How do you compare Websphere Commerce with the rest of the ecommerce tools available in the market?

Question

All those familiar with websphere commerce will know that it is feature rich. It supports B2B, B2C and extended sites(which ATG doesn't) and some other features. But it is complicated, and on the performance and reliability front it still seems to leave a lot to be desired. Any opinions on which would be better for a high traffic site?

Answer 1

Personally I'd stay away from it and Commerce Server - I've had a lot of success with open source solutions such as zencart but a new player to the game with a very nice offering is http://www.magentocommerce.com/ - it is php, nice framework. I've used it for busy production sites and it worked well.

Answer 2

I have been working with WebSphere Commerce (WC) for over 7 years now. I agree that it is feature rich and complex (maybe overly so for many sites) but it's main target is for large e-tailers. I disagree that the performance or reliability are issues. I have worked on sites using WC that have some of the highest peak loads in the industry. The performance and reliability are functions of the code base and how well it is written. The issue with WC is that it is easily extended and people making those extensions don't always understand the performance impact of their code. As for the alternatives out there, I have messed around with zencart and I find it pretty feature full. I have friends that run small sites with it but I have not heard of it being used at an enterprise level. I have researched magento commerce and it looks to be the next great thing but I don't know any major sites using it either. As far as ATG goes I have no opinion. I really don't know much about it.

Answer 3

In my opinion, Commerce is far too complex for most applications. It starts with over 600 database tables, and you have to either shoehorn your data into those tables or create custom ones. Controlling the flow of built-in controller commands can be confusing and problematic when you need to string several of them together at once. Using EJB 1.x Entity beans is inadequate in both performance and usability when compared to using a EJB 3.x JPA implementation, or just standalone Hibernate. WC provides its own wrapper for communicating via JMS, but it is much different than conventional methods, is poorly documented, and does not offer any improvements other than a slightly simpler implementation.

Answer 4

My Oppeninon is Commerce is ocean.It has hell lot of features, I have sean in most of the projects they do unnessary customizations which already provided by the product and they will not follow coding standards, so obviously there will be a performance hit.I do not feel that commerce is too complex.

While implementing Commerce they have chosen EJB1.1 and they can not convert that to EJB3.0 because it is so hughe to change.That is only the draw back I see from WCS.

Answer 5

I worked on project that migrated away from Websphere to ATG. As my experience is on ATG side, I am probably biased but I believe there are many technical advantages on side of ATG:

http://www.atg.com/en/resource-library/white-papers/detail/?documentId=7900021

Unfortunately, the technical arguments are not always deciding for large scale ecommerce site and selection criteria are much more business focused ...