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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.
Integrating
Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using HCL Commerce in combination with other products.
Sterling Order Management integration
The integration between HCL Commerce and Sterling Order Management combines the industry-leading front-end capabilities of HCL Commerce with the proven, back-end order and inventory management features of Sterling Order Management.
Solution Overview
The integration of HCL Commerce and IBM Sterling Order Management delivers the strengths of both products.
Overview of the inventory process flow
In the Sterling Order Management integration with HCL Commerce, Sterling Order Management maintains, and provides inventory information to, the HCL Commerce Inventory Cache. The two systems interact with each other through APIs and services that are supplied as part of the integration.
Real-time inventory check
With real-time inventory check, HCL Commerce checks the availability information of items from Sterling Order Management. Real-time inventory check is used to check inventory against an online store, or against a physical store for the buy online, pick up in-store option.
Criteria for item availability
There are some conditions to determine whether the item is unavailable in HCL Commerce Inventory Cache:

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.
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using HCL Commerce in combination with other products.
  - Order management system integration
    Integrate a distributed order management (DOM) system with your store to provide comprehensive coverage of the order lifecycle across channels, from capture to fulfillment.
  - Sterling Order Management integration
    The integration between HCL Commerce and Sterling Order Management combines the industry-leading front-end capabilities of HCL Commerce with the proven, back-end order and inventory management features of Sterling Order Management.
    - Solution Overview
      The integration of HCL Commerce and IBM Sterling Order Management delivers the strengths of both products.
      - Technical overview of Direct Integration
        Direct Integration is offered in Sterling Order Management and HCL Commerce. This overview describes both technologies in general, the Direct Integration design in particular, and gives general information about migrating from bus-based to Direct Integration.
      - Overview of the order process flow
        In the HCL Commerce integration with Sterling Order Management, HCL Commerce is used for selling and Sterling Order Management provides a fulfillment solution.
      - Overview of the inventory process flow
        In the Sterling Order Management integration with HCL Commerce, Sterling Order Management maintains, and provides inventory information to, the HCL Commerce Inventory Cache. The two systems interact with each other through APIs and services that are supplied as part of the integration.
        Inventory cache push synchronization
        The Sterling Order Management Real-time Availability Monitor (RTAM) is used to generate request for both batch update as well as for further adjustments.This enables better control for synchronizing the HCL Commerce inventory cache.
        Handling order and inventory system outages
        In the point-to-point integration between HCL Commerce and Sterling Order Management, in the order management system, outages occur, sometimes with long downtime. To avoid impact to the front end, HCL Commerce has a way to deal with the outages in the order capture process.
        Real-time inventory check
        With real-time inventory check, HCL Commerce checks the availability information of items from Sterling Order Management. Real-time inventory check is used to check inventory against an online store, or against a physical store for the buy online, pick up in-store option.
        Inventory checks online store
        HCL Commerce checks inventory availability for an online store by in two possible ways.
        Buy online, pick up in-store
        For the buy online, pick up in-store scenario, Sterling Order Management gets inventory availability for a catalog entry.
        Criteria for item availability
        There are some conditions to determine whether the item is unavailable in HCL Commerce Inventory Cache:
      - Overview of the pricing and promotion process flow
        In the HCL Commerce integration with Sterling Order Management, HCL Commerce provides pricing calculations and promotion information for orders. The two systems interact with each other by means of user exits that are supplied as part of this integration.
      - Security
        This integration offers Secure Socket Layer (SSL) one-way and two-way options for secure network communications. It also provides secure data access policies and ways to override them selectively.
      - Scenarios
        The Sterling Order Management and HCL Commerce integration supports several shopper scenarios.
    - Prerequisites
      For the Sterling Order Management integration with HCL Commerce, some prerequisites, system requirements, assumptions, and limitations apply.
    - Sample configuration for integrating with Aurora starter store
      The sample configuration for integrating with the Aurora starter store provides a preconfigured order management-to-storefront environment that you can test to understand the significant features of the HCL Commerce integration with Sterling Order Management.
    - Integrating Sterling Order Management with HCL Commerce
      Configuring and deploying HCL Commerce and Sterling Order Management for integration includes running provided activation scripts, defining properties for your implementation, granting permissions, and triggering agent and integration servers.
    - Customizing
      Many elements of the side-by-side integration can be customized.
    - Troubleshooting and status codes
      To troubleshoot integration issues, review status codes.
    - Reference
      To understand how Sterling Order Management integrates with HCL Commerce, review mappings between the two systems and integration flows.
  - Inventory Management system integration
    Integrate an inventory management system with your store to ensure that inventory availability is constantly updated to reflect your store's current inventory levels.
  - Payments system integration
    Integrate a payments system with your store to process shopper payments for your site. You can also integrate with pricing and tax service providers to manage the pricing and tax calculations for your store.
  - Tax system integration
    You can integrate HCL Commerce with a third-party tax calculation system to provide tax calculations for your store. Integrating with a third-party tax service provider can help you to build and maintain a highly secure e-commerce site with a worldwide tax calculation process. Use the available HCL Commerce tax integration extension points to create any extensions that you need for integrating with your third-party tax calculation system. The tax integration xC extensions are a set of task commands that are called by the order component to communicate with the third-party tax calculation system when the tax integration feature is enabled.
  - Integrating with back-end systems and external applications
    External systems integration is a key feature of the HCL Commerce solution. In HCL Commerce business logic is enabled for integration and built-in adapters and interfaces are provided for common integration points. Additionally, the HCL Commerce integration solution leverages integration standards by using various IBM connectivity solutions.
  - IBM Watson Campaign Automation integration
    You can integrate IBM Watson Campaign Automation with HCL Commerce so that transactional emails are sent by IBM Watson Campaign Automation.
  - IBM MQ
    HCL Commerce provides a listener for IBM MQ for inbound requests, and an adapter for IBM MQ for outbound requests, to integrate back-end, and external systems with HCL Commerce.
  - Content management integration
    You can integrate HCL Commerce with an external content management system through a punch-out window from Management Center and through the web feed utility. You can integrate HCL Commerce with IBM Web Content Manager to provide Management Center users the ability to associate IBM Web Content Manager content with HCL Commerce objects.
  - Analytics for HCL Commerce
    HCL Commerce provides a framework that you can configure to integrate your store with an external Web analytics solution. This framework includes a tag library that you can use in store page JSP files to provide appropriate analytics information to the external analytics system.
  - IBM Product Recommendations and HCL Commerce
    IBM Product Recommendations is an IBM Digital Analytics solution that you can subscribe to that automatically generates personalized product recommendations on the storefront. The recommendations are based on the browsing, shopping, and purchasing behavior of individual customers. If your site is integrated with IBM Digital Analytics, you can display recommendations from IBM Product Recommendations on your store pages.
  - IBM Enterprise Marketing Management integration
    You can integrate HCL Commerce with IBM Enterprise Marketing Management.
  - IBM Dynamic Pricing
    Dynamic Pricing is a cloud-based pricing system that analyzes real-time market data to provide suggestions on how merchandisers can react to competitor pricing and shifts in market conditions. Data can be fed to Dynamic Pricing from multiple sources, including HCL Commerce. You can configure HCL Commerce to export pricing data to Dynamic Pricing for pricing analysis and adjustment. The adjusted pricing data can then be imported from Dynamic Pricing to HCL Commerce, so the prices can be propagated to your live store front.
  - IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale
    You can integrate HCL Commerce version 9.0.0.7 or later with IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale version 8.6.1.2 or later. The WebSphere eXtreme Scale licensed program is an elastic, scalable, in-memory data grid that you can use as an advanced cache for HCL Commerce. Integrating with WebSphere eXtreme Scale can provide significant performance benefits for high volume HCL Commerce customers.
  - Apple Pay on the Web integration
    Apple Pay on the Web integration with HCL Commerce provides you with an easy and secure way to accept and process payments. Apple Pay on the Web enables customers to purchase products in the Aurora starter store with a single touch in Safari on Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
  - Configuring directory services (LDAP) with HCL Commerce
    HCL Commerce can be configured to use one or more LDAP servers as the master user repository instead of the HCL Commerce database. This is typically done when multiple applications need to share a common user repository.
  - Sterling Omni-Configurator integration
    The Sterling Omni-Configurator integration for HCL Commerce enables your storefront to sell complex, configurable products, otherwise know as dynamic kits.
  - OAuth 2.0 framework for social login
    When you integrate with the OAuth 2.0 framework, your shoppers can authenticate to your storefront with their social networking accounts, like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
- 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.

Criteria for item availability

There are some conditions to determine whether the item is unavailable in HCL Commerce Inventory Cache:

If inventory for an item does not exist in the Inventory Cache.
Inventory for an item might not have been cached in HCL Commerce yet. In this case, the information needs to be retrieved from Sterling Order Management.
If inventory level is below a certain threshold and is stale in the Inventory Cache.
A threshold can be set in HCL Commerce to ensure that the Inventory Cache gets updated if inventory for an item falls below a certain level. Any inventory below the specified threshold triggers a call to Sterling Order Management. If the inventory is stale, HCL Commerce can be configured to pull inventory information from Sterling Order Management if it has not been updated for a specific number of hours.