Circumstances over the last year coupled with consumer trends around digital engagements, have made transforming to digital first a minimum viable prerequisite. But to go beyond simply surviving, B2B and B2C businesses must start with search for any new digital commerce strategy. A well-organized search strategy will improve all facets of your customer engagement from the direct impact of better, more relevant search results to the overall enhancement of your customer’s experience by leveraging the data your search engine collects. HCL Commerce partnered with Ray Wang and Constellation research to create a guide to help you think through digital search as part of your larger digital commerce strategy. The result is five best practices you can apply to optimize your project: Preview search to provide textual and visual suggestions. Search autocomplete to suggest keywords during search. Faceted search uses attributes (such as product or content features) as criteria for shoppers to explicitly filter for their search results. Full-page search lays out the initial results based on ascertained relevance Store- and product-level search bridges the gap between physical and online shopping by identifying shoppers' ZIP codes to enable a geographical lookup of nearby inventory. Why does this matter? Search is rapidly becoming the heart of the customer experience and it often initiates the buyer journey before customers even hit your site. When they do, they expect to find exactly what they want quickly and easily and if they can’t, they are happy to leave - meaning not only do businesses lose revenue, but they actively push customers to their competitors. However, there is a gap between customer expectations and what can be delivered by (traditional) search and personalization capabilities which leads to frustration for both buyers and sellers. What’s the solution? Without giving too much away, the solution entails an integrated...

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...

As more and more business in both the B2B and B2C space is driven through the digital commerce platform, it is imperative that organizations ensure their web sites maintain the performance and reliability required to deliver great customer experiences.

More and more businesses are transforming themselves digitally and relying on their website to drive their business.

HCL is in the process of implementing a state-of-the-art Learning Management System to enable and promote people for their skills within the product. Read the blog for more details.

Quadrant Solutions is an emerging analyst organization, who has their finger on the pulse of commerce. Read blog for more details.