Pros and Cons of Using an Ecommerce platform out of the box

Most of the times depends on the scale the company is at, if you are a start-up company with no legacy systems then seems appropriate to use such a solution. Always looking ahead is essential that the tool is extendable and has an API exposed so you can integrate later with other systems and 3rd parties. If you do follow this approach make sure that you don't grow your system into a monolithic structure by doing more than it's supposed to.

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Cons:

Increased Logic in ESB, The ESB becomes a bottleneck and less of an aid to retire legacy systems

• Monolithic architecture
• Increased development time
• Increased testing time
• Dependent of community/company upgrades
• Less flexibility for connectivity
• Complex interoperability - Increased development time to integrate new platforms
• Single point of failure
• Need to adapt and extend a pre built product

Pros:

• Solution out of the box can increase the time to benefit of new features out of the box.
• Very good for startup companies as it normally provides 80% of features needed
• Out of the box integration with different payment gateways
• Product management out of the box
• Customer manager out of the box
• Easy to use UI
• Centralized management

Supporting References:

http://microservices.io/patterns/monolithic.html

http://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/5073/5195381/pdf/Online_Chapter_19.pdf

Although doesn't refer directly to ecommerce follows the same principles:

https://www.sparkred.com/blog/saas-vs-customizable-platform-ecommerce/

https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/6113-building-fault-tolerant-java-applications-with-apache-cassandra

To see:

http://www.datastax.com/ecommerce

Supporting references:
http://cornerstone-digital.com.au/blog/using_magento_for_your_ecommerce_website/#.VMor_iusVfA
http://www.zdnet.com/article/saas-pros-cons-and-leading-vendors/