HCL Commerce Tooling Explained: Features and Benefits
The first HCL Commerce Open Mic made clear that tooling is no longer just an admin interface; it has become the backbone of how e-commerce teams work. From uploading catalogs and setting promotions to approving new B2B buyers or troubleshooting live schedulers, tooling is where business and IT teams spend much of their time.
When the tooling is outdated, even simple tasks can become bottlenecks. Marketers may wait days for changes to go live. Product managers lose hours navigating menus. Customer service reps risk losing sales while chasing approvals.
The newly modernized HCL Commerce Tooling (v9.1.18) changes this by giving teams a web-based, role-aware, API-first suite that helps them move faster, make fewer mistakes, and deliver better results.
The Business Case for Modern Tooling
1. Speed to Market and Agility
In retail and B2B distribution, timing is everything. Digital channels drive nearly 80% of B2B sales interactions and over half of U.S. B2B revenue.1 Modern tooling lets teams update catalogs or launch promotions in minutes instead of days, keeping pace with campaigns like Black Friday or Diwali sales. Companies adopting composable models deliver new capabilities up to 80% faster than those tied to monolithic systems2, proving that speed translates directly to growth.
2. Seamless Customer Onboarding and Operations
In B2B, buyer approvals are critical. Slow approvals can block transactions. A unified auth/live environment allows CSRs to approve accounts instantly while maintaining governance. This helps remove friction at the start of the customer journey.
3. Efficiency Today, Flexibility Tomorrow
Forrester estimates knowledge workers lose 30% of their time searching for data across apps3. Features like sitemaps, global search, and favorites close this gap, reducing wasted clicks and rework. At the same time, REST-first extensibility future-proofs operations, allowing businesses to integrate third-party services and scale without re-platforming in an increasingly composable, digital-first landscape.
What’s New in HCL Commerce Tooling and How It Helps
1. All New Dashboard
The role-aware dashboard shows favorites, recent activity, task boards and approvals.
This eliminates the old “blank home screen” and gives users one-click access to what matters most, whether it's catalog uploads for product managers or pending approvals for CSRs.
2. Unified Authoring and Live Access
A single container lets users open both environments in separate tabs and compare settings such as schedulers or user approvals. This way, teams save time and reduce errors. They can debug differences between environments instantly, and Buyer Admins can approve B2B buyers directly in live environments.
3. Sitemap Navigation
A centralized sitemap icon lists all tools and environments. This complements search and favorites, so users spend less time navigating menus and more time getting work done.
4. REST-first Extensibility
All new features run on REST APIs, with an extension framework on the roadmap for customer-specific customizations. This makes it easy to connect with third-party workflows and future-proof operations in a composable setup.
5. Compatibility With Legacy CMC
Legacy Management Center tools, such as Org Admin or Promotions, are embedded in the new framework. This provides a unified experience during transition so users don’t lose access to essential functions while moving forward.
6. Role and Persona-based Model
The tooling ships with more than 30 out-of-the-box roles such as Catalog Manager, Product Manager, CSR, Promotion Manager, and Site Admin.
Final Thought
Modern tooling is not just a new interface. It is the operating system for commerce agility. With the new HCL Commerce Tooling, business users gain speed, clarity, and confidence, while IT teams get an API-first, extensible foundation. Together, this prepares organizations for the future of commerce: modular, composable, and fast-moving, where execution speed is the real competitive edge.
To learn more, watch our first Commerce Open Mic on HCL Commerce Tooling.
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