Is there anything that actually works somewhere? Probably, but does it work for everyone? No. Here is a short rant on the current state of the e-commerce systems landscape, written with a wink.
Yep, I have stolen the title from what I consider a classic by Scott Hanselman, and in my darkest moments it feels like it could have been written today rather than 10 years ago. Hold on, this is written with a wink.
Does it matter which system you choose? Honestly, I do not think it does. You can build a fantastic solution with FTP integrations and duct tape, and you can just as easily wreck your extreme best-of-breed architecture with a lousy implementation. At the end of the day, most things are good enough for most things, because there is no alternative. Or the flip side: nothing is really good enough, so you have to make lemonade out of the lemons as best you can.
For the last few months I have been sitting listening to vendor after vendor present their e-commerce systems (and other adjacent systems) and how great they are. Why on earth? Why put myself through this? Well, to stay up to date on what is happening in the market. For too many years I have worked with a handful of platforms and learned what they are bad at and how you build around them to still get something reasonable working for the clients.
Today's e-commerce operators come from one platform they have built themselves into, and they move on to a new one that they will build themselves into. It is all the same. Sure, some have nice APIs or a great UI or something else lovely (but look at our PIM!), but at the same time they are completely bonkers about something else, like "currency, market and language are the same thing!".
There is no system that works the way you want. Either they have a marketing concept you cannot work with, terrible catalogue management, poor APIs, or a checkout that cannot be customised, or they have nothing and are headless, so then you have to build everything yourself.
No vendor can be good at every system. So if you go to a vendor, they will recommend the system they know or happen to have available developers on the bench for. If they only know one system they will say that system is the right one. If they know more than 3, they probably know nothing about any of them. Run.
Wanted: a system for e-commerce that you can grow with. That can handle many markets and has a good CMS and a front end that can be customised with drag and drop and does not require 1,000 hours of consultant development just because you want a different image on the French site than on the German one. That can handle promotions and different prices in parallel. That offers a number of payment and delivery integrations but can also be extended with new ones if you want. That is fast and has a transparent API where you can easily pull your data or push it in. That does not cost the earth. And that actually works. Too much to ask? And I want a pony while we are at it, and a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
While I wait for my pony, I will probably have to settle for all of today's systems with their flaws and lovely features and APIs and PowerPoints. In the end it just comes down to which flaws you can live with. And remember, when you switch systems you are just swapping problems, though that in itself can be refreshing. Off we go.
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