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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.
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, Buyer Administrator, Customer Service Supervisor and others).
Catalog Filter and Pricing tool
Use the Catalog Filter and Pricing tool in Management Center to create and manage catalog filters, price lists, and price rules. Sellers, Sales Managers, and Account Representatives can use the tool's flexible features to implement catalog filtering and pricing strategies that meet the site's business needs over time.
Managing price rules
A pricing manager creates and manages the price rules that are used for storefront pricing.
Scenarios for using price rules
By reviewing different business scenarios for using price rules, you can learn more about price rule assignment strategies and how price rules are inherited.
Scenario 1: B2C store using a simple price rule
The following scenario shows how a pricing manager for a B2C store might use a simple price rule to manage pricing. This scenario highlights the following price rule concepts: simple equations in price rules and rounding prices.

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.
  - 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, Buyer Administrator, Customer Service Supervisor and others).
    - Management Center keyboard shortcuts
      Use the Management Center keyboard shortcuts to access user interface functions or complete tasks, using a single key or combination of keys.
    - Working in extended site stores in Management Center
      If your company operates an extended site, you can perform certain tasks directly from your extended site store within Management Center.
    - Manage content externally for use in Management Center
      If content management capabilities other than the functionality that is provided by default with HCL Commerce is required, HCL Commerce can be integrated with IBM Web Content Manager. If HCL Commerce is integrated with IBM Web Content Manager, you can use content from IBM Web Content Manager content libraries with Management Center objects.
    - Management Center Dashboard
      The Management Center user interface helps you quickly access business tools and provides a usable, intuitive, and efficient way to complete your business tasks. The Management Center dashboard has all the tools with descriptions displayed on the screen. The dashboard view will contain the tools the user has access to.
    - Management Center user interface
      The Management Center user interface provides a usable, intuitive, and efficient way to complete your business tasks.
    - Using the Management Center
      The starting point for all Management Center tasks is to open the tooling. Afterward, you can use several methods to complete a task: by selecting menu options, by clicking toolbar buttons, by right-clicking and selecting menus, or by keyboard shortcuts.
    - HCL Commerce License Metrics
      A Resource Value Unit (RVU) is a proof of entitlement based on the number of units of a specific resource that are used or managed. HCL Commerce License Metrics is an order line resource where you are able to produce a report of the count of any completed order lines for auditing purposes. For your specific RVU entitlement, refer to your license.
    - Catalogs tool
      Use the Catalogs tool in Management Center to manage catalogs, categories, catalog entries, merchandising associations, product attributes, and attachments in your store. The Catalogs tool lets business users create, and manage online catalogs. Catalogs provide a way of organizing the products that you want to sell. You define catalog data in groups of categories and products. Catalog data contains descriptions and pricing information for products and services.
    - Marketing tool
      Use the Marketing tool in Management Center to create and manage marketing campaigns and other store content, excluding catalog content. You can use the extensive precision marketing features in the tool to deliver targeted marketing messages to customers.
    - Promotions tool
      Use the Promotions tool in Management Center to create and manage promotions that support the marketing campaigns for your site.
    - Attachments tool
      As a Product Manager, Marketing Manager, or Category Manager, you can use the Attachments tool to manage URLs that point to marketing image files, catalog image files, PDF documents, and multimedia files that you use in marketing campaigns.
    - Catalog Filter and Pricing tool
      Use the Catalog Filter and Pricing tool in Management Center to create and manage catalog filters, price lists, and price rules. Sellers, Sales Managers, and Account Representatives can use the tool's flexible features to implement catalog filtering and pricing strategies that meet the site's business needs over time.
      - Catalog filtering
        Set up catalog filters to entitle your customers to a subset of your catalog. Catalog filters can also be used as one of the price rule conditions when you are determining prices for the set of catalog entries your customers are entitled to.
      - Catalog filter assignment and contracts
        To entitle different customers to a subset of your catalog on the storefront, you assign a catalog filter to a contract using HCL Commerce Accelerator. This requirement applies to all business models (B2B, B2C, and extended sites). As a result, customers shopping under the contract are entitled to see and purchase only the set of catalog entries defined in the catalog filter.
      - Attribute dictionary attribute and property conditions in catalog filters
        When you include or exclude categories in your catalog filter, you can specify which catalog entry properties or attributes to include or exclude. To include or exclude categories, define conditions on the categories in the catalog filter. A condition can contain attribute dictionary attributes or catalog entry properties.
      - Scenarios for creating catalog filters
        The following scenarios show you how to create catalog filters by specifying categories, catalog entries, catalog entry properties, and attribute dictionary attributes.
      - Scenarios for using catalog filters
        By reviewing different business scenarios for using catalog filters, you can learn more about catalog filter assignment strategies.
      - Managing catalog filters
        Catalog filters can be managed by Sales Managers, Account Representatives, and Seller Administrators.
      - Managing price lists
        A pricing manager creates and manages the price lists that are used for storefront pricing.
      - Managing price rules
        A pricing manager creates and manages the price rules that are used for storefront pricing.
        Price rules: An overview
        A price rule is a set of instructions you create to generate prices on your storefront. Each time a customer views a store page that displays prices, HCL Commerce follows the instructions in the price rule to set a price for each catalog entry. The price rule is also used during checkout so that the customer is charged the correct price, before taxes, discounts and shipping charges. Using price rules for your store is optional; however, price rules provide a flexible, feature-rich alternative to using static price lists.
        Price rule assignment and contracts
        For a price rule to display offer prices on store pages, you must assign the price rule to a contract. This requirement applies to all business models (B2B, B2C, and extended sites).
        Price equations and constants in price rules
        A price equation is a mathematical statement used in a price rule to calculate and output a price. For example, you can create a price equation that adds margins or distribution costs to prices in a price list. You can use the same price equation in more than one price rule so that the set of price rules is easier to maintain.
        Independent and dependent price rules
        A price rule can be either independent or dependent. An independent price rule contains a price list. A dependent price rule does not contain a price list. Dependent price rules cannot output prices, so you cannot use them as contract-level price rules.
        Options for managing pricing
        The Catalog Filter and Pricing tool in Management Center gives you a flexible, alternative way of managing pricing for your store. Before you begin using this tool, you should be aware of the price management options available to you.
        Price rule building blocks: actions, conditions, and branches
        When you build a price rule using the Price Rule Builder, your building blocks are actions, conditions, and branches. These building blocks are represented as icons, or elements, in the palette. You select elements from the palette and place them in a precise order along a flow that represents the price rule.
        Scenarios for using price rules
        By reviewing different business scenarios for using price rules, you can learn more about price rule assignment strategies and how price rules are inherited.
        Scenario 1: B2C store using a simple price rule
        The following scenario shows how a pricing manager for a B2C store might use a simple price rule to manage pricing. This scenario highlights the following price rule concepts: simple equations in price rules and rounding prices.
        Scenario 2: Extended site stores using different price rules
        The following scenario shows how a pricing manager for a B2C store might use price rules to display different prices on three extended site stores, each in a different country. This scenario highlights the following price rule concepts: inheritance of price rules in extended sites, nested price rules, and dependent price equations.
        Scenario 3: B2B store with negotiated prices in contracts
        The following scenario shows how a pricing manager for a B2B store might use price rules to provide various customers with standard or negotiated pricing. This scenario highlights the following price rule concepts: catalog conditions in price rules, and price rule reuse.
        Best practices for price rules
        Review these best practices for creating price rules so you can learn ways to simplify price rule maintenance and reduce performance impacts.
        Creating and assigning price rules
        By creating price rules and assigning them to contracts, you can manage the prices customers are entitled to.
        Viewing where price lists, rules, equations, and constants are used
        You might need to check where a pricing object is used before changing it or deleting it. For example, before changing a price equation, you might want to see a list of price rules that use the price equation. If so, you can open the pricing object and click a tab labeled References. For price rules, this tab also shows a list of contracts to which the price rule is assigned. The References tab is available for these pricing objects: price lists, price rules, price equations, and price constants.
      - Active Catalog Filter
        In the Catalog Filter and Pricing tool, you can select the Active Catalog Filter object in the navigation area to display the current active catalog filter selection. If a Catalog Filter is selected for the current e-site, only then it will be displayed. If no Catalog Filter is selected, then the empty table is displayed.
    - Installments tool
      Use the Installments tool in Management Center to create and manage installment rules that support the payment methods for your site.
    - Commerce Composer tool
      Create pages and build layouts for your store directly in Management Center without involving IT by using the Commerce Composer tool. Take advantage of the tool's page design and management functions to improve your productivity and give you more control over the customer experience.
    - Store Management tool
      As a Seller, Site Administrator, or Channel Manager, you can use the Store Management tool in Management Center to manage your stores. The Store Management tool in Management Center replaces all of the store management features in HCL Commerce Accelerator, except store creation and the ability to suspend and resume stores. Use the Store Creation wizard in Management Center to create new stores.
    - Workspace Management tool
      The Workspace Management tool is a graphical user interface tool that is used to manage workspaces and workspace-related activities. It provides a single view across all workspaces and all tasks in the workspaces where managers can see how work is progressing.
    - Organizations
      An organizational entity is a type of member in HCL Commerce. An organizational entity is classified into one of three types: an organization, an organization unit, or an authorization domain. For site administrators, one of your first tasks after installing and configuring HCL Commerce is setting up and managing access to your e-commerce site. This process involves creating organizations that participate at your site, and defining users that are members of those organizations. After an instance is created, you can publish a starter store that defines the organization structure. Sometimes, organizations joining your site might be buyer organizations. In other cases, you might have customers registering at your site who are engaged in a business-to-consumer relationship with your business. Defining the organizational structure of site is an important step in managing the types of access that members have to your system.
    - Assets tool
      As Product Manager, Marketing Manager, Marketing Director, or Category Manager, you can use the Assets tool to manage URLs that point to marketing image files, catalog image files, PDF documents, and multimedia files that you use in marketing campaigns.
    - Analytics Tool
      Management Center now has a new tool called Analytics listed at the top of the menu.
    - Approvals
      Accurate, secure transactions require that a second individual approve some electronic marketplace actions before they proceed. This individual, called an approver, can accept or reject requests to perform a specific action. During the organization registration process, the organization administrator selects the business processes for which they want to enable approval. This is done by signing up for the appropriate approval member group during membership registration. The organization administrator also populates the approver member groups. Only users within these groups have the authority to accept or reject requests to perform those actions for which approval has been enabled.
    - Approving requests
      Submitters and administrators with the appropriate access can view approval requests and verify the status of their associated approval decisions. When an approvable action enters the approval process, the submitter sees it as an approval submission or submission in the user interface. The approver responsible for approving the action sees it referred to as an approval request or request in the user interface.
    - Security Policies
      For enhanced security of your site, ensure that you are aware and up to date on all account related policies.
    - Registries
      The Registries tool allows site administrators to update a registry without requiring a server restart. The Registry Manager maintains a set of registries for catching HCL Commerce runtime data. Each registry provides methods to enable adding, deleting, and refreshing of the registry content. These methods are available to the URL interface by using the ListRegistry and the RefreshRegistry commands.
    - Search Tool
      Management Center now has a new Search tool listed in the hamburger menu.
    - Page Composer tool
      Like the Commerce Composer tool in Management Center, the Page Composer tool lets business users manage store pages. The Page Composer tool is available only on Auth environment and specifically for use with React stores. This tool allows users to create store pages and assign SEO URLs to them.
    - Marketplace
      A marketplace is a web storefront that enables third-party sellers to sell their products on your platform.
    - Managing shipping
      You can set up shipping at a store-level by using Management Center.
    - Managing taxes
      You can set up taxes at a store-level by using the Management Center.
    - Users
      When a user first accesses an e-commerce site and is browsing product pages, the user is running as a generic user. The generic user has a common user ID (-1002) that is used across the entire system. The use of a common user ID on the site minimizes system resource usage. Once the user performs an operation that requires a unique identity, for example, adding a product to the shopping cart, the user is converted from a generic user to a unique guest user. A guest user has a unique user ID, but no password. This user implicitly belongs to the Default Organization and does not have any roles in the site. Depending on the business model of the store, and the access control policies, the user may be able to do other operations on the site, for example, placing an order. Both the generic user and a unique guest user have the registration type of "G" (Guest user). If the guest user registers to the current store, then the user is converted to a registered user, and any assets that the guest user owned will now be owned by the registered user.
    - Messages
      Site Administrators can use the resend function in HCL Commerce to resend messages that are stored in the HCL Commerce system.
    - Member groups
      A member group is a grouping of members - users, organizations, or other member groups - used for various business purposes. Two kinds of member groups exist: implicit and explicit. An implicit member group contains users that share common attributes and are therefore considered members of a specific member group. An implicit member group specifies criteria or attributes that users must satisfy in order to be considered members of that member group. You can also explicitly exclude certain users although they satisfy the criteria. An explicit member group contains explicitly assigned users, who may or may not share common attributes. A member group can be both implicit and explicit at the same time.
    - Extended Sites Store Management
      You can create store quickly and easily from Management Center Tools. The wizard asks a customer to provide some basic data about their store (name, description, and so on), allows the customer to select the storefront or catalog they want to use, and then creates the store. The resulting store has some unique data, but uses the storefront and catalog data from existing asset stores.
    - Scheduler
      A job is HCL Commerce command that is scheduled to run on behalf of a site or store at a specified time or interval. The three types of jobs are: site level jobs, store level jobs, and broadcast jobs.
    - Message types
      HCL Commerce predefines several message types and sets them as active. You can create or change the parameters for message types from Management Center.
    - Transport methods
      HCL Commerce provides several transport methods. By default, the e-mail transport method is configured and active. You can also use these transport methods: File, IBM MQ, or a sample adapter. You can configure transport methods for the site, or for particular stores.
    - Accounts
      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.
    - Previewing a store
      Preview your store to ensure that changes made in Management Center show up in your store as expected. You can use store preview in production, authoring, and staging environments.You can use store preview within the authoring instances for any of your environments. Do not use store preview within the live instance of your HCL Commerce on Cloud environments.
    - Management Center frequently asked questions (FAQ)
      Find answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about the Management Center.
    - Management Center Troubleshooting
      If you encounter issues with the Management Center that are not related to any specific tool, review this troubleshooting topic to solve common problems.
  - HCL Commerce Accelerator
    Use the HCL Commerce Accelerator to maintain online stores.
  - 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 Enterprise edition.
  - HCL Customer Service Hub for HCL Commerce React stores
    HCL Customer Service Hub 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 Reference Store application and enable a CSR to complete key tasks on behalf of guest and registered customers for headless stores that are built based on the Emerald and Sapphire reference stores. Customer Service Hub for HCL Commerce is offered for Enterprise edition.
- 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 Enterprise

Scenario 1: B2C store using a simple price rule

The following scenario shows how a pricing manager for a B2C store might use a simple price rule to manage pricing. This scenario highlights the following price rule concepts: simple equations in price rules and rounding prices.

Site description

A retail vintage t-shirt business with a single store.

What the pricing manager wants to do

The pricing manager currently uses an Offer Price list to display t-shirt prices to customers on the storefront. Instead, he wants to base pricing on his cost to make each t-shirt. For this purpose, he has created a T-Shirt Cost price list. For now, he wants to mark up his cost by 15%. Over time, he wants the ability to change the markup percentage quickly and easily to suit the current t-shirt market.

How the pricing manager uses price rules

To achieve his pricing goals, the pricing manager creates a price rule called Cost Plus and assigns it to the default contract for his store, as shown in the following diagram:
B2C store using price rules

B2C store using price rules

When customers view t-shirts on the storefront, the prices they see are calculated using this price rule.

The Cost Plus price rule looks like this:

Price rule for vintage t-shirt store

The actions used in this price rule work like this:


Get Price from Price List	Looks up the price of the t-shirt the customer is viewing in the T-Shirt Cost price list. This price is used as input to the next action in the price rule.
Calculate Price	Marks up the cost from the T-Shirt Cost price list by 15%.
Apply Rounding	Rounds up the calculated price so that the price ends with either ".49" or ".99"

Highlights of this scenario

With price rules, you can use the Offer Price list, or any other price list, to mark up or mark down prices for products on your storefront.
By including a simple equation in a price rule, you can dynamically adjust prices in a price list by changing the equation, rather than changing each price in the price list. For example, if the pricing manager wants to mark up his costs by 20% instead of 15%, he can change the percentage in the Calculate Price action. As a result, the storefront uses the revised price rule to calculate prices.
When you use price rules to perform a calculation and output a new price, you can make the prices look more attractive to customers using the Apply Rounding action.