B2B businesses are growing fast. Latest data suggest that more than 46% of B2B purchases were made online last year in this segment. But despite the great numbers, B2B businesses have complex needs.
Unfortunately, those needs are not always supported by the eCommerce technology used, and as a result brands struggle to adapt to a constantly changing environment.
Among its competitors, HCL Commerce has scored Gold for Cloud Native Platform by Paradigm B2B in its latest Combine report, which assesses the top B2B eCommerce platforms. Despite its many components, HCL Commerce is a strong option for developing scalable B2B commerce. The main reason behind this are the key functionalities that HCL supports natively for this segment.
Key functionalities natively supported by HCL Commerce for B2B
- Customized contract pricing: Pricing personalization allows distributors to establish price rules and individualized price lists for each user profile, as well as to define prices with or without VAT, based on the type of customer.
- Flexible catalog management: HCL Commerce’s catalog management supports the creation of personalized catalogs, a typical need for a B2B of any size. This allows B2B businesses to create and manage products and categories, and make them visibles for multiple stores.
At a technical level:
- Headless Commerce: exhibit all eCommerce functions via REST APIs to build better customer experience across any channels.
- Cloud native infrastructure: HCL Commerce is a microservices-based application and Kubernetes native. This opens up the possibility of running eCommerce in any cloud service (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, Digital Ocean, etc). Also, HCL Commerce has now partnered with AWS, GCP and Azure in order to improve its features for each of those platforms.
- Integration: HCL Commerce allows the integration of a wide range of services. At the ERP level, it can integrate with leading technologies such as SAP. For CMS, there is Coremedia or HCL Digital Experience. For CDN, there are a number of possibilities: Akamai. Cloudfront, Cloud CDN or Azure CDN. And then there are Payment methods: Paypal, Apple Pay, Sofor or Redsys. Last but not least, the integration of Monitoring solutions like Prometheus/Grafana , ELK stack, Dynatrace, Newrelic or App Dynamics.
- Highly modular and customizable to fit any specific need: The microservices architecture allows the development of custom services and applications and its communication with HCL Commerce’s own microservices ,taking advantage of all the power and possibilities it offers without being tied to the base concept. For example, we can develop our own front end based on any technology, using all the logic and power provided by HCL Commerce.
With the newest version of HCL Commerce (9.1.9), its B2B solution has added a vast amount of features on top of the existing ones such as multiple quick checkout profiles, B2B multi-order/multi-user collaboration for checkout, and even cryptocurrency. This is in addition to an improved page-builder functionality, out of the box analytics dashboards and even a CSR.
A success B2B case developed for Pladur Gypsum with HCL Commerce
At Orienteed, we have a great example of a complex B2B implementation with HCL Commerce, developed for a leading drywall manufacturer, Pladur.
For this particular project, we adopted version 9 of HCL Commerce, which is based on a container and microservices architecture, and is 100% cloud. This is the first eCommerce project developed in Europe with HCL Commerce V9 and the third worldwide.
Pladur’s interest in enhancing the sales process of its product, together with the enormous potential of the B2B segment and our passion for eCommerce, have been the key ingredients to this project’s success.
If you want to know more about HCL Commerce implementations for the B2B segment, please visit our site and contact us.
Article written by Jose Manuel Redondo, Solution Architect at Orienteed Spain.
