most cases, the change of state is triggered by actions you take. Some state changes occur automatically.
        Contract referral
        A base contract is a contract that can be referred to by other contracts. For example, contract B refers to (base) contract A. Thus, a buyer who is entitled to the terms and conditions in contract B is also entitled to all the terms and conditions in contract A. Multiple customer contracts can refer to the same base contract so that all the customer contracts can share a set of terms and conditions.
        Display customization
        Through the HCL Commerce you can change the look of display pages in your store for every business customer by specifying the DisplayCustomizationTC term and condition in the business account definition. This display customization can be as simple as adding a different logo, or as complex as having a custom store name and message, for each customer.
        Creating contracts
        There are two methods to create contracts in HCL Commerce. You can use HCL Commerce Accelerator or XML format to create contracts.
        Creating a contract by using HCL Commerce Accelerator
        Create a contract by using the HCL Commerce Accelerator , which creates a contract in the draft state. The contract then goes through any approval process that is defined for your store. If you want to create a new contract in either the approved or active state, you must import the contract from an XML file.
        Creating a new version of a contract
        Creating a new version of the contract creates a draft version of an existing contract. This new version has the same name as the original contract, but the version number is incremented. When you deploy a new version of a contract, the existing contract is moved to the closed state. You can create a new version of a contract for contracts that are in the approved, active, or suspended states. You can duplicate a contract if you want to create a new version of an existing contract with a different name. Duplicating a contract does not move the existing contract into the closed state.
        Creating a contract that can be referred by other contracts
        A contract can refer to another contract. For example, contract A can refer to contract B. Thus, a buyer who is entitled to contract A is entitled to all the terms and conditions from contract A and contract B. A base contract must be in active state to allow customer contracts to refer to the base contract. You might not suspend or cancel a base contract if active customer contracts refer to the base contract. After you specify that a contract refers to another contract, you can change the reference, but not the fact that the contract refers to another contract.
        Examples: Contract product selection and pricing
        The following examples show how to define the products available for sale under a contract and the prices that are charged for the products.
        Managing contracts
        Managing a contract involves tasks that take the contract from creation to the end of the contract's lifecycle. The various tasks that are involved in managing a contract are performed by different roles.
      - Deprecated feature: Catalog filtering
        You can filter the catalog to a specific set of users and exclude any products in the master catalog that you do not want to sell at your store. Use the Catalog Filter on B2B contracts and hosting contracts.
  - HCL Customer Service for HCL Commerce JSP stores
    HCL Customer Service for HCL Commerce provides customer service enhancements that enable a customer service representative (CSR) to resolve common issues and capture orders. These capabilities are built into the HCL Commerce Aurora storefront and enable a CSR to complete key tasks on behalf of a guest and registered customers for both B2B and B2C stores. Customer Service for HCL Commerce is offered for both Professional and Enterprise editions.
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using HCL Commerce in combination with other products.
- Administering
  Topics in the Administering category highlight tasks that are typically performed by the Site Administrator, to support daily operations of the HCL Commerce site.
- Customizing
  The topics in the Customizing section describe tasks performed by an application developer to customize HCL Commerce.
- Tutorials
  HCL Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your HCL Commerce instance and stores.
- Samples
  Topics in the Samples category highlight the various samples that are provided with HCL Commerce.
- Compliance
  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.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of HCL Commerce and how to configure these features.
- Performance
  Topics in the Performance section describe the means by which to plan, implement, test, and re-visit the optimization of HCL Commerce site performance.
- Troubleshooting
  Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with HCL Commerce, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
- Reference
  Topics in the Reference section contain all of the HCL Commerce reference documentation.

Creating contracts

There are two methods to create contracts in HCL Commerce. You can use HCL Commerce Accelerator or XML format to create contracts.