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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)

Salesforce Commerce Cloud's main use case is D2C and B2C, focusing on direct-to-customers. Salesforce Commerce Cloud's architecture is very effective for our channel partners, providing them a good platform. However, we are not using the native commerce mobile app but the generic web-based one.

One of the most valuable features in Salesforce Commerce Cloud is that it helps me avoid storing credit card information, with a vault function taken care of. Salesforce provides this vault feature, enabling me to bill my D2C customers directly and also feeding data into my Marketing Cloud and Services Cloud.

For visibility features in Salesforce Commerce Cloud, I might need to schedule a separate meeting as I can only share certain levels of information. Experience-wise, it is very good; the platform helps identify promotional opportunities and integrates well with Salesforce's Trade Promotion Management.

The main benefits Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides are significant process improvements. If we did not have it, I would need to establish a separate D2C portal such as Magento Commerce and integrate with Salesforce for some data. Having Salesforce Commerce Cloud is essential as it integrates very quickly and is part of the entire ecosystem.

If Salesforce Commerce Cloud could incorporate features such as Product Data Management and Customer Data Platform internally, it would benefit large customers such as us, reducing reliance on multiple third-party products.

I started working with Salesforce Commerce Cloud in 2019.

I rate the stability of Salesforce Commerce Cloud between nine and ten, as it tends to be stable despite occasional issues typical of SaaS products.

I would rate the scalability of Salesforce Commerce Cloud as a nine because it offers plug-and-play solutions, enabling faster rollouts in different countries.

My experience with technical support from Salesforce is mixed; they are available but sometimes not as responsive when issues arise, leading to longer wait times unless I subscribe to higher-level support.

Integration with Salesforce environment is achieved using MuleSoft, which is a Salesforce product.

We are not using Salesforce's content management tool; instead, we use a different product called Aprimo for managing our content. Aprimo integrates with Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud's initial setup is very easy and simple; if your sales process is clear, implementation can be done in less than thirty days.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud faces competition from ServiceNow with its latest features, and products such as Zoho CRM and Zoho Marketplace also present strong competition, though Salesforce still leads. Commercially, they also offer very competitive pricing.

Integration with Salesforce environment is achieved using MuleSoft, which is a Salesforce product.

We are not using Salesforce's content management tool; instead, we use a different product called Aprimo for managing our content.

Zscaler is our VPN, providing extended network capabilities instead of using the Cisco VPN client we relied on earlier.

I tried Salesforce's Einstein AI-driven personalization feature, but we did not find it very effective, so we created our own platform for GenAI and a conversational bot. We use our product to extract data from Salesforce into our Data Cloud.

I would rate this review an eight overall.

Public Cloud

Other