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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.
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.
Managing features
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.
Marketing
To support marketing features in Management Center, there are a number of administration tasks that you might need to perform.
Administering marketing email activities
If your site uses the Marketing tool in Management Center to send email activities and dialog activities, you must perform some configuration tasks.
Configuring your store to avoid sending multiple marketing e-mails to the same email address
You can add an attribute to the HCL Commerce configuration file to prevent the server from sending multiple emails to the same address for the same email activity. This attribute can prevent the server from sending the emails even when the email address belongs to different users. This configuration ensures that a customer who registers as more than one user but supplies the same email address for each user receives only one email per email activity.

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.
  - The HCL Commerce application
    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.
  - Overview of administering an HCL Commerce site
    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.
  - Staging environment
    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.
  - Workspaces
    You can enable and manage workspace assets and determine policies such as locking rules and commit and publishing options.
  - HCL Commerce database
    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.
  - 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.
  - Extracting and loading data
    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.
  - Payment plug-ins
    To configure a payment plug-in define payment and refund methods; payment and refund rules; and the payment protocols that you intend to use.
  - Search
    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 and the Elasticsearch search engine. The indexing pipeline is a more open, flexible and scalable and is tightly integrated with the data service. Using the underlying dataflow technology and architecture, you can easily customize the pipelines. This open-standards approach considerably eases the process of integrating Search with existing and third-party applications.
  - HCL Customer Service for HCL Commerce
    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.
  - HCL Commerce configuration file (wc-server.xml)
    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.
  - Enabling the SSL Accelerator option
    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.
  - Managing features
    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.
    - Changing the ports used for HCL Commerce tools
      You can change the ports used by the HCL Commerce tools: HCL Commerce Accelerator, Management Center Administration Console, Organization Administration Console and the Store Preview port.
    - Catalogs
      You can administer catalog features such as the attribute dictionary and categories.
    - Marketing
      To support marketing features in Management Center, there are a number of administration tasks that you might need to perform.
      - Configuring marketing for Management Center
        Before business users begin using marketing features in Management Center, a site administrator must perform a number of administrative tasks. These tasks enable and configure key features of the Marketing tool, including web and dialog activities, email activities, marketing statistics, and marketing experiments.
      - Working with the marketing component configuration file
        Some Management Center components, like the marketing component, have customizable configuration files. These files contain properties that control certain component features.
      - Administering marketing statistics
        To ensure that business users can see up-to-date marketing statistics in Management Center, there are a number of administration tasks that you might need to perform.
      - Administering marketing email activities
        If your site uses the Marketing tool in Management Center to send email activities and dialog activities, you must perform some configuration tasks.
        Configuring email activity accounts
        To support sending marketing emails for your store, you must use the Administration Console to configure outbound and inbound email activity accounts.
        Improving Email activity sending performance
        You can set two parameters in the EMLMSG database table that can improve performance when you use Email or Dialog activities to send marketing emails.
        Configuring your store to avoid sending multiple marketing e-mails to the same email address
        You can add an attribute to the HCL Commerce configuration file to prevent the server from sending multiple emails to the same address for the same email activity. This attribute can prevent the server from sending the emails even when the email address belongs to different users. This configuration ensures that a customer who registers as more than one user but supplies the same email address for each user receives only one email per email activity.
        Forcing email activities to be sent right away during testing
        To avoid waiting for the scheduled email send time to arrive in an authoring or staging environment, you can run SQL statements to set the send time to the current time. The SQL statements temporarily override the Time to start delivery field value that is set in the Administration Console for the email account.
        Viewing emails that were not delivered
        When an email or dialog activity runs, emails can fail to be delivered for a number of reasons. You can query the HCL Commerce database to view details about the delivery of emails for the activity. For instance, you can view whether an email was opened, clicked, or bounced back to the sender. You can also view the email addresses that are associated with emails that were opened, clicked, or that bounced-back.
      - Testing web and dialog activities
        Test web and dialog activities in your authoring or staging environment to ensure that the activities produce the right result before publishing them to the production environment.
      - Defining image map HTML
        When you are creating or changing marketing content that is an image, you can create the image as an image map. An image map provides Marketing Managers with the capability of specifying multiple click actions areas within a single image.
      - Substitution variables for entering HTML in Management Center
        In the Marketing tool, you can use substitution variables in marketing content HTML to improve the handling of links to store pages and files from the marketing content. By using these substitution variables, you can use the same HTML in your store preview and production storefront without changing the context root. The marketing engine dynamically replaces these variables with the correct context root information.
      - Creating substitution parameters for image paths in CKEditor content
        If your site uses CKEditor, you can create a substitution parameter to represent the variable part of an image path. When business users enter HTML content in CKEditor, they can use the substitution parameter in the image path.
      - Checking when a dialog activity was last processed
        You can view a timestamp in the DMACTATTR table that indicates the last time the trigger for a specific dialog activity was processed. This timestamp applies only to daily check triggers that run once a day. For example, if you want to know the last time the Customer Celebrates Birthday trigger was processed for a specific dialog activity, you can run an SQL statement to check the timestamp.
      - Deactivating or deleting expired Web activities for better performance
        To improve runtime performance, make sure to either delete or deactivate expired Web activities on a regular basis. This ensures that the HCL Commerce server does not waste resources checking the schedules of expired Web activities when evaluating what to display in an e-Marketing Spot.
      - Setting up the customer segment export feature
        As a site administrator, you can connect the staging or authoring environment with the production environment so business users can export customer segment information from the production environment. By retrieving and exporting the customer information from the production environment, the customer segment export file includes the most recent information for the customers in a segment.
    - Promotions
      You can administer promotion features such as creating or deleting promotion folders and configuring the promotions engine.
    - Price rules and price lists
      A Site Administrator must perform a series of tasks to enable and configure price rules and price lists in Management Center.
    - Catalog filters
      As Site Administrator, you might be required to assist business users with certain catalog filter tasks that relate to the Catalog Filter and Pricing tool in Management Center.
    - Negotiated pricing
      To use negotiated pricing, you must have a nominal cost price list that is defined for your store.
    - Store preview functions
      You can administer store preview functions such as enabling and disabling commands and views, and adding a customized business context.
    - Order management
      As a Site Administrator, you can manage various features of the order management subsystem.
    - Request For Quote (RFQ) trading
      As a Site Administrator, you can enable and disable the RFQ trading mechanism, and enable RFQ notification messaging.
    - User traffic
      Edit the HCL Commerce configuration file to set the level of caching performed on user traffic data. The default number of URLs in the cache is 20. If this number is too low for your site, for example, if your site is very busy and you are concerned about performance impacts, you can increase the cache size. User traffic data is used in some operational reports.
    - Inventory sharing in extended sites stores (non-ATP)
      The extended sites business model provides scalability and manageability improvements for HCL Commerce sites where there are multiple stores which can share assets including non-ATP inventory. The sharing of non-ATP inventory reduces the complexity of managing inventory assets for all the stores in the site. All stores in extended sites can share inventory from a single asset store with distributed fulfillment centers.
    - Tax sharing in extended sites stores
      In extended sites store model, tax assets can be shared between the extended site asset store and the extended site store. You can manage the tax assets in an extended site store in HCL Commerce Accelerator.
  - Logging services
    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
    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.
  - Business events
    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.
  - Business Object thresholds
    Applying limits on business operations reduces the risk of system attacks where unbound conditions might result in system failures.
  - Stores in HCL Commerce
    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.
  - Enabling registered users to access all stores in the Extended Sites business model
    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.
  - Hystrix on the Store server
    The Hystrix framework is used as a proxy for back-end resources such as the Transaction server and Search server by default. This can be disabled, but does have performance implications that must be considered.
- 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.

Configuring your store to avoid sending multiple marketing e-mails to the same email address

You can add an attribute to the HCL Commerce configuration file to prevent the server from sending multiple emails to the same address for the same email activity. This attribute can prevent the server from sending the emails even when the email address belongs to different users. This configuration ensures that a customer who registers as more than one user but supplies the same email address for each user receives only one email per email activity.

Procedure

Open the HCL Commerce configuration file.
Locate the section of the file that starts with the <Instance> element.

Within the <Instance element, add the attribute filterDuplicateEmails="true", as shown in the following example:


<Instance BootstrapMulti="wcs.bootstrap_multi_en_US.xml,"
 ....
 InstanceName="demo"
 filterDuplicateEmails="true"
 InstanceType="local"
 ...
 WCSInstallDir="WC_installdir"
 WorkspacePath="" />

Save and close the file.