Marketplaces have been a hot topic lately, fueled by the pandemic pushing more buying online, or simply because it makes it easier to work with partners. As a result, we’ve added Native Marketplaces to our roadmap, targeting the Summer of 2022.

This pillar is one that will be receiving ongoing focus throughout the next few years, because the business user tools represent the “face” of the product, and are the main way that our customers interact with it. No matter what capabilities we have, if our tools don’t expose them properly, it’s effectively unavailable to our customers. We want to ensure that our customers who are interacting with the product day to day, are able to leverage and make full use of the features we’ve worked so hard to include in the product. For those of our customers who have been with us for a while, you’ve already seen the complete rewriting of some of our oldest tools: the Accelerator, Admin Console, and Org Admin Console. Now we’re turning our attention to some of the capabilities that have been inside the Commerce Management Center (CMC). To that end, in our next release, we will be launching the first phase of two new tools: Search and Commerce Composer. Search is one that we’ve had some tooling for, but it’s been buried inside of two other interfaces – Catalog and Marketing. However, search is definitely a large enough focus area that it needs its own set of tooling, and with the introduction of our new ElasticSearch engine and the new capabilities that come with that, the time is right to provide a Search tool. To start, we will focus on exposing the new functionality that ElasticSearch gives us. In follow-on releases, we will fold the existing capability into the new tools - things like SEO, search rules, and synonyms. The second new undertaking will be a re-implementation of our Commerce Composer tool, rewritten in our new architecture, enabling control of the layout for the React sample stores, Emerald and Sapphire. For the first...

The latest version of HCL Commerce, v9.1.6, will be out shortly. One of the features introduced is the new version of Customer Service Representative (CSR) capability. This is the first phase of CSR capability that we are adding to HCL Commerce, and this phase is focused on a functional replacement of the CSR capability from the Aurora storefront (also known to some of our customers as Buy On Behalf). While this is mainly a functional replacement, with the same CSR use cases as were in the Aurora store, there’s a big difference architecturally with the new implementation. In Aurora, the CSR capability was embedded into the storefront .jsps, meaning that for any of our customers who didn’t start with the Aurora store as the base, they needed to spend the time and money to re-implement our CSR capability into their storefront. There was no way to just “drop” the capability into the store, as it was spread across multiple .jsp pages. It had to be re-coded across all of those .jsps. That changes with the new implementation. It’s done in REACT, to match the rest of the storefront, but it’s not actually coded into the Emerald/Sapphire sample SPA (single page application). Instead, it is a separate SPA, informally called a mini-SPA by our development team. This mini-SPA renders the CSR tool which allows a CSR to log in, find customers, find orders, and other such operations. When it comes time for the CSR to make modifications to the customer’s information, they can press the button to view it in the store. The storefront launches, with the CSR logged in on behalf of the customer they have selected. Under the covers, what’s happening is that the CSR mini-SPA is passing the login information to the URL of the chosen storefront. As...

We want to provide our customers with the tools that they can easily customize to meet the needs of their business. Read this interesting blog to know more.