Yes, the Germans were intending to use the Bismarck class battleships for surface raiding, and made several attempts at doing so. They also used other heavy units - battleships and heavy cruisers - in the commerce-raiding role during the war.

When Bismarck, accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, set off from Gotenhafen to begin Operation Rheinübung, her goal was to wreak havoc on the Atlantic convoy routes. The two ships refuelled at the Norwegian port of Bergen, before heading north, and trying to sneak into the North Atlantic through the Denmark Strait. Here, they were engaged by a British force, consisting of the battleships Hood and Prince of Wales. The older Hood was sunk by a shell which passed through her thin upper belt and exploded in her magazine. Prince of Wales, suffering from technical issues with her turrets (she had been rushed to sea, and was not quite fully complete), withdrew, but not before scoring a hit on one of Bismarck's fuel tanks. This hit caused much of the fuel in the tank to leak out, and contaminated the remainder with sea-water. Without this fuel, Bismarckdidn't have the range to threaten the convoy routes and return to France. Her commander, Admiral Lutjens, detached Prinz Eugen to continue the raiding mission, and turned for home. However, she would be caught by the Royal Navy, and, slowed by a torpedo hit by a Swordfish aircraft from Ark Royal, would be sunk by the battleships Rodney and King George V. Prinz Eugen, meanwhile, attempted to raid the convoy routes, but was thwarted by engine problems, and forced to return to France before she could do any damage.

Tirpitz operated from Norway, threatening the Arctic convoy routes carrying lend-lease equipment and supplies to Russia. She made several abortive attempts to raid these convoys. The first came in March 1942, when she attempted to attack the convoys PQ-12 and QP-8 as part of Operation Sportpalast. These two convoys were heavily escorted by the British, with three battleships, an aircraft carrier, two cruisers and 12 destroyers taking part. What ensued was a complicated series of moves and counter-moves, as the British and Germans groped around, trying to find and avoid each other. On the 7th March, Tirpitz and her escorting destroyers encountered the Russian merchantman Izhora, a straggler from PQ-12. She was sank by the Friedrich Ihn, one of the destroyers. Ultimately, Sportpalast would be cancelled without Tirpitz encountering any other ships, thanks to poor weather, and a faulty report that the convoys had turned back. As Tirpitz withdrew, she was attacked by 12 Albacore torpedo bombers from Victorious, though no hits were scored. Tirpitz would next attempt to target the convoy PQ-17, as part of Operation Rösselsprung in June-July 1942. As she headed north, she was sighted by Allied submarines and reconnaissance aircraft. Fearful of an air attack from the carrier accompanying PQ-17, Tirpitz was withdrawn by German high command. However, the Allies had not noticed this withdrawal. Convinced that a German surface squadron was about to attack PQ-17, the convoy was ordered to scatter. This was a good defence against surface ships, which couldn't hunt down every ship. However, it made the ships much more vulnerable to aircraft and submarines - without an escort, the ships of PQ-17 were easy pickings, and many were sunk. After this, she would make no more sorties against Allied convoys, as Allied raids throughout 1943 did enough damage to immobilise her before her sinking in 1944.

The Germans used large surface ships as commerce raiders many times during the war. Beyond the actions of the two Bismarck class ships, the main contributors were the Scharnhorst class battleships, the Deutschland class pocket battleships, and the Admiral Hipper class heavy cruisers. At the start of the war, the pocket battleship Graf Spee operated against Allied shipping in the South Atlantic, before being run to ground by Royal Navy cruisers in the Battle of the River Plate. In October 1940, the Admiral Scheer began a near six-month cruise in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. On the 5th November, she encountered the convoy HX-84, escorted by the armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay. While Scheer should have easily overcome this trivial opposition, Jervis Bay (and the armed merchant Beaverford) managed to hold her off long enough for most of the convoy to escape - Scheer would only sink five merchants from HX-84. In December 1940, the cruiser Admiral Hipper would make her first sortie. On Christmas Day, she engaged the troop convoy WS-5A, but was chased off by the cruiser Berwick. In January 1941, the two Scharnhorst class ships began Operation Berlin, a joint sortie into the Atlantic. They encountered a number of convoys, but were chased off two by the battleships Malaya and Ramillies. Altogether, they sank or captured 22 ships. Hipper sortied again in February, scoring a major success when she engaged the unescorted convoy SLS-64. Following the failure of Rheinübung, focus moved to the Arctic convoy routes, with ships moving to Norway. On the 31st December, Hipper and the pocket battleship Lutzow attempted to engage the convoy JW 51B, but were chased off by the cruisers Sheffield and Jamaica. This failure led to the end of surface raiding operations for nearly a year. In December 1943, Scharnhorst sortied to attack the convoys JW 55B and RA 55A. However, on the 26th, she would be engaged and sunk by a British force of four cruisers, the battleship Duke of York and nine destroyers. There were no further attempts at surface raiding.

To add to /u/thefourthmaninaboat 's answer- although it might seem like overkill to use the heavy guns of the Bismarck-class battleships against merchant ships, there were both military and political reasons for the Kriegsmarine (KM) to do so.

The strategic situation confronting the KM in early 1941 held out some promise for the Germans, but was also daunting on a number of levels. On the positive side, the Fall of France had not only eliminated French naval power in the Mediterranean, but it also allowed for German access to French naval bases. Moreover, some new construction of heavy units was making good on some of the earlier losses sustained in Norway. Nonetheless, there were some troubling factors on the horizon. The KM naval planners rightly figured that the expansion of American neutrality patrols signaled the increasing chances of American belligerency. The prospect of a American heavy units joining the British would mean that Germany's already outnumbered surface fleet would be dwarfed. The Italian Regia Marina meanwhile was proving not as effective of an ally that its raw numbers suggested and German naval planners had to contend with the Italian fleet not being able to tie down significant numbers of British warships in the Mediterranean.

Part of the impetus for Operation Rheinübung- the Bismarck task force- in May 1941 was to strike with the heavy units of the KM while it still could. KM chief Raeder had timed the operation to coincide with the invasion of Crete in the hope of pushing British heavy units in multiple directions. This was in keeping with earlier naval strategy of using surface units to keep the numerically-superior RN off-balance while disrupting British trade. Part of the rationale for detailing Bismarck to convoy-hunting was that British strategic convoys had also begun to detail heavy surface units for their escorts. The idea was the fast and heavily-armed battleship could not only lap up the merchants and break up the convoy, but also destroy their escorts as well.

Of course, there was a significant amount of caution involved in this strategy. The directive for Rheinübung laid out in clear terms that:

The primary mission of this operation also is the destruction of the enemy's merchant shipping; enemy warships will be engaged only when that primary mission makes it necessary and it can be done without excessive risk.

Rheinübung's commander Vice Admiral Günter Lütjens was pessimistic about the operation's chances of success and pleaded for it to be postponed until either newly-launched Tirpitz or damaged Gneisenau could join the task force. Lütjens recognized that this sort of asymmetrical warfare with heavy units was a risky proposition in light of Britain's absolute numerical superiority. Raeder managed to eventually win over Lütjens for the smaller task force, but Rheinübung's commander still remained pessimistic about the overall mission, which explains some of his behavior after the encounter with Hood and Prince of Wales.

One of the reasons that Raeder was insistent on Rheinübung was that the operation's success would have reflected well on the KM's surface fleet. The KM not only had to contend with both British and American naval power in its 1941 strategic formulations, but also the impending war with the USSR. Such a war signaled a further loss of funding for the surface fleet and a sidelining of the KM in Germany's war effort. While Hitler was amenable to battleships as a symbol of German power and prestige, he was also sensitive to their loss and the symbolic impact it would have on Germany's prestige. Hitler flirted with the idea of cancelling Rheinübung on a 22 May naval conference and Raeder's memoirs claimed that the KM chief managed to sway the dictator not to abort the mission. Even though Raeder and other naval planners were aware of the risks associated with sorties by the surface fleet, thy did not want the navy to simply remain in port. As veterans of the Imperial Navy, the memory of a port-bound battlefleet of the Kaiser rusting away in idleness cast a long shadow over planners like Raeder. Sorties by the surface fleet were a means to keep in the game, so to speak. While the KM's battleships could not tackle the numerically superior British fleet, convoys were a much plausible target. Waiting for more surface units would only mean that the British naval strength would only get stronger with American aid while the surface fleet played an increasingly peripheral role in Germany's war effort. Merchant convoys were the only quarry within the reach of the KM surface fleet's capabilities, so they built a strategy around this reality.

Fittingly, Rheinübung had much the impact the pessimists like Lütjens feared. Hitler subsequently became more cautious with the surviving battlefleet. The idea that surface units could break up convoys also was much harder than it was in theory; experience with Scharnhorst and Gneisnau showed that escorts could interfere with the KM surface ships long enough for a convoy to move out of position. The British also had an abundance of heavy units to spare to deal with the threat of a German battleship or battlecruiser. Tirpitz did make several attempts to intercept the Arctic convoys, but KM naval directives as well as fuel shortages meant that Tirpitz's operational range was much more limited to areas where there was German aircover and proximity to German-controlled ports. Rather than being a powerful battleship, she was much more of a naval scarecrow.