eCommerce Engineering is Hard
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.
