HCL Commerce Roadmap & Releases
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HCL Commerce Cloud is the eCommerce transaction platform to help you sell more as well as go beyond the transaction with customer service and after-care support. It helps businesses simplify global complexities, and manage large complex catalogues, whilst doing this at scale and being API-first with a cloud-native approach, offering you a choice of where to run the platform. HCL Commerce seeks input from its customers and the wider community in developing its roadmap. This is provided by the HCL Commerce aha portal.
HCL Commerce has several guiding principals for its roadmap. These are:
- Extensive Sales and Business Model Support
- Exceptional User Experience
- Optimised Business User Tooling and functionality to trade the site
- Performance, Scalability and Security
- Cloud Native
Below are the recent releases from the HCL Commerce Cloud Roadmap with reference to the guiding principals. If you would like help; reviewing the new capabilities released through the roadmap, considering upgrade or migration options or simply need support please use our online chat facility during business hours or get in touch with the Contact Us form below,
HCL Commerce Cloud v9.1.15 - December 2023
B2B – Ruby Business-to-Business (B2B) storefront improvements (#1)
The following User Experience improvements have been made in the Ruby B2B store.
Recurring Orders
In the Ruby B2B store, Recurring Orders allow users to create automatic orders for products on a schedule.
Organization Management
A Buyer Administrator can navigate a hierarchical list of organisations, select one, and display its buyer list. This feature allows you to create, view, edit and approve organizations.
Buyer Management
Buyer management involves administering buyer accounts and access within an organisation. This involves tasks like creating, editing, enabling or disabling accounts, and maintaining control over assigning roles to new buyers who register.
Buyer and Order approval
Buyer Administrators can manage and approve registered buyers through the Buyer Approval page.
Buyer Administrators and Buyer Approvers can manage and approve orders through the Order Approval page.
Search (#2)
Comprehensive guides to using and extending Elasticsearch
Search documentation has been revised, and updated, with new guides and references added. These improvements will quickly familiarize you with the concepts and practicalities of running and customizing Elasticsearch as well as the powerful Ingest and Query systems that power the V9.1 Search stack.
Extending Elasticsearch An updated set of guides and reference sections provide extensive information on customizing Elasticsearch
Additional tuning parameters in the Indexing Build Summary Report More parameters are available in the Indexing Summary Build Report. This report is an essential tool for tuning a variety of Ingest functions
Text Relevance in HCL Commerce Search Improve your Query service results by tuning search relevance.
Performance (#4)
New Statistics Service
The Statistics service gathers data on catalog dimensions. You can use this information to customize the default SQL used by the Search system, and extend it using your own SQL.
Ingest tuning guide
A new guide has been added that includes formulae and methods for tuning the performance of your NiFi service to match the capacity of your Elasticsearch indexing system.
Cloud Native (#5)
HCL Harbor Docker Distribution Registry
The HCL Harbor Docker Distribution Registry is now available as an alternative means to obtain HCL Commerce Docker images. HCL Harbor can be used within your CI/CD pipeline to more quickly and easily obtain the latest HCL Commerce releases from HCL.
Configuration additions
Automated clean-up of ingress definitions.
The clean-up of old ingress configurations is automated in order to avoid conflicts during HCL Commerce deployment upgrades.
HCL Commerce Cloud v9.1.14 - October 2023
Storefront (#1)
Following on from the storefronts for B2C as released in 9.1.13, the new official Next.js and REACT based B2B Storefront have been released to elevate business-to-business interactions. This now gives parity with the B2C storefronts. In future releases expectation is now that new feature and functionality will be advancing beyond current capabilities.
Search (#2)
Elastic Search has been enhanced to allow browse and search seamlessly in 10 new languages namely Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Greek, Norwegian and Turkish. Fallback support for all other languages is also available.
Analytics (#3)
Analytics has been upgraded from Universal analytics to GA4.
- GA4 provides event-based data collection: GA4 collects event-based data from both websites and apps, which provides a more comprehensive understanding of the customer journey,
- Privacy controls: GA4 includes privacy controls such as cookieless measurement, which helps protect user privacy,
- Predictive analytics: GA4 has predictive capabilities that offer guidance without complex models,
- Direct integrations to media platforms: GA4 has direct integrations to media platforms that help drive actions on your website or app,
- Cross-platform analytics: GA4 collects both website and app data, which provides a more complete view of the customer journey
- More data visualizations: GA4 has more data visualizations than Universal Analytic
- More predictive analytics and insights: GA4 has more predictive analytics and insights than Universal Analytics
Customer Services (#3)
Following on from the support for non-headless storefronts like Aurora in release 9.1.13 Customer Service has been enhanced to allow for exceptional post-ordering support. This now includes the ability for Customer Service Representatives (CSR’s) to grant appeasements to customers regardless of the order status.
Page Composer(#3)
Now has store asset store support. This means that all e-sites are inherited from the selected Storefront Asset Store (SAS). SAS will inherit all the pages layouts and layout assignments to the pages in read-only mode. This allows business users to unleash creativity while maintaining consistency in your e-commerce journey.
HCL Commerce Cloud v9.1.13 - June 2023
Storefront (#1)
Following on from the preview for the new storefront in release 9.1.12. 9.1.13 sees all the B2C storefront capabilities rolled out in this General Available release. The storefront has been built to be SEO, analytics, and, upgrade-friendly with a new customisations framework that allows you to isolate your changes, so that they are unaffected by upgrades. The plan is to bring the same capabilities into the B2B storefront in the next release 9.1.14
Customer Services (#3)
The Customer Service Representative (CSR) tool has been upgraded to now support non-headless storefronts like Aurora. Giving brands the ability to modify orders, apply appeasements, and initiate as well as verify returns.
Analytics (#3)
Management Center has been updated to GA4. This will provide a deeper insight into customer behaviour, including what customers are actually doing on your website, along with improved customer journey tracking, enhanced user analytics, and more powerful audience segmentation for ad campaigns.
Enhanced user privacy and tracking features (#4)
Enhanced user privacy and tracking features have been updated ensuring intelligent tracking while respecting user privacy preferences.
HCL Commerce Cloud v9.1.12 - March 2023
Marketplace (#1)
Major update from the initial Marketplace release in 9.1.11 with advanced capabilities aimed towards providing a better seller onboarding experience, order tracking, shipping, and administration. Sellers can now self-register for a marketplace including being able to select their own shipping methods. Marketplace operators and site administrators can now approve marketplace sell or self-registrations. Additional support for B2B business has been implemented so that it is possible to apply contracts into your marketplaces for individual sellers so that they can have catalog filters and dynamic catalog pricing for their different buyers.
Seller administrators are now able to track and view all orders placed on their products and more advanced user search and marketplace analytics have been added.
Search (#2)
Ability to update multiple e-sites or mini e-sites and index all of them at once saving considerable time around indexing for Elasticsearch
Customer Services (#3)
Tooling has been updated to allow CSR’s to initiate returns, modify orders at the order or line level, apply line-level discounts for appeasements and also add comments to both an order and to a customer record
Marketing (#3)
Marketing capabilities have been updated including adding of promotional threshold messaging that would allow merchants to provide messages to customers to encourage them to spend more in order to qualify for a specific promotion that has been established like free shipping. Additionally, a new widget that allows for the ability to drop a recently browsed products section on any given page.
HCL Commerce Cloud v9.1.11 & 9.1.10 - July 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPNPLBgP5KU
Marketplaces (#1)
The introduction of the Marketplace Store model with functionality that allows selling other bands/ people’s products on your commerce site. Tooling allows store owners the ability to manage the onboarding of new sellers and multiple marketplaces for different geographies or business units. New capabilities for managing catalogue updates, inventory updates, order updates, and access control.
B2B (#1)
Addition of requisition lists for frequently ordered items by B2B customers.
Storefront (#1)
Product comparison: implementation of product comparison feature on the storefront.
Ribbon Ads: Overlay images on products to indicate seasonal, exclusive, clearance, or marketplace items.
Buy Online Pickup In-Store (BOPIS) (#2)
BOPIS features added with store locator functionality
Search (#2)
Ingest Profiles Flexibility – Bring increased flexibility for ingesting additional information into the search index, and allows searching more rich content including existing elastic search customisation.
My Account (#2)
Dashboard Updates improved management of personal information for customers including adding “remember me” and persistence options.
Page Composer (#3)
Layout assignment ability to assign layouts as an entire layout or selected page. Custom Widget creation for use in page composer enables the incorporation of custom components through drag-and-drop functionality.
