10 good reasons to use Sharepoint 2010 and Commerce Server 2009

I want to make it clear that, if you are going to set up a static web site to handle few orders per month with a very low budget, this post is not for you....
but in the remaining 99% of the cases, you should read this post before designing your MS architecture to handle your E-Commerce platform

1) What they can offer me
Sharepoint: WCM, Enterprise Content Management, Search, Workflows, Security, BDC, etc.
Commerce Server: Catalog, Profile, Marketing, Order Systems, Multichannel platform

I would consider as Key Selling points for CS the Marketing system and for SharePoint the WCM features.

2) They give me a platform

Commerce Server and Sharepoint gave you a FRAMEWORK to build on your first class E-commerce environment.
the difference between a framework and product is sustantial, most of Commerce competitors are products, it means that they deliver something ready to use but much more close and difficult to extend

3) Added value

you can provide added values if you design and use propertly CS & Sharepoint.
try to think about Sharepoint & CS potential put it toghether and you could deliver something incredible...

Try to think about the chance to create campaign pages using web parts, combined with WCM and a Workflow engine to approve it... and when your campaign is approved, you can send out your mailing list to a set of customers in a specified target.

4) I can integrate them with other technologies easily

I can integrate them very easily, as any other custom .net Web Application.
You can use Biztalk adapters to handle Commerce Server and Sharepoint features

the most common e-commerce integrations with third parties are:
Payment gateway (Cybersource, Payex & so on...)
Web Analytics (Google, Omniture, Yahoo, WebTrends, Coremetrics)
Search and Merchandising (Omniture, Google Commerce, etc..)
Image Servers CDN (Akamai, Scene7, Fluid, and so on)
Product Feeds (Google Base, kelkoo, etc)
SEO (you have full control on the produced Html and you can enforce style rules to improve your SEO quality on CS & Sharepoint)
Independent Product Reviews

5) They are flexible & scalable

they play well in small and big infrastructure and they can scale very well in a MS infrastructure...
I saw successful small ecommerce web site running on a single server and I saw enterprise infrastructures with 10 WFE and a SQL cluster with 5 nodes.

6) They are reliable

Several enterprise international retailers are using Commerce Server and SharePoint to improve their multimillion on line business

Microsoft support them with an excellent support team

7) They are mature technologies

I'm talking about 2 enterprise products with more than 10 years of experience

8) they are 100% .net products

they expose everything with a .net API and several stuffs are exposed as WebServices
CS still use COM on the profile system and on the marketing system and pipelines, but everything is encapsulated in a .NET API that make it transparent
to the developer

9) They are becoming a standard

try to take a look on the sharepoint 2007 numbers, and you will understand that people is starting to use it seriously...

10) They are cheap

Sharepoint 2010 license for single domain internet site cost £ 7500 GBP

Commerce Server 2009 standard license cost: $7,075 per physical processor

you can use sql standard license & mirroring to save on SQL license cost.

it means that you will pay a very low license fee, compared to the feature and the potential that these 2 products could offer to your architecture

I think as well that you would save a lot of time and money on the development work to implement from scratch all the features offered by this platform.