Home
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.
Reference
Topics in the Reference section contain all of the HCL Commerce reference documentation.
Payments subsystem
In HCL Commerce, payment processing uses the Payments subsystem.
Payment plug-in specification
Review the following overview of the payment plug-in specification to better understand how you can use payment plug-ins.
Enabling dependent credit support
You must perform the following procedure to enable support for dependent credit transactions.
Configuring synchronized payment reversals
You can configure the payments subsystem to support payment captures that are associated with shipments. This helps avoid payment problems with orders for which there are multiple shipments and multiple payment transactions.
Synchronized payment reversal
Synchronized payment reversal solves the intermittent problems that can occur when online payment gateways permit only one payment capture per payment authorization, but your site offers multiple shipments for orders.

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 9.1, 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.
- 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.
  - HCL Commerce API reference
    HCL Commerce exposes two main programming APIs. The first and newest API is a REST interface, and most new classes are exposed here. The legacy Java API also contains new classes not suitable for REST, and can be browsed in Javadoc format.
  - Cross-reference of data beans and tables
    Data beans are grouped into several component groups.
  - Cross-reference of commands, tasks, and tables
    URL commands, controller commands, task commands, view commands and tables are related to each other.
  - Cross reference: Commands to beans to database tables
    Use this information when you are customizing a command and you want to know which tables are affected. You should also use this topic if you are modifying a table and want to know which commands and beans are affected.
  - Run Engine commands
    The following Run Engine commands are available by default for you to configure the applications that are running inside the containers.
  - Entering Docker containers
    To enter a Docker container you can complete the following steps.
  - Docker container start up logic for HCL Commerce Version 9.1
    When you deploy a container from an HCL provided image, an Entrypoint.sh helper script determines the configurations to use while starting up the container. Review the following information to learn about what the helper script does, and how you can customize the configurations.
  - HCL Commerce database schema
    The HCL Commerce database model was designed for data integrity and optimal performance. HCL Commerce provides several hundred tables that store HCL Commerce instance data. To maintain data integrity, and to ease maintenance referential integrity, constraints are widely used in the database model. Indexes are used carefully on tables to avoid over-indexing and to provide a good balance between data retrieval and data manipulation activities (insert and update). The business rules are implemented at the application level rather than by using database trigger. Triggers, however, are used to facilitate data staging and optimistic locking. A limited number of SQL-based database stored procedures are used for data intensive activities.
  - Payments subsystem
    In HCL Commerce, payment processing uses the Payments subsystem.
    - Payments subsystem
      In HCL Commerce, payment processing uses the Payments subsystem.
    - Extended data in payments or credits
      Some payment plug-ins require extra protocol data or keywords to communicate with a back-end system. This extra protocol data called extended data is in addition to the standard attributes defined in the PaymentInstruction definition. Extended data is any data other than the currency, amount of the payment instruction, and the payment method name. For example, credit card number, expiration, and billing address are extended data.
    - Payment rules provided in HCL Commerce
      Payment rules specify the payment actions that should occur for the payment methods a store accepts for its goods or services. Payment actions and credit actions are determined in terms of current-to-target state movements. payment rules define what target state a payment should be in by defining the actions needed to move a payment from its current state to the target state.
    - Payment configuration files
      Use these files when configuring the Payments subsystem and payment plug-ins.
    - Payment plug-in specification
      Review the following overview of the payment plug-in specification to better understand how you can use payment plug-ins.
      - Payment plug-in containers class diagram
        The Payment plug-in containers class diagram shows the relationships between the following objects: PaymentInstruction, Payment, Credit, FinancialTransaction and ExtendedData.
      - Payment state machine
        The following diagram shows the state machine for a Payment as used by the Payment plug-in controller. It describes how a Payment moves from state to state when financial transactions, queries, or external edits are made against a payment and payment plug-ins are used to process payment transactions. The payment state is persisted in the PPCPAYMENT table.
      - Credit state machine
        The following diagram shows the state machine for a Credit as used by Payment plug-in controller. It describes how a credit moves from state to state when financial transactions, queries, or external edits are made against a payment and payment plug-ins are used to process payment transactions. The credit state is persisted in the PPCCREDIT table.
      - Financial transaction execution flow
        The Financial transaction execution flow illustrates how a financial transaction occurs, and how HCL Commerce interacts with the payment plug-in.
      - Plug-in deployment descriptor XSD
        An example of the XML schema document for a plug-in deployment descriptor.
      - Enabling dependent credit support
        You must perform the following procedure to enable support for dependent credit transactions.
        Dependent credit
        HCL Commerce 6.0.0.3 introduced payment rules and policies to support dependent credit.
        Configuring synchronized payment reversals
        You can configure the payments subsystem to support payment captures that are associated with shipments. This helps avoid payment problems with orders for which there are multiple shipments and multiple payment transactions.
        Synchronized payment reversal
        Synchronized payment reversal solves the intermittent problems that can occur when online payment gateways permit only one payment capture per payment authorization, but your site offers multiple shipments for orders.
      - Processing multiple shipments with a single approval
        You can process multiple shipments at a time with a single authorization approval by customizing the PaymentEventListenerImpl class. Without customization, the PaymentEventListenerImpl class uses the default payment rules and processes multiple transactions for multiple shipments.
      - LOC plug-in financial transactions
        Payment plug-ins can perform payment actions differently. The following table describes how the LOC plug-in performs financial transactions (payment actions). This information might be useful to plug-in writers who are modeling plug-ins after the LOC plug-in. In summary, the payment actions performed by the LOC plug-in involve checking the presence of data in the payment instruction.
      - SimpleOffline plug-in financial transactions
        The SimpleOffline plug-in performs several financial transactions (payment actions). Plug-in writers who are modeling plug-ins after the SimpleOffline plug-in could model the financial transactions in a similar way.
      - SimpleOfflinePlugin.xml
        This file contains a list of the unique parameters required for each payment method supported by the plug-in.
  - Dynamic caching
    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.
  - HCL Commerce store pages properties
  - Cache-entry elements
    The root element of the cachespec.xml file, <cache>, contains <cache-entry> elements. The WebSphere dynamic cache service parses the cachespec.xml file during start-up, and extracts a set of configuration parameters from each <cache-entry> element.
  - Data Load utility configuration file schema
    The Data Load utility contains several configuration files. You can use the configuration file schema to understand and customize the data load configuration files.
  - HCL Commerce web services
    HCL Commerce provides many web services.
  - Utilities
    In HCL Commerce utilities are scripts that perform operations such as loading access control policies, loading store data, and cleaning the database of obsolete objects. In runtime environments, run utilities from the Utility server Docker container. In the development environment, run utilities from the bin directory.
  - Shopping flow URLs
    HCL Commerce shopping flow URLs are organized by subsystem.
  - Messaging system URLs
    The following URLs relate to the Messaging system.
  - Scheduler URLs
    The server subsystem consists of functions that are associated with URLs that are run by the scheduler.
  - jQuery Enhancements API
    The Aurora starter store in HCL Commerce is completely written in jQuery, which is one of the most commonly used JavaScript libraries used in dynamic websites. The jQuery AJAX and events API provides an easy to use framework that meets most AJAX requirements for storefront development.
  - HCL Commerce foundation tag library
    The HCL Commerce foundation JSTL tag library is a collection of custom tags that are provided to you to support the authoring of HCL Commerce JSP files. HCL Commerce stores use the JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) to perform logic, instead of Java code. At the same time, business logic is moved into data beans. The combination of these steps allows for less Java code in a JSP page.

Synchronized payment reversal

Synchronized payment reversal solves the intermittent problems that can occur when online payment gateways permit only one payment capture per payment authorization, but your site offers multiple shipments for orders.

For example, if you authorize $20, and then you capture $10 against this payment authorization, the payment authorization becomes unavailable, and the remaining $10 is automatically released.

Consider the following scenario in which the payment gateway only permits a single capture per authorization:

A customer adds two items to the shopping cart, item A with a price of $20, and item B with a price of $30. The customer selects different shipping addresses for these two items.
The customer selects a credit card as the payment method, and submits the order. A payment authorization for $50 is submitted against this credit card.
The Store administrator wants to support the behavior capturing payment by shipment. When item A is shipped, a payment capture worth $20 is performed. At this time, a payment capture for $20 occurs against the payment authorization performed during order submission, for $50. This payment capture is successfully performed by the payment gateway. The remaining $30 is automatically released by the payment gateway.
When item B is shipped, a payment authorization and capture worth $30 is performed by creating a new payment

In order to support this scenario, in step 3 HCL Commerce must synchronize the local payment data with the payment gateway when the payment gateway automatically releases the remaining $30. This behavior is configured using the locallyPartialReverseApproval flag. If this flag is configured as true, then in step 3, HCL Commerce locally reverses the remaining $30. Then in step 4, a new payment with $30 will be created for payment authorization and payment capture for the second shipment.

Note: You can configure this behavior so that the second payment approval is performed immediately after the synchronized payment reversal occurs in step 3 if you prefer.