eCommerce Engineering is Hard
What makes it hard? First, you have to write or acquire an eCommerce engine, integrated it with an order management system, a content management system, and a payment service. Then you have to interface these products with 20-40 legacy applications so it fits into your corporate structure. You have to design a user experience that is better (or at least no worse) than you have on your old site. Finally, after you have managed to get all of the projects, and subprojects done, it must perform well today and scale well over time. If it won't perform, then you have to go to your boss and get $X million more for additional licenses and CPUs. This is clearly in the hard category!
It is surprising how many major eCommerce sites are architected by people who have never designed or built one before. Managers often pay more attention to the credentials of their family mechanic than they do to the person who will architect a site they have bet their careers on. Often they take comfort in the fact that each product vendor will send a good professional services person to the project team. But unless someone on the team can take an end-to-end view of the whole ecosystem, they will fail. They will be like a basketball team that has great talent but is uncoached, and thus rarely wins. Someone must take bottom line responsibility for the final result. This means that he/she must constantly measure the data flow velocity (the speed that data flows from its source of truth to/from the site) at every integration and interface point, including that between the Web server and the eCommerce engine. When a laggish flow is detected, it must be fixed via a redesign. When someone is capable of doing this, they deserve the title of eCommerce Architect.
