HCL Commerce Marketplace - Our Preview is Live!

I’m thrilled to let you know that with our recent release of v9.1.10 of HCL Commerce, we are now live with our preview of our upcoming Marketplace. Our Marketplace is already integrated with our Commerce platform so there is no additional cost and no need for 3^rd party integrations.

Since I talked about marketplaces in general in a previous blog post (found here: https://blog.hcltechsw.com/commerce/native-marketplaces-in-hcl-commerce/), we have been working closely with customers in our Sponsor User Program to build a first release of our Marketplace capabilities based on what they identified as their needs in a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

We believe in developing our products together with our customers, and therefore, we have made our MVP available to all our customers as a preview. In that way, we can gather even more of that valuable customer feedback that we’ve been reliant on to make sure we get the right capabilities out there.

So, what are the core use cases that our customers asked for in our first release? Let me give you a quick rundown of what to expect in our upcoming July release:

• Onboarding and management tools for the owner and the operator to bring the sellers onto the system and manage them throughout their lifecycle
• Tools for catalog and pricing for the sellers that go through an approval process
• Tools for inventory and orders that sellers can use to make direct updates on the live site
• Tools for the seller to manage their portion of the order afterwards

Get a sneak peek today or meet us in Dallas on May 11, 2022

For the preview, we have most of the first set of tools done, for onboarding and managing sellers. You can see it by accessing v9.1.10 on Sofy, or by downloading it. Information on how to enable the Marketplace capability is found here:

https://help.hcltechsw.com/commerce/9.1.0/storeseparation/refs/react_Marketplace.html?hl=marketplace (Please note that the preview Marketplace capability is not intended for production use).

We’d also be very happy to see you at our event in Dallas in May, where we will go through our roadmap, and you can learn why a native marketplace is the best option. Send an email to peter.wharton@hcl.com  to receive your invitation or sign up here to secure your spot.

Of course, there’s much more to Marketplace capability than what I’ve mentioned; this isn’t the end of the journey. This is the first step to get the core functionality in place. From here, we’ll be able to build out all the additional features that we’ve identified so far, thanks to the active involvement of our Sponsor User customers and business partners.

Become a Sponsor User today and influence our next step

All our Sponsor Users have brought us requirements, and they’re all on my list to be prioritized as we keep building out our Marketplace. For example, one of our Sponsor Users has the requirement to have a few dozen individual marketplaces, with sellers who may participate in all of them, just one of them, or anywhere in between. That’s a requirement that’s much easier for us to build in right from the beginning, and thanks to their participation in the program, they are getting that feature right away in our MVP release. I’ll be depending on feedback from my Sponsor Users to help me prioritize the list of additional features, based on what each of them sees as important for their needs.

If you’d like to participate as a Sponsor User, please feel free to contact me directly at (annemarie.lafond@hcl.com), or my colleague Amanda Chan (amanda.chan@hcl.com), who runs the Sponsor User Program. Every piece of feedback helps us improve the product.