[ic] "High traffic list" - ramblings on Interchange

[jeff at downtowndevelopmentplan.com]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 09:03:30AM +0100, Andreas Grau wrote:

> And many of the PHP carts are, well, good looking. Hardly any IC shop
> in the hall of fame is nice and modern. And inviting.

www.sophee.com, www.charmschool.com, and www.xtremetrips.com are just 3 
of our clients deployed using Interchange .  They were designed by an 
award-winning graphic designer.  The PHP carts look flat-out bad by 
almost any design standard, they all have the same feel, and full 
customization is agonizing as the ecommerce engine is not fully 
decoupled from the presentation.

> Next, IC is largely unsupported. If you look in the mailing list
> archives, there are tons of serious questions which remain without
> answer. The other IRC channel is mostly dead.

This hasn't been my experience.  All serious questions have been 
addressed.  I have really, in three or four years, never seen a single 
serious question (that wasn't already previously answered) go 
unanswered.

> Then, IC is not really documented. Since when I follow IC, there has
> been zero visible progress on the docs.

Hasn't been my experience either.

> Take an unsupportive mailing list plus zero docs, and you come to think
> that IC is actually a closed-shop solution.

It's not that IC is closed-shop, it's that it is big shop.  If you need 
something to seriously handle ecommerce or content management, then you 
use IC.  If you just need a cart to sell a few things, it's probably 
cheaper to use Yahoo Stores.  As is the case with osCommerce, those 
solutions are just not even on the same scale as Interchange.  One of 
our clients processed $140,000 USD in sales last month, as many as five 
transactions per second during some periods.  I doubt if any single 
osCommerce-based solution does even a tenth of that.

> In the end, there may be a team of dinosaurs who satisfies himself with
> existing clients. Probably rationalizing that IC is technically better
> than anything else.

We have deployed more IC-based solutions in the last 12 months than in 
the three years prior.  Our clients want something that looks good (and 
unique), runs good, and can grow and change with their business.  The IC 
framework completely meets these requirements.  You can't compare IC to 
something like osCommerce.  It's like comparing a tractor trailer to a 
passenger car and complaining that it's hard to fit in the parking space 
at the corner store.

Jeff