Ecommerce platforms?

[etherealfocus]

So I've been the webmaster at my company for a few years. We've got several WordPress sites and a Joomla one, sell pretty successfully on Amazon, and have had a crappy out of the box webstore on some hacked up version of AspDotNetStorefront that is, to put it mildly, terrible. Slow, regular downtime (err, "sleeping their servers"), etc. Pricey too.

Long story short we got sick of it and we're replatforming. I've got a decent amount of ecommerce experience and have worked professionally on common platforms including Magento CE, Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, even WooCommerce once (never again). However, my experience with most of those platforms is at least a year or two out of date and wasn't always very deep.

I'm in charge of the replatforming effort and want to make sure I'm not overlooking any good options. That's where you guys come it.

Factors:
-We're a midsize company with several dropshippers and warehouses so we need multiple location support
-We have an in-house database/API developer who's a Certified Badass (tm) so we can build custom stuff if needed, but his time is valuable and we don't need to reinvent the wheel
-Must support 100k SKUs with over 100 attributes (each SKU has about 10 active attributes so our product matrix is 100k * 100 with ~10% utilization)
-Smart search compatibility (SLI or Celebros) strongly preferred
-Attributes need to be fully searchable so people can drill down a la Newegg
-Obviously an Amazon/eBay feed integration would make our lives a bit easier
-We use our own CRM and mailing list software so don't care about their integrated apps
-SEO and server performance are, of course, major considerations
-We NEED SQL access. No granny style csv uploads. lol

Our exec team really wants to go full enterprise on this with Demandware or Websphere but we don't have the volume for that yet - largely due to our crappy current platform.

Therefore, the plan I'm leaning toward is to do an emergency replatform to something easy like Shopify Plus just to stop the bleeding and hold us over till we can get in with the big guys.

I've evaluated Magento CE (awesome power but PITA to get running) and "enterprise" versions of Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, and Pinnacle. None are exactly what the doctor ordered but we could probably make any of them work. Pinnacle seems to have the most heavy duty back end, but I've read dodgy reviews of their customer support and server performance. Anyone had experience improving their performance with a CDN? Suppose we could shell for a dedicated box if needed as well.

I'd love to get other platform recommendations and hear your thoughts on my primary options above.

Our database guy loves the idea of osCommerce or Magento CE, but in my experience self-hosting is more trouble than it's worth - especially when our entire tech team is only two people. Never used osCommerce, but Magento is, as I said, hardly a fast platform to build on or an easy one to support.

 

[DesiPower]

Its expensive but Oracle ATG is a pretty good one

 

[NikolaeVarius]

Learn Rails and make your own website. Or use Spree.

 

[Zstream]

Magento hands down.

 

[etherealfocus]

Well...

1. Like I said Magento is awesome but deployment timelines make it a poor choice for an intermediary platform and the execs are leaning heavily toward MarketLive for our end goal. We'd need 4-6 months to roll out Magento and then have to replatform again in a year or two. Ditto for learning Ruby - I'm a front end guy and have no interest in digging into the LAMP stack unless there's serious ROI in it. I'm responsible for webmastering five sites, a bunch of front end dev work, SEO, ecommerce strategy, and now this replatforming. I need something as close as possible to an out of box solution. Spree looks cool, but given that Ruby is a bad thing for me, what's the killer feature over, say, osCommerce... and why would we want to host it ourselves? That's just more hassle and more risk of me gotten woken up at 2am because something broke and our host doesn't know our platforms... unlike, say, Pinnacle.

If there's a great reason to use a self-hosted platform, I'd love to hear it.

2. I've never used ATG but I have worked on WebSphere a bit and will be getting a MarketLive demo at some point. Are these all broadly competitors with each other? Important differences I should know about?

 

[XavierMace]

Magento is good. osCommerce is quite reliable too.

 

[Zstream]

Well...

1. Like I said Magento is awesome but deployment timelines make it a poor choice for an intermediary platform and the execs are leaning heavily toward MarketLive for our end goal. We'd need 4-6 months to roll out Magento and then have to replatform again in a year or two. Ditto for learning Ruby - I'm a front end guy and have no interest in digging into the LAMP stack unless there's serious ROI in it. I'm responsible for webmastering five sites, a bunch of front end dev work, SEO, ecommerce strategy, and now this replatforming. I need something as close as possible to an out of box solution. Spree looks cool, but given that Ruby is a bad thing for me, what's the killer feature over, say, osCommerce... and why would we want to host it ourselves? That's just more hassle and more risk of me gotten woken up at 2am because something broke and our host doesn't know our platforms... unlike, say, Pinnacle.

If there's a great reason to use a self-hosted platform, I'd love to hear it.

2. I've never used ATG but I have worked on WebSphere a bit and will be getting a MarketLive demo at some point. Are these all broadly competitors with each other? Important differences I should know about?

Magento or websphere are your choices. The e-commerce platform is not something you should take lightly as security, usability are key functions. I would fix your deployment methodology while tackling this. I would not use that as a crutch.

 

[etherealfocus]

Zstream - security is one of my concerns with Magento. I'm pretty familiar with PCI requirements and best practices, but I'm not a six figure security ninja and from what I've read that's what Magento requires to lock down. Long term, like I said, my first pick was Magento EE plus a dedicated security/compliance guy. Our exec team sees less ROI in that than they do in WebSphere/MarketLive and I can certainly see their argument. Someone else ensuring best in class hosting and security leaves us free to maintain a relatively light headcount and to focus on SEO and revenue generation.

In the short term, ANYTHING is better than what we have now. If Geocities had an ecommerce platform, this would be it. Therefore, considering the extended timeframe in moving to Magento EE/MarketLive/WebSphere, it makes a whole lot of sense to find an intermediate solution.

 

[brianmanahan]

whatever you do, don't use the websphere commerce platform

it sucks :\

 

[yllus]

I think Shopify is the best option, honestly. Magento is a real pain to configure and get to run with acceptable performance, and there's just no real value in pouring your own developer time into trying to get it to do what it really can't do well. In regards to using a CDN to increase performance - that's a lot easier said than done. The slowdowns you experience are going to be due to all that database activity; you can attempt to use a CDN to sit between you and your website visitors to speed up page load times, but not really because each of your pages are going to have dynamic elements on them that you can't use a CDN for.

Please do update us with what you choose, though, I'm interested in what you figure out!

 

[etherealfocus]

Brian - what's your beef with websphere? All the enterprise tools are clunky as hell... that's just the nature of enterprise. I've worked in Magento Go, CE, and EE... all three seem way more complicated than they need to be. Go in particular just seems worthless. Most of the clunkiness of CE but you lose a lot of the customizability and with the front and back ends on the same server the scaling sucks compared to Shopify/BigCommerce/Pinnacle.

CE definitely serves a market that needs a sophisticated platform, has ninja devs onboard to work on it, but doesn't have the cash for an enterprise platform. Unfortunately the scaling still sucks.

Bottom line you need EE to handle serious traffic with anything resembling serious efficiency, and then you're looking at 17k a year in license fees plus 50-500k in pro developer fees (unless you wanna spend a year and several full-time dev salaries doing it right in-house).

I feel confident in my ability to roll out a CE site in 6 months, but without an intermediate step, that'd be six months more of terrible hosting - not acceptable.

There's a business issue here too: We have a core biz that pays the bills; ecommerce is a relatively new game for us. Ecommerce is a whole lot more exciting to me than our core biz and more exciting than juggling silly WP updates. It's frankly the reason I've stuck with this company when I've gotten plenty of offers for more money elsewhere. The tradeoff is that if I'm working in the ecommerce side, there's a lot of career value for me in delivering flawless execution over and over again. That's a lot easier and the timeframes are a lot shorter when someone else is covering hosting and some of the hard site optimization work.

Flip side is just that I need to make sure both the intermediate and the long term solutions do everything we need and do them well.

I like Shopify but their Enterprise service is mostly about increasing server allocation and giving more API calls. That's cool but my bigger concern is needing more Magento-like flexibility with multi-warehouse fulfillment, large product matrixes, etc.

Pinnacle has some of those more robust near-enterprise features, but the platform is clunkier, worse SEO, and as I mentioned, reviews of their support are dodgy.

I also like being the big fish in a small pond - as we would be on Shopify. We're midsize to Pinnacle and small to the enterprise platforms where they want seven figure monthlies just to talk to you.

<rant>
We've been hosed repeatedly by enterprise companies bragging about their banner clients and then delivering crap to us. The reason I'm in charge of SEO is that we had National Positions doing it (a big well-respected company with lots of enterprise clients) and our marketing guy just happened to ask me a simple question. I dug into it and found 10k bad backlinks they'd just dumped on us. Apparently some doofus running a link farm forgot to trickle the links and murdered our traffic flow overnight. We tried another big name company and their sales guy called us after we'd had them for a year and told us how bad our SEO was. And he was mostly right.

We almost got nailed again when one of the execs started talking to ChannelAdvisor. If you guys aren't familiar, their reviews are... terrible, to put it mildly. They push a hard sell focusing on their enterprise success stories, but everyone sub-enterprise who deals with them hates them. Even their employees trash the company on GlassDoor.
</rant> (that tag really needs to become part of HTML5)

Anyway, happily ChannelAdvisor passed over my desk before we signed anything. Moral of the story: companies that tout enterprise success stories are often a terrible value for SMBs. Seems like they're happy to stick you with the B team and figure most customers won't realize they're getting screwed.

I like that paying a few hundred a month for Shopify Plus means we're one of the big fish and they've got motivation to keep us happy. Pinnacle and Volusion, ditto. They're obviously upmarket from Shopify, but neither could support most real ecommerce-focused enterprises.

yllus - I'll update back with the decision and probably some status updates as we get rolling. Shopify is pry the lead candidate for now but Pinnacle and Volusion both have some nice features at the expense of clunkier back end and worse SEO.