The sad state of e-commerce

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.