HCL Digital Commerce Reviews

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.

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.

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.

Positive

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.

I am actually getting a website developed on HCL Digital Commerce.

I haven't reached a state where I can say that I like some features of the product. I am actually frustrated with the solution.

I have been trying to put together a website for the last year and a half, and I have been facing some problems because the tool is unable to integrate properly with my ERP product. It is difficult to find coders for HCL Digital Commerce who can do a good job within a reasonable amount of time.

I think the development curve of the tool is just too long, and there aren't enough good coders, while whoever is available takes a lot of time.

The tool has a really rigid structure, so it is not something that has the simplicity to adapt to newer environments in a fast manner. If you try to tell HCL Digital Commerce that you need front-end integration, which is a standard practice right now, HCL will take a lot of time as a lot of things are not available as an out-of-the-box feature. You have to spend more time and money to get things developed in HCL Digital Commerce, which I believe causes challenges for users, especially in an Indian scenario where the tool has a primary market.

have been using HCL Digital Commerce for a year and a half. I am a customer of the tool.

I haven't faced any issues with the product's stability. My business hasn't taken off with HCL Digital Commerce's help.

With the product's initial setup phase, I am still trying to get things in place, and in general, it has been a struggle from the very beginning.

I believe that HCL Digital Commerce is one of the most expensive products on the market. I am yet to get a quote on Adobe Commerce's price. Compared to the other platforms available in the market, HCL Digital Commerce is very expensive.

I have a fair idea about Magento's price since it was available as an open source platform. Magento's cost used to be about 30 percent of the cost of what I pay for HCL, but I don't know its new cost after it became known as Adobe Commerce.

As I was facing some challenges with HCL Digital Commerce, my vendor suggested I move to Adobe Commerce. My vendor's suggestions are the reason why I was trying to weigh the pros and cons between HCL Digital Commerce and Adobe Commerce.

One of the vendors with whom I am in touch suggested that my company should plan to switch from HCL Digital Commerce to Magento.

I am looking for a product that offers simplicity. I am a business person whose core competency is in areas other than IT. E-commerce is supposed to be another channel for me and HCL Digital Commerce shouldn't take away all the time and energy from my core business so that I can just set it up.

I won't recommend the product to those who plan to use it.

I would suggest that HCL go closer to customers and give a more direct and frank presentation when they are initially setting up the tool. HCL should also explain the technical nuances before a person decides to really buy a product. At this moment, I feel that I was mis-sold a product by HCL.

I rate the tool a one out of ten.

The tool is easy to use and flexible. It is flexible enough to tailor to your requirements.

HCL Digital Commerce should improve its integration capabilities with other platforms.

I have been using the product for four to five years.

We haven't had any issues with stability and I rate it a nine out of ten.

My company has three customers for HCL Digital Commerce.

HCL Digital Commerce's tech support is great. They are very knowledgeable and fast.

HCL Digital Commerce's deployment is straightforward.

HCL Digital Commerce's licensing costs are annual. It is expensive.

I rate HCL Digital Commerce a nine out of ten. You need to contact a knowledgeable partner.

This is basically an e-commerce packaged solution. It gives you an end-to-end solution for your e-commerce platform for products and it enables the publication of catalogs. I'm a technical lead.

The value of HCL is that it provides a complete solution and there's no need to develop an application using multiple technologies or different platforms. If you need an order management module, Digital Commerce has everything from order capture to order fulfillment. As a registration module, it has all the details for registration, account management of users, and even B2B modules available for generating and deploying business-to-business contracts. It has all the features required for an e-commerce platform and is one of the leading e-commerce solution providers in the market today.

Digital Commerce is like a monolithic solution in that you get everything when you purchase the license for this product. There's no option to select just one module. You might only need the order management module or the account management module, but there's no possibility of purchasing them separately. I'd like to see a microservice-based approach whereby each module can be purchased separately as it would enable more flexibility.

I've been using this solution for nearly nine years. 

The solution is quite stable, it's been around for more than a decade. 

Scalability is quite good because of the new Kubernetes-based approach, where you can simply add more pods. Whenever traffic increases, you can simply scale up the pods. It's quite easy. Earlier versions required more application servers but since it's just a dockerized container-based thing, you can simply add more containers if the traffic flow is more.

HCL has a good dedicated tech support team, which is available 24/7.

The initial setup is relatively easy. The solution comes as docker images that you download and you can just simply start the docker. Deployment shouldn't take more than a few hours but requires some experience so if you don't have that in-house, a vendor can provide the service. Deployment and maintenance require two to three people because of customizations and changes that will need to be made to the UI. Complete implementation can take about a year depending on the size of the organization and the customizations required.

Licensing costs are quite high compared to other e-commerce platforms, probably because they also have B2B and B2C solutions which are very good and they also offer good tech support.

I would definitely recommend this solution. If you are looking for a large e-commerce platform where you can reach many customers, then this is definitely a good solution. If you're a smaller company with a restricted budget, it's worth looking at smaller platforms like Magento, an open-source solution, or possibly a microservice-based platform. So it all depends on what kind of business you're looking into.

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

There are different use cases such as fashion retail eCommerce and B2B-component manufacturing. We also have B2B Info Commerce that can be reached and browsed by many people, including end-users, but only a specific B2B client can view prices and acquire the product. So, we have very different use cases.

We have clients with version 8, version 9, and version 9.1

It is a very mature product. It has a lot of features. It can also be very easily customized in order to reach goals or features that are not available, but mainly the fact that it's a very mature platform with all major features that are normally required by the clients is most valuable.

One of the main disadvantages of the platform was the poor front-end experience. They had a template, but it was a very old template. It was not good for the current front-end technologies, browsers, etc. They are already fixing it, and they're implementing new templates with more responsive features.

Another area of improvement is the user-friendliness of the back office stuff. This issue is still valid, and it is still a problem, but I know they are currently working on it.

Their support and documentation could also be better.

I have been using this solution for more than 10 years.

It has a lot of scalability. We have clients who started with just one country and one store, and now, they are managing more than 13 stores in countries all over the world.

It also allows you to use a different business model on the same platform. For example, you can use a single platform in order to sell to B2C and B2B. You can make eCommerce for your employees, and you can also develop some more complex business models such as B2B2C, B2B2E, etc.

Their support is not amazingly good. We had a lot of trouble moving from version 8 to version 9. It was also due to the fact that HCL acquired the platform from IBM. There was a time when we had a little bit of a problem in getting the right support.

They have very technical documentation, but sometimes, technical documentation is not enough. You also need something for a business user.

We have been working with it for more than 10 years. So, for us, it is pretty easy now. It's not a friendly technology from a technical standpoint. If you are a new company or a new business partner, it may take some time for you to understand how to implement it.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I am a project manager of these projects.

The most valuable feature is that it allows you to adapt it according to the customer's needs.

The product catalog is an area that needs improvement. It is forcing us to look and test other solutions. For example, when the customer has already implemented SAP and they want to get more from the integration, then the choice is SAP. Otherwise, this is a great platform for us.

In the next release, I would like to see the integration improved.

We are in our second year of using HCL Digital Commerce.

The versions used are different from customer to customer. We have only one customer who is using the latest version, which is the 9th.

It's a stable solution.

It could be scalable. 

Our customers are enterprise companies.

I have not contacted technical support but my colleagues have and they are satisfied with the technical support.

We are working with SAP Upscale. It's a small product.

The implementation is quite complex. I can't compare it with other products because they don't have the experience.

Definitely, SAP Upscale is a much easier product because they offer much less functionality. For this reason, I should not compare them to each other.

For our companies and our users, the price is quite high. They are looking for other solutions.

As I have not compared it with other platforms, it is difficult to offer an opinion. We have only one other platform, which is SAP Upscale, but you can't compare the two. 

Overall, we are satisfied with this product.

I would rate HCL Digital Commerce a seven out of ten.

The promotion engine is definitively one of the highlights. It facilitates precision marketing and dynamic segmentation (based on the shopper’s insights and behavior). Business user can set up promotion and segmentation rules simply by dragging and dropping the component icons.

All the B2C and B2B components are comprised in a single starter store template, which is great for customers with B2B2C aspirations. The template was recently enhanced with new functions that facilitate development as well as integrations with third party systems.

I can give you an example of ExtraLux, a Slovenian office supplier. They carved out an interesting business model. The core of this model was the decentralized stock - they moved the stock to the customers’ locations so they can never run out of supplies. The results was so impressive that the management decided to move the majority of sales operations online.

The Product information Management is very basic, and the template for front-end coding could be improved.

I've used it for five years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

First level technical support is conducted via IBM partners (Creatim being one of them). The IBM partners are backed up with an excellent second and third level support provided by IBM technical service.

We use various solutions, including Presta shop, and Symfony2. We leverage IBM Websphere for the most complex and demanding solutions.

Although quite complex, deployment is a very predictable process, if you follow the rules. The only issues you can expect are form the custom developed components.

I don’t think it is reasonable to preform the implementation without an experienced Websphere development team.

It can vary, but normally ROI is seen between two to four years depending on the specifics of every business case.

IBM is very flexible in this area. Various products can be covered by a single license, there are plenty hosting possibilities. From IBM Cloud Managed Service (managed entirely by IBM) and IBM Softlayer hosting, to partner hosting solutions.

We chose Websphere in response to the market demands. We are a hybris partner as well but we haven’t implemented any hybris solutions so far.

Prepare ahead. Extensive planning is needed, and try to leverage the out of the box components (there are many) to avoid unnecessary custom development costs. Find a reliable Websphere partner who can help you accomplish the recommendations mentioned above.