Comment by jsntrmn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsntrmn | Hacker News Reader

This acquisition has piqued my interest moreso than your average bear because I work for a major retailer that just so happens to be heavily invested in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). We are using AEM strictly as a CMS and are otherwise heavily invested in Oracle Endeca to drive commerce from a search/nav perspective. And then there's the whole payment and order management issue which we handle with custom, in-house solutions.

I'm a little scared to hear all the horrible experiences with Magento because I'm a developer on our search team and working with Endeca (or any Oracle product for that matter) is an absolute nightmare. I flat out hate Endeca. We'll be due for a replatform in another few years (once the business gets sick of us trying to bolt on big data features to Endeca, which just wasn't built for such). I can imagine us going the Magento route since we already have hefty contracts in place with Adobe.

I've tried to pitch a custom solution based on Elasticsearch (or Solr directly) but my director and VP don't want to hear about anything that involves building various business user UIs from scratch. Endeca provides a (sigh... Flash based) UI that gets the job done, and on top of that we have several legacy apps with (can't believe I'm saying this in 2018) UIs written in classic ASP.

Other than Shopify or Workarea, are there any platforms you, the ever-full-of-knowledge gurus of HN would recommend? I really like both of the aforementioned products because they give you a lot of useful UIs out the box (in addition to the capabilities of the platforms themselves), but they also give you a lot of content management and we don't need that.

It's a smart move for Adobe I believe. I really can't see how the overlap of customer base for AEM / Magento will be, also it will be interesting to see if they start to do more b2b or b2c eCommerce. It is an interesting time in the space, strong CMS adding eCommerce, and strong eCommerce adding CMS. It's highly likely that Salesforce / Commerce Cloud will expand into the CMS space and possibly more consolidation of platforms.

There are some abstract systems like Moltin.com that offer eCommerce APIs Platforms like BigCommerce.com / VTex.com / Miva.com / Volusion.com are also pretty popular.

Then you have some end to end ones like Coredna.com* that offer B2B, B2C and CMS.

*Disclaimer : I work for the last company

Awesome reply! This is why I love HN. I'll be sure to investigate all of the options you've provided, including your own company. It takes a lot of integrity to list your own product last and include a disclaimer to boot. Kudos!

Hey! one of the founders at Moltin here. Thanks for the mention @blackdogie, always a nice surprise to stumble across! Coredna looks interesting (nice explainer video!).

@jsntrmn we often see the need to de-risk technology choices for decision makers at larger retailers which can sometimes be in conflict to what a developer looks for when selecting a tool or service. We're trying to get the right balance at moltin as we think both voices need to be at the table.

Happy to chat with either of you if you would like to share learnings/experience or if I can help in any way, just drop me a message adam@moltin.com

Great to connect, will reach out via email. Thanks for the kind words about the website, it was just relaunched last week.

When picking a platform, it's generally not about the feature set, as to why one is chosen over another. Often it's service : price, flexibility (integrations or future expansion), or just how the business operates in general. Best of luck on your reach. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

I totally understand the fear your VP have. It’s much harder(expensive) to find developers who have to manage their own ES or Solr instance instead of just making minimal enhancements to a base product that “works”.

It sounds like solid risk management which is what most companies (large) end up hiring people at that level for.

If you’re wanting to build newer things with newer technology then you should find a new role.

I suppose you've hit the nail on the head with your final sentence. I do agree with you, though, that my VP is making the appropriate decision given that we're a large enterprise.

At the end of the day, whether I'm a cog in the wheel of a huge machine or a decisive voice at a small startup, the engineer in me just wants to see the best solution realized. I guess that's why I still care, when in reality, I should probably be considering a move elsewhere.

Thank you for your input!

Drupal 8, plus integrated ElasticSearch (so you don't have to build UIs and can also integrate search into displaying collections generally), and Drupal Commerce if you like.

Have you worked much with D8 Commerce? I know it's spoken of highly in the community but after tolerating it since my first deployment of that combo in late 2015, it still feels half baked at best and almost completely undocumented relative to other major Drupal projects.

Why this very evening I'm having to manually re-input authorize.net details because they updated the module with a very poor upgrade path.

Well it's always been under resourced and you could fairly say it lacks product/commercial maturity so will have many rough edges and gotchas, but at the same time it's a very complex problem space where all of the solutions have drawbacks - so I'd look more at what the differentiators are, since we have to endure pain in any case.

So for example, with shopify you know it's all going to be click and build and largely configurable by commerce owners. Ease of use and a generic set of capabilities that scale across its userbase.

With Drupal Commerce, you know you are going to have a completely extensible open source system which leverages very powerful existing Drupal components such as entities, views, users, rules, search. There isn't really anything else like this.

A long time ago, I saw one very big d6 project (with insanely huge spiky traffic) which recognised this and used d7 commerce as a separate standalone system which sat on the back end integrated with the d6 site. This was after assessing Hybris, Magento, and Demandware as alternatives and understanding that they would require far more bespoke coding and have higher maintenance costs to come anywhere close to the very very specific and high spec requirements this particular site had.

Why do you work there?

Please see my reply to @brogrammernot.

tl;dr

You've posed a very appropriate question, one they I find myself replaying over and over as of late.

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