AEM as the sole ecommerce solution

[jakej40603950]

Does it make sense to have AEM as the sole system for ecommerce related features on the site (catalog, shopping cart, etc.)?

It seems in most of the projects, there's an ecomm platform like atg or hybris and AEM just sites in front of it and communicates with these platforms either by services or by the integration framework. But since AEM does offer ecomm features like catalog, checkout, payment, etc. does it make sense to not use any separate ecomm platform and just have AEM take care of all the ecomm functionality (along with all the page creation, authoring features of course ..)?

What would be the cons of doing this? Is there any feature based or performance based limitations that would make it a bad idea to do so?

Any thoughts here will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[ksuren]

Good thought.

Below are my thoughts:

• If the requirement for an ecommerce solution is basic and does not need advanced features, then YES we can use AEM eCommerce.
• AEM eCommerce is still not a sophisticated and well grown product. For enterprises, they'll need more features and functions from an eCommerce platform. Like Adobe mastered the Web CMS, solutions like Hybris, Elasticpath, Magento have mastered ecommerce and they keep updating their product.
• Also performance maybe an issue if AEM eCommerce is used. Large enterprises have thousands, if not millions, of transactions that happen and i'm sure AEM eCommerce is not at that stage to scale to such use.
• AEM eCommerce does not comes as pre-packaged with AEM. This has to be purchased by customers as an add-on product/service.

[jakej40603950]

Thanks a lot ksuren. On the first 2 points, would you be able to elaborate on the features / functions that may be missing from AEM eComm but may be required by enterprise level apps? That'll really help make the limitations more clear.

Thanks again.

[kautuk_sahni]

Hi 

I have asked internal product management team to also look into this question.

I hope you will get some good reference from them.

Thanks and Regards

Kautuk Sahni

[jakej40603950]

Thank you. That'll be great.

[kautuk_sahni · Accepted solution]

Hi

Reply from Product Management Team:-

"We position AEM (and the Marketing Cloud) as the presentation layer and not as a commerce platform. Therefore, the recommendation is to integrate with a commerce platform by using the Commerce Integration Framework. The tools they mentioned (catalog, checkout, payment) are used to create experiences (e.g. the product detail page, the checkout flow with payment, …) that are connected to a commerce service provider.

The use-cases where you can go with AEM only are very limited (e.g. just displaying product information without transactional capabilities, no big pim requirement), but usually the effort that is required to build these functionalities is much bigger than integration to an external service.

FYI – There is a simple JCR-implementation (product editor, shopping cart, checkout) of the Commerce Integration Framework in our Geometrixx demo – this is for demo purposes and does not have the itention to be production ready. "

I hope this will help you.

Thanks and Regards

Kautuk Sahni

[jakej40603950]

Thank you. This really helps.