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.

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.

We introduced HCL Digital Commerce because it was an enterprise e-commerce platform with the capability of integration with ERP and payment gateways, so we used it for our B2C retail segments. HCL was also providing payment gateways at that time, so we used those payment gateways for our retail operations. We also used this in our e-commerce websites and omni-channels as well, allowing customers to buy online and pick up from the store with click and collect, which helped with inventory management.

We had multiple mobile companies providing more than 30,000 products, including Xiaomi, Samsung, Apple, and Lenovo mobiles. We had to give personalized discounts as well, and this solution offered us the capability for customers to do online orders for home delivery or store pickup, with multiple payment options available. It was quite helpful as we were able to track the orders in real-time, and our main focus was to ensure that inventory should be there. This was a plug-and-play solution for us.

We use HCL Digital Commerce for product cataloging, pricing, promotions, shopping cart, checkout, and order processing. We also integrated this with warehouse and payment gateways and last-mile delivery with courier teams such as Delhivery, which was quite helpful. As we were scaling up, we were able to achieve and connect to new cities very fast after implementing this.

There are many features in HCL Digital Commerce, but what we liked is the capability of product cataloging, providing promotions, and integrating it with payment gateways.

The product cataloging and promotion features made things more flexible because the marketing team was able to create campaigns easily. For example, it was very easy to apply discounts and give special offers based on predefined rules. Earlier, we did it manually, but once this system was in place, it became much easier for the marketing team to automatically apply discounts, special offers, bundle pricing, and time-based pricing, such as during Black Friday or Christmas sales. This was a good use case because it also helped us provide coupon promotions, giving welcome discounts to customers signing up for our newsletters. We could also do customer-specific pricing for wholesale customers, benefiting both retail and business portfolios.

HCL Digital Commerce positively impacted our organization notably because earlier we were using everything manually. After enabling HCL Digital Commerce, we saw that the revenue went high, with higher online revenue due to better user experience, personalization, and promotions. We noticed an increasing trend in conversion rates because checkout was streamlined and product recommendations were more relevant. We also saw higher average order value due to cross-selling, upselling, and targeted promotions. Customer retention, which was not possible earlier due to manual efforts, improved significantly by offering loyalty programs and personalized offers. It helped retain customers as well. The system's scalability and operational efficiency were beneficial as we could integrate it with our inventory and fulfillment teams, reducing a lot of manual work.

This system has multifold value, but we appreciated the flexibility it offers, which helps us grow.

HCL Digital Commerce has the necessary features, but we are particularly alert about security, especially as the current landscape moves to cloud solutions. We feel the main priority should be how data is secured and ensuring it is not shared with unauthorized individuals.

We look forward to improvements in API security, PCI DSS support, and role-based security. More focus is needed on security because if we manage it well, we want to ensure that data is not handed over to vulnerable people. The assurance of how our data is secured on this cloud platform is crucial to us.

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

HCL Digital Commerce is stable.

So far, HCL Digital Commerce's scalability is good.

The customer support for HCL Digital Commerce is excellent. I would rate the customer support a ten out of ten.

Everything was manual before we started using HCL Digital Commerce.

We were a customer at that time and did not have any additional business relationship with the vendor.

We saw a twenty-three percent year-over-year revenue increase after putting this in place because of modernization. We expected zero downtime, and even during the holiday season, there was zero disruption. We experienced a twenty percent surge in revenue once we went online with HCL Digital Commerce.

I was not there when other options were evaluated before choosing HCL Digital Commerce, as I joined once it was deployed.

I advise others looking into using HCL Digital Commerce to go for the proof of concept and see how it helps. There is no need to reinvent the wheel as this solution offers everything needed for marketing and startups, making it a good choice. I would rate this product eight out of ten.

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.

I have been using and managing HCL Digital Commerce projects for five plus years.

I typically use HCL Digital Commerce for catalog management, basket and checkout, PDP, PLP attributes and features that are part of the catalog management, as well as authentication, authorization, and interfaces for interfacing systems with tax calculation and payments.

For one of the grocery retailers, I have used HCL Digital Commerce to create a basket and checkout, list the PDP and PLP for the grocery items, and also utilized tax calculation by invoking the tax interfacing components.

One of the challenges that we always face in our main use cases is the search; HCL Digital Commerce has a good feature called Solr search that optimizes the search for getting faster search results and also helps receive results with a quicker response time.

The best features HCL Digital Commerce offers that stand out to me are Solr search, authentication and authorization, the plugins that connect to tax and other payment systems, and the ability to create some mobile apps.

The plugins help my team by interfacing with tax; for instance, if I want to calculate tax, I use the inbuilt plugin to interface with the tax system like Vertex, which provides the base price, and then I calculate or override the pricing with any custom tax on top of it.

HCL Digital Commerce has positively impacted my organization by being a strong e-commerce solution, helping e-commerce retailers build websites and run businesses; it has indeed supported the transformation of our clients in their e-commerce journey.

I see a lot of room for improvement in HCL Digital Commerce, such as making customer reviews less cumbersome, enhancing promotion coupons and e-marketing features, improving CMS options compared to other CMS systems like Adobe Commerce, and addressing the lack of user-friendly features for building mobile apps, along with the challenge of tightly coupled systems that hinder autonomy.

HCL Digital Commerce is stable, but I find it to still be heavyweight.

From a scalability perspective, I would rate HCL Digital Commerce seven to eight, noting that achieving higher scalability requires high-end systems.

The customer support for HCL Digital Commerce is fair.

Before HCL Digital Commerce, we were using Magento Commerce for one client, which was outdated technology; I switched to HCL Digital Commerce for its numerous features, enhancing our return on investment, though clients are now moving towards MAC-based architecture, which should be part of HCL Digital Commerce's development roadmap.

I have seen a return on investment from HCL Digital Commerce, with AI capabilities enhancing productivity, but I acknowledge this area remains a new field of exploration.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been fair; however, I believe pricing could improve further to achieve better time to market and ROI that clients seek.

I did not really evaluate other options before choosing HCL Digital Commerce since the decision was made through a method adoption workshop.

Regarding that transformation, I have noticed that the footfall has increased by ten percent to twenty-five percent, and customer satisfaction percentages have risen with a better customer experience.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate HCL Digital Commerce between six and seven. I do not rate it higher or lower; the reason for a six or seven is that while it gets the job done with a higher degree, building the components takes a lot of time. Despite offering headless commerce features, there are numerous improvements required, such as moving towards a MAC-based architecture, which many retailers are adopting now, hence the mid-level rating.

Regarding HCL Digital Commerce's AI capabilities, I feel its governance and security could be better, needing more transparency; however, I am still exploring that aspect.

The accuracy and reliability of output from HCL Digital Commerce are not issues, but I believe there could have been better response times as previously mentioned.

My advice for others looking into using HCL Digital Commerce is to note the various improvements needed like MAC-based architecture, better CMS capabilities, enhanced e-marketing features, and a more straightforward customer review process, which are important for potential users. I rate HCL Digital Commerce six out of ten 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.