420 Design Blog
The sad state of e-commerce
12 Jun 2008 | Angie H
Having worked on 2 e-commerce websites in the past 6 months, the lack of solid e-commerce solutions that are fully standards compliant and don't require a PhD to customize has become increasingly frustrating. Visiting various forums I know these sentiments are shared by many designers and developers, especially within the web standards community.
I've spent probably 40 hours or more (that's no exaggeration) over the past several months searching high and low for a good e-commerce package that plays nice on a number of fronts. And I'm not just talking open source here. I've looked heavily into commercial software as well, mainly figuring that a commercial version must be better (money going in means the ability to put more resources into a project right?). But the pickings are slim, if there are any at all. Sadly, there are consequences, if you will, to both camps (designers/developers and clients) on this issue.
Developers have to work harder
Web standards developers are perhaps the noisiest bunch when it comes to finding solid e-commerce software. But it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone - web standards-based development is on the rise and will be the norm in the next several years. For whatever reason though, e-commerce software developers are slower than molasses to make the switch fully to standards-compliant code for customization.
The very few that have embraced web standards to some degree (or have come close) are either missing crucial features in an e-commerce package or are just ridiculous when it comes to customization (I'm looking at you Magento). This means that developers are having to compromise on design decisions, put in twice as many hours to avoid that compromise, add a slew of plugins and modules, or hack away at the software to make it compliant.
Or worse, all of the above.
Clients pay more
Clients have expectations - and rightly so. It's our job as designers and developers to meet exceed those expectations. And at a good value. But if web developers have to work twice as hard to get the stinkin' shopping cart software to work and display correctly in order to meet, not just to code standards, but client expectations as well, then there's going to be additional costs involved. While web developers get tortured traversing through crap code, clients pay extra for it. It shouldn't be this way. Plain and simple.
Looking ahead
So what are the choices? As I mentioned earlier, the pickings are slim. So much so that I have zero recommendations. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Niente. None. Sad, I know.
2 Comments
@Bob,
You're absolutely right about FoxyCart - it is perhaps the only one that is fully standards compliant. It's also different in that it's a monthly solution which some folks may balk at (some may not).
We used to work with ModXCMS a couple of years ago before we found ExpressionEngine. ModXCMS is a good CMS but EE is much more flexible in many ways. Additionally, there's a module for ExpressionEngine that connects it with FoxyCart as well.
Other than that, I've only briefly played around with FoxyCart mainly due to e-commerce clients wanting more of an integrated solution to their cart needs (in our experience anyway). If you get a chance to work in more depth with FoxyCart please drop me a line!
While it isn't a full eCommerce solution, http://www.foxycart.com/ "reads" like it is the start of a standards compliant eCommerce product. And because it isn't an commerce CMS, I've noticed they work with http://www.modxcms.com/.
Do you have any experience with either of these individually or together? If so, do you find that ModX or Foxy Cart provides the ease of customization you are looking for? (I haven't experimented with these options yet.)
Bob
11 Jul 2008