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.
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.
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.
Data Extract utility
The Data Extract utility is a command-line utility that you can use to extract data from the HCL Commerce database into an output file.
Samples: Data Extract utility
The samples that are provided for use with the Data Extract utility demonstrate the best practice methods for extracting data from the HCL Commerce database. Use these samples and the related sample configuration files as templates for configuring and running the utility when you need to extract your own data.

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.
    - Data Load utility
      The Data Load utility is an enhanced business object based loading utility. This utility provides an efficient solution for loading information into your HCL Commerce database. You can also customize the Data Load utility to load other types of data. The Data Load utility is the recommended loading utility.
    - Data Extract utility
      The Data Extract utility is a command-line utility that you can use to extract data from the HCL Commerce database into an output file.
      - Best practices for using the Data Extract utility
        Review the following best practices for configuring and running the Data Extract utility to help you extract data from your HCL Commerce database more effectively.
      - Configuring and running the Data Extract utility
        You can configure and run the Data Extract utility from a command-line utility to extract data for a store from the HCL Commerce database. You can extract data into an CSV or XML output file. You can then use the Data Load utility to load the output file into stores in other environments, such as for copying data into multiple stores or setting up multiple test environments.
      - Extracting promotion data with the Data Extract utility
        You can configure and run the Data Extract utility from a command line utility to extract the promotion data for a store into an XML file. You can then use the Data Load utility to load the promotion XML file into stores in other environments, such as for testing the promotion in multiple test environments.
      - Extracting Commerce Composer data
        You can configure and run the Data Extract utility from a command-line utility to extract Commerce Composer data for a store into CSV output files. You can then use the Data Load utility to load the extracted data into stores in other environments, such as for testing purposes. By using these utilities to copy data between instances, business users do not need to manually create the same assets across multiple instances.
      - Extracting marketing data with the Data Extract utility
        You can configure and run the Data Extract utility from a command-line utility to extract marketing data for a store into CSV output files. You can then use the Data Load utility to load the extracted data into other HCL Commerce stores or instances.
      - Samples: Data Extract utility
        The samples that are provided for use with the Data Extract utility demonstrate the best practice methods for extracting data from the HCL Commerce database. Use these samples and the related sample configuration files as templates for configuring and running the utility when you need to extract your own data.
        Promotions
        This sample demonstrates how to extract promotion data from a store with the Data Extract utility. After you extract the data, you can use the Data Load utility to load the promotion data into a new store to quickly copy promotions between stores.
        Marketing data
        This sample demonstrates how to extract marketing data from the HCL Commerce database, such as activities, e-Marketing Spots, customer segments, content, and associated attachments. This sample uses the Data Extract utility to extract the marketing data for a specific store. You can then use the Data Load utility to load the extracted data into another HCL Commerce instance or store to quickly copy marketing data between instances or stores.
        Commerce Composer data
        The following samples demonstrate how to extract Commerce Composer data with the Data Extract utility.
    - Catalog Upload feature
      You can configure the Catalog Upload feature in Management Center to change the behavior for how the Catalog Upload feature loads data. You can configure properties for the utility to change validation behavior, invalidate the cache, load SEO information, and more.
  - 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.
  - 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.

Samples: Data Extract utility

The samples that are provided for use with the Data Extract utility demonstrate the best practice methods for extracting data from the HCL Commerce database. Use these samples and the related sample configuration files as templates for configuring and running the utility when you need to extract your own data.

Each sample includes the XML configuration files that you need to run the utility. You can run these samples as-is, or you can copy and edit the configuration files to configure the Data Extract utility to extract your own data. The samples are in the following directory:

utilities_root/samples/DataExtract
WCDE_installdir\samples\DataExtract

The DataExtract directory contains the following subdirectories, which include samples for the corresponding object types:

Promotion
Commerce Composer
Marketing

Note: The DataExtract directory also includes the Catalog and Config directories, which are for use when you integrate with IBM Product Recommendations, formerly known as Coremetrics Intelligent Offer. These files are used to configure the utility to create Enterprise Product Report (EPR) data for dynamic recommendations. This data is required by IBM Product Recommendations.

Prerequisites for running the samples

Before you run any of the Data Extract utility samples, ensure that your WebSphere Commerce store and instance meets the following requirements:

The WebSphere Commerce server must be stopped.

Data Extract utility samples