HCL Commerce Cloud (Private Offer Only)

My main use case for HCL Digital Commerce  includes different diverse types of scenarios, including B2B and B2C scenarios, greenfield projects, and enhancements, as different clients have various scenarios and projects.

A specific project I worked on involved building a B2B website for a manufacturing client in inkjet printers, which was a greenfield implementation incorporating organizations, accounts, contracts, quotations, catalogs, and navigation across different catalogs for customers, utilizing version 8 and featuring multi-country and multi-locale setups, making it a full-fledged B2B implementation.

Regarding my use cases with HCL Digital Commerce , I also utilized it for clients in pharma manufacturing, specifically Fortune 500 clients, along with several clients in the UK and European market for omnichannel functionalities such as buy online, pick in store, and return online; many of these million-dollar clients are still on this platform, although some have migrated to Shopify  and Salesforce .

The best features HCL Digital Commerce  offers include extensive possibilities to extend both the business logic and business layer as well as the persistence layer, allowing the addition of any type of business logic or database tables with flexibility, which is a significant advantage over other platforms I have worked with, particularly in the B2B area, where it is the strongest contender.

One specific feature of HCL Digital Commerce  that makes a significant difference in my projects is the ability to link different types of terms and conditions between organizations when creating a B2B contract, which is quite extensive; additionally, the catalog entitlement for each customer allows for different layers of filtration depending on office locations, something difficult to achieve with other platforms.

HCL Digital Commerce has positively impacted my organization indirectly, specifically for our clients, for whom I have implemented websites on this platform; one client had more than seven brands on it, all benefiting from the platform's reliability, with good revenue variances and the ability to integrate with various third-party services efficiently.

There is room for improvement in HCL Digital Commerce, particularly regarding making the platform lighter since not all clients require a heavy solution that demands extensive effort and customization; further, performance improvements are needed, especially since the checkout process relies on outdated architecture.

Additional necessary improvements include better search functionalities on-site, considering most clients currently opt for third-party search solutions; making the front end more lightweight and responsive, possibly utilizing Next.js, would also be beneficial; stores should come with predefined storefront options to offer flexibility in selecting features.

I have been using HCL Digital Commerce for more than eight to nine years, having previously used IBM WebSphere Commerce, versions 6, 7, and 8.

HCL Digital Commerce is stable, provided the hosting is well-planned and anticipated visitor counts are manageable; otherwise, performance can degrade under excessive strain, although it generally performs well.

The scalability of HCL Digital Commerce is flexible; clients can choose to add any number of servers based on their specific needs, allowing for both vertical and horizontal scaling as required.

Customer support for HCL Digital Commerce varies by country; while there is generally room for improvement, it is not overly problematic.

Before settling on HCL Digital Commerce, I explored alternatives including Salesforce , which offers a comprehensive suite with features such as OMS, CRM , and other integrations that make it quite competitive; I also considered Shopify  for clients needing a more cost-effective solution.

During my evaluation for migration from my existing solution, I found HCL Digital Commerce lacking in market activity and client engagement, prompting me to consider other options including Salesforce, which proved to be a better fit for sales and customer engagement.

The time saved or measurable improvements for clients after moving to HCL Digital Commerce depend largely on the activities being performed; while onboarding typically takes longer than other platforms such as Salesforce, the extensibility of back-office tools is a significant improvement, alongside the ability to manage the number of customers and sales effectively.

A return on investment is often observable through the automated omnichannel flows that reduce the need for extensive human involvement in workflows, providing savings in terms of operational efficiency.

I do not handle the pricing, setup cost, or licensing directly as that is managed by clients and merchants; however, I am aware that pricing tends to shift annually as they strive to remain competitive, meaning improvements on this front are essential to keep up with cost-effective solutions such as Shopify.

My advice for those interested in HCL Digital Commerce is to thoroughly explore and compare different options in the market, including obtaining demos and analyzing all costs related to merchandising, operations, and development to find the best e-commerce platform aligned with their business needs. I would rate my overall experience with this platform at a 6 out of 10.

On-premises

Amazon Web Services  (AWS )

I mainly work on HCL Digital Commerce  platform as the owner of the product master data solution area in my company, but I have also worked as a project manager in many HCL projects, with the main use being B2C, but we also have many B2B projects.

A specific example of how I use HCL Digital Commerce  in a B2C project is with a company that sold electronic equipment, and in a B2B project, the last one I completed was with a company that sells electrical equipment for different customers.

HCL Digital Commerce  has positively impacted my organization by facilitating integration between a PIM  platform and the e-commerce platform, with my experience mainly focused on that area. Over the years, I have worked with PIM  platforms including Stibo, Informatica, and ContentServ, noting the industry's move towards the API-first approach, which allows systems to communicate through APIs instead of exchanging large batches of data, making projects faster and easier.

The best feature HCL Digital Commerce  offers, in my experience, is flexibility. I believe that it is a very flexible platform, and during these years, the growth of the solution, especially in the integration area where I worked extensively, has been outstanding because we started by sending more than 15 files to load the catalog, and now on the API-first side, there is a huge benefit of integration with HCL Digital Commerce.

The API-first approach and improved integration have helped my projects by reducing the time spent on integration from the PIM platform, whereby we had to generate many files for a complete catalog import. With this API-first approach, the workflow became more flexible, allowing easy integration of data from the PIM platform to HCL Digital Commerce.

I believe that the benefit for business is mainly reducing the time to market of the product, involving information that comes from PLM and ERP  into the PIM platform, enriching this information, and then sending it to HCL Digital Commerce, which is a huge benefit for the company.

One important way HCL Digital Commerce can be improved is by reducing the learning curve, as developing is not straightforward, which I have observed from my activity as a project manager in HCL projects, where customization inside the platform takes time. I would also suggest continued investment in API and integration, as well as improvement in diagnostic and troubleshooting capabilities.

I would add that self-service capability for business users, allowing non-technical users to manage catalog, content, promotion, and workflow without directly involving developers, is essential. I find the documentation to be appreciated and genuinely good.

I have been working in my current field for more than 20 years.

My advice for others looking into using HCL Digital Commerce is to start by understanding your business requirements, as HCL Digital Commerce is a powerful enterprise platform best suited for organizations with complex commerce needs rather than simple online stores. I recommend investing time in solution architecture before starting implementation while involving both business and technical stakeholders from the beginning.

HCL Digital Commerce has successfully evolved from a traditional enterprise commerce platform into a more modern solution. The shift towards cloud-native architecture and API-first integration is the right direction. If HCL continues investing in developer experience, documentation, and integration tooling while maintaining its robustness, it will remain a strong choice for enterprise customers. I would rate this product an 8 overall.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Our main use case for HCL Digital Commerce  is to manage the front-end and back-end side, with the more data and more complex structure we have on the back-end side. HCL Digital Commerce  helps us to reduce our workload and provides a great architecture for collaboration between our front-end and back-end teams, allowing everyone to integrate everything at once using the cloud system.

On the back-end side, we have a commerce engine that handles product and catalog management, pricing, discounts, promotions, cart, checkout, order, return policy, inventory and fulfillment, and customer account logic. On the front-end side, we have a store that is a React-based headless storefront, supporting mobile, web, kiosk, and other digital touchpoints and can integrate with third-party front-end frameworks.

We also have business tools from the admin, which manage the UI for product and catalog management, promotion and marketing, and order management. The search mechanism provides fast product searches thanks to the advanced features, navigation filter, relevant ranking, merchandising rules, and personalized search results, all of which are great features provided by HCL Digital Commerce . Additionally, HCL Digital Commerce  excels in B2B commerce capabilities, featuring corporate accounts, sub-accounts, contract-based pricing, and approval workflows.

A specific example of how my team uses HCL Digital Commerce in a real-world scenario is during events such as Black Friday when our system, which is complex with a high data database, provides offers to customers, allowing us to manage higher traffic seamlessly because HCL Digital Commerce, built and integrated with AWS  at a high complexity level, helps us to manage this stress and database spike effectively.

The best features HCL Digital Commerce offers include strong business-to-business commerce capabilities, with corporate accounts, sub-accounts, contract-specific pricing, quote building, and complex approval flows. It also provides a highly scalable and enterprise-grade system, managing millions of SKUs, supporting thousands of concurrent users, and enabling global multiple brands and multi-regional deployments, thanks to its headless and API-first architecture, which allows for custom storefronts such as the React or Angular we use.

Furthermore, the advanced search feature allows for fast search with relevance tuning, personalized results, and integration with the search-indexing pipeline. A robust promotion and pricing engine offers a multi-level pricing strategy, promotions, discounts, and the ability to customize business logic without rebuilding the core system, while strong caching and performance optimization ensure it is cloud-ready with DevOps support.

HCL Digital Commerce's many features provide significant reductions in workforce requirements, leading to time savings and cost reductions. We save a considerable amount of time thanks to our extensive experience with the tool, and while the company pays a one-time cost for the licensing, it minimizes our ongoing resource use, reducing overall costs. The tool automates fast order placement, enhancing our processes compared to manual tasks we have performed in the past, resulting in lower costs per order, higher customer retention, and improved compliance and control.

While there are no specific pain points, HCL Digital Commerce's complexity does require a unique architecture, and it would be beneficial to have an integrated architecture that simplifies end-user integration with other AWS  cloud services. Additionally, an improvement in speed would be advantageous; for example, if orders could be processed within a minute instead of three to four minutes, we could boost selling time.

Optimizing for sales productivity to minimize processing time while maximizing sales time would also be valuable. Regarding challenges, the complexity of the structure due to large product catalogs, complex pricing, multiple brands, and regional requirements does create challenges. Reducing these complexities through HCL Digital Commerce's features could streamline our operations, particularly regarding ERP , CRM , payments, security, performance, and scalability.

I have used HCL Digital Commerce for the last four to five years with the AWS platform because our company is working on an e-commerce platform, which is a complex e-commerce shopping cart, so we have to use HCL Digital Commerce, which provides great features for the complex application.

In my experience, HCL Digital Commerce is very stable, and I can confidently say it performs reliably.

The scalability of HCL Digital Commerce is impressive; it can easily handle growth and increased demand without issues, making it a great feature for our needs.

HCL Digital Commerce offers 24/7 customer support, and I have contacted them two or three times for issues with setup; they provided prompt responses and support, with problems being escalated through different support levels until they were resolved satisfactorily.

Positive

Before HCL Digital Commerce, I used Shopify , which is suitable for mid-level applications, but we switched to HCL Digital Commerce as it provides extensive support and features for our current large and complex systems.

I have observed a return on investment with HCL Digital Commerce, primarily through time savings due to its complexity and extensive features. However, I cannot provide specific figures regarding monetary savings as I am not directly involved with product pricing.

Regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing, while I am not entirely certain of the specifics, I know that the setup and licensing costs are relatively cheaper compared to other systems.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing HCL Digital Commerce because we recognized its capability for handling large, complex systems, given our previous experiences with other tools.

On a day-to-day basis, we have different teams consisting of 200+ developers and 50+ QA members, with each person assigned to different modules including front-end, back-end, business, B2B commerce, and search engine, so each team is responsible for its own module, and I work on the commerce engine on the back-end side. Each module integrates with other modules, and we have a very strong team for integration. HCL Digital Commerce provides a great platform for integrating everything effortlessly.

The biggest impact on my daily work comes from the business-to-business commerce capabilities because most e-commerce platforms start with business-to-customer designs, while HCL Digital Commerce is business-to-business native, fundamentally changing our operations. The platform supports contract-based pricing, corporate accounts, sub-accounts, and an approval workflow, which are crucial for higher value, repeat-driven, and contract-based transactions.

HCL Digital Commerce facilitates moving large offline sales online, reducing dependency on sales representatives and streamlining trusted deal cycles. Additionally, it offers operational efficiency improvements by replacing manual processes with a self-service buying portal and automated approvals, locking in enterprise customers with tailored experiences and enabling global scaling.

Regarding time or cost savings from automation, while I am unsure of exact figures, I can say that we have significantly streamlined operations compared to earlier tools such as Shopify , which manage mid-level applications. HCL Digital Commerce has automated customer self-service and contract pricing, allowing approximately 80 to 90% time saving per order. Previously, the quote-to-order cycle took about 3 to 10 days, but now we can complete it in less than 24 hours. For reorders from repeat customers that took 15 to 30 minutes, it now only takes three to four minutes due to the system's efficiency, and our typical cost saving is at least $10 per order, which is impactful.

My advice to others looking into HCL Digital Commerce is to choose it if you are working with complex architecture because it offers great support and features for both large and complex systems. I would rate this product 8.5 out of 10 overall.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)