what are the limitations of present ecommerce cms?

[tvboy]

I have a project to design a cms for an ecommerce application. I need to know some of the limitations of the present ecommerce cms so as to come up with a new system that takes care of those limitations. pls can anybody help?

[chris.p]

This is an interesting question because it is complex. Do you really mean that (1) you have been tasked with designing a CMS, ie developing one? Or (2) designing a website?

The first would frankly be asking a lot because the current offerings have cost millions to develop and aren't necessarily right yet. By 'cost millions' I mean they have taken large teams hundreds of thousands of hours, some of which may have peen paid, some not. For example eZ Publish + cart or Joomla + cart. Both of those cost many millions to develop, in real terms.

An ecommerce CMS may be *the* most complex webapp possible and it would be pointless to try and create something new on any kind of scale - although an extremely lightweight app is within the bounds of possibility for one person; something along the lines of Redaxscript plus a simple cart script for example. In fact if I were doing this I'd get hold of Henry Ruhs, the Redaxscript author, and ask if he were interested in working together. If it worked out you could develop it all further, as a single unit, which is the best way to go forward.

The second option is more realistic and involves a choice of applications, determined by budget and/or the aims and therefore scale of the website.

If you want to examine their limitations or faults, this essentially comes down to the typical faults in any ecommerce app rather than specific issues with cms / ecommerce integration. The integration seems to work well considering the complexity of the resulting applications.

There are ecommerce apps that you could define as 'good' or 'bad' depending on your point of view. Every possible webapp fault is seen in many of them, much as the same could be said for forum apps, because the developers set out to build something that worked the way they wanted it to and never considered any form of quality control or consulting with people with a wider viewpoint. This is a little critical but many completely disregard web standards, the generated pagecode is poor, admin usability is poor, and commercial results are not optimal because the resulting low quality means that SEO (which when interpreted correctly is a measurement of quality) is handicapped.

So to find an ecommerce app of any kind, whether integrated with a CMS or not, you could start by looking at the pagecode and checking it out for web standards compliance, including W3 validation and accessibility validation. The results here give a big clue to quality factors (and therefore the potential for success) all the way through the application.

An other point worth noting is that the designed objective of an ecommerce app of any type is to make money. Simple as that. It is not, for example: to look nice; to work well; to be easy to manage; to be easy to use; to be very capable; to be highly scalable; to be web standards compliant; to be cheap to buy; to be cheap to run; to be easily expandable; to have a lot of plugins; to have many templates; to be easy to work with the templates; to be flexible and easily repurposed; or any other such factor.

They all count, but the simple, basic fact is that an ecommerce app is only there to make money and if it fails in that it's utterly useless. I'd start by finding out if the search engines like it or not - because if they don't, you're up the creek from Day 1. Some carts are disliked by the SEs and therefore a poor bet.

[tvboy]

Thanx Chris for your reply, I really gained a lot of insight from it.

The main concept of the project is to design a content management system for an e-commerce application. I have been asked to select an existing e-commerce cms, find its limitations, and come up with my own cms that will fix those limitations noted in my selected e-commerce cms.

[chris.p]

It looks as though you are taking on a project that some large teams had trouble with, so perhaps the best way to approach your task is to reduce the scale by as much as possible.

If you are an extremely capable PHP dev you could add a CMS frontend to an existing ecommerce app - which might be what you are suggesting? (Or, what I really mean is - any PHP dev could do that, but consider the scale of the task to get the job done right.)

I know in theory it is possible for one brilliant developer to create an entire CMS or even an ecommerce CMS that actually passes a few quality tests, but I only know one like that out of hundreds.

To fix design or build issues with server software of this complexity, you need to be an expert and very familiar with it. Assuming you were, the biggest fails for ecommerce apps are their poor generated pagecode quality, lack of compliance with web standards, lack of basic and obvious plugins (eg some don't even have a visual editor for page text, the site owner needs to write code), admin bugs (issues with trying to get the app to do something it should, without major surgery) due to the complexity of the software, and poor SEO performance (ie commercial results) due to strange functionality within the app leading to noncompliance with search engine requirements.

Frankly it's amazing that ecommerce dev teams don't have an SEO tech person on the team since the only possible function of the app is to make money. The only possible way to do that with a shopping cart is to build it so search engines like it. The alternative is to spend vast sums on PPC. Because of this omission you get very basic fail points such as the app has all sorts of incorrect functionality in the case of a 404 error, which means some can't even qualify for a GWT account (Google webmaster tools) without ducking and diving. And this situation can apply to large and capable commercial apps.

Therefore ecommerce apps commonly fail on basic quality and modern icommerce requirements. CMS apps are generally of much higher quality, or at least the best are, and have different issues. For instance admin usability might not be perfect, templates and templating are a big area for problems, and the feature list demanded of CMS now means that any with less than 1,000 plugins will need custom dev work just for everyday features. Assuming you don't choose one of the real dogs with 40 code errors per page, the next thing to look at is how many plugins it has - because without them you are talking money. Here is a quick measure of CMS support in the plugin area - how many plugin visual editors are there that you could install and have running today?

Over 5 means very well supported, 3 to 5 is an average number, 2 means they don't have many plugins, and 1 alone means there are few plugins and most extension requires dev work. Since one of the core requirements of a CMS is easy / quick / cheap extension then it is not a good sign when money is tight.

[Acekin]

To the point that you will need to build a e-commerce site that catch many viewers. The design of different sections is the biggest factor of all. I remember the time when I was in College, my instructor also gave us our final exam and that is e-commerce site.