HCL Commerce+

HCL is able to support our highly customized implementation of Commerce using both legacy and new technologies. Having HCL manage our Commerce cloud environment allows us to focus on customizations and our business without having to manage the infrastructure for our Commerce platform. HCL is highly engaged and very responsive with proactive monitoring, weekly conference calls, dedicated slack channels and emergency calls (either initiated by us or them) when critical issues arise..

The licensing is inexpensive and the support staff - the ones that are still there - are supportive.

HCL Commerce is a key component of our ECP setup. HCL Commerce as a product offers a wide range of business capabilities which are extensively used by our business. Few of the key highlights. 1. Catalog Capabilities - Catalog is key for browsing by customer, Master and Sales catalog way of setup is helping business to handle Products / Categories exclusively as per region/ stores. 2. Pricing - Pricing capability having SKU level controls for Quantity / Date range wise pricing is helping the business a lot to maintain competitive pricing with a lot of convenience. 3. Open for integration & Customization as per business needs - Framework provides extension points helps in external integrations as per business needs. 4. Extensive payment handling providing flexibility to maintain multiple payment gateway integrations. 5. Cart and Checkout handling for customers with scale and performance. 6. Business tooling and Authoring Environment for preview. 7. Promotion engine capability to handle wide array of promotions for business to run different campaigns.

HCL uses Google Cloud Platform services for functions such as CDN and WAF. These services are OK, but the level of configuration capabilities provided to HCL's customers is limited. Some customers may find that they want to leverage their own CDN, WAF, etc. in order to better control the user experience and security footprint at the edge. The HCL Commerce Cloud platform also does not natively support adequate transactional email volume, requiring the use of external services for transactional emails such as order confirmation, password reset, etc.

Features that should work out of the box - like Recurring Orders - do not work. We have to take the broken core functionality and build off of it. The documentation is also not good at all, with missing or outdated instructions that do not match. The feature roadmap for the product is also not a straight line and predictable. It's always one step forward, two steps back. We have learned the hard way to wait at least a year before we implement any suggestions from the vendor because they might not release a fully-baked product and might decide to stop supporting it very quickly (i.e. Elastic Search).

It's not about specific dislikes, it's about improvements which can be taken up in releases. Search is a major one and should be a key area of improvement. Search should reflect modern AI-based relevancy and ranking.