SharePoint Commerce Services – When Does it Make Sense?

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately as to when SharePoint Commerce Services makes sense for a company.  A lot of people are skeptical to jump right into SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites because of the stigma that SharePoint 2007 had in some circles.  Even though I am a huge fan of SharePoint 2010 for Internet sites (when it is implemented correctly of course!), There still are some things you should keep in mind when determining whether or not SharePoint and SharePoint Commerce Services makes sense to you.  Hope this helps!

• SharePoint Commerce Services is ideal for those that are already leveraging SharePoint 2010 internally and can further increase your return on your SharePoint investment

• Enterprise eCommerce websites (roughly 10 million hits per month or more) or websites that sell somewhat “non-traditional” products (e.g. digital downloads, custom built cars, highly configurable products, etc.) would typically leverage 3rd party providers for recommendation engines, search engines, etc. Custom .NET websites are typically better suited for websites of this size and complexity.

• SharePoint public website pages tend to have a larger payload to accommodate its many robust features. Businesses that demand extremely low payloads for their public websites due to bandwidth, proximity, or other nuanced performance factors should ensure SCS will meet its needs.

• Businesses that demand full “div based” layouts vs “table based” HTML layouts for search engine optimization may run into unnecessary complexity by leveraging SharePoint as it dynamically renders its page layouts using tables. The pros and cons of these two HTML markup paradigms should be evaluated accordingly.

• ECommerce
• SharePoint
• SharePoint 2010
• Commerce Server
• Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 R2