Are eCommerce platforms worth using for large scale systems?
My company and I are creating a new system for a relatively large client. We're going to replace our entire system, which includes some aspects of e-commerce, among many other things. This is not your typical public shopping site and there are many things about the system (both back and front) that are completely different.
Some of the people I work on are convinced that we should use a third party product to implement parts of e-commerce (shopping cart, catalog management). Their opinion is that this is a solvable problem and we do not need to invent it. With that in mind, I've reviewed about ten different .NET-based e-commerce platforms, and I'm struggling to imagine how we can seamlessly integrate any of them without a lot of friction. They are so comprehensive that I feel they are probably better suited for implementing simple shopping sites rather than larger systems that have some aspects of ecommerce for them.
We have a really good architecture planned for everything else (Entity Framework, ASP.NET MVC, etc.) and my gut tells me that trying to introduce a third party framework will cause unnecessary fragmentation and difficulties.
I would like to hear some opinions from people who have been there. Have you used a third party ecommerce platform? Was it a typical shopping site or something else? Did you think it was a help or an obstacle? Thanks.
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You are not reinventing the wheel if your square is required . This is why I curse the day I used Drupal as the basis for a project. The sphere engulfed him, and then it became a whip. If you already smell the disease, why keep thinking about it?
You could share the existing one, but what would you be left with? Can you implement this yourself without too much trouble? Also, what are the licensing restrictions? You would have to reallocate your derivative works.
Common sense is valid only because this software does not change the logical approach to reuse.
Go make your square wheel. You can learn a few things / create a more abstract developer-centric API for e-commerce that other developers can use as a library rather than a platform to avoid the problems you run into when implementing "Me too".
If you do, open source. I would use it if it had an independent database schema and API for catalog and inventory management; But I agree to nothing outside the norm, the business logic you need depends on using the existing platform.
But not because your project is so unique and amazing?
"don't reinvent the wheel" seems like one of those things that gets overused. Like Helvetica. It makes sense, but not for everything.
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Ecommerce solutions are similar to encryption procedures: you should avoid writing unless you have experience creating one and really know what you are doing. Especially in today's environment, there are many legal issues that need to be addressed when creating an e-commerce solution that protects your client from litigation. PCI and PII come to mind. It's easy to make shopping baskets wrong and cause serious grief for your customers. By using a third party, you are essentially expanding your development team significantly. You now have a whole company working on adding and updating the shopping cart. A good set of shopping baskets is expandable and allows you to replace components in the shopping pipeline with your own. In short, I agreethat you should look for a third party shopping cart management solution if you don't have a lot of experience building your team.
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