An E-commerce Platform Evaluation basedon the DoSAM Framework

Abstract: The goal of the thesis work was to give Softronic AB, a management and IT consulting company, an overview of strengths and weaknesses of the four content management systems Magento CE 1.6.2, Episerver Commerce 1 R2 SP1, Wipcore eNOVA 5.3 and Umbraco CMS, as platforms for ecommerce. The evaluation was to be made from a marketing perspective as well as from a user and in-house developer's perspective. Additionally, the goal was to provide an overview of how certain functionality from a current project could be implemented on the Magento CE platform. To be able to evaluate the platforms, a study of current evaluation and comparison models was performed. This resulted in the choice of the framework Domain-specific Architecture Comparison Model. A comparison framework was derived and defined from this model, and applied on the platforms. The choice of what was to be measured, and how, was determined from literature studies of the e-commerce domain, as well as studies of current e-commerce platforms. The demonstration of the capabilities of the Magento platform was solved by creating a new Magento store instance, implementing two components from a reference project, as well as parts of the graphical user interface, and deploying the solution on a cloud server. The evaluation resulted in a description of the platforms' strengths and weaknesses, and a table showing the properties of the platforms. The evaluation indicated that the platforms Magento CE and Episerver Commerce were the strongest when it came to functionality and market readiness. Wipcore eNOVA and Umbraco CMS's strongest side was performance efficiency, while none of the platforms were assessed as particularly strong in terms of maintainability.