Why CMS sucks. (Guide to Small Business E-commerce Strategy)

I was on a panel yesterday called “I Hate My CMS” for the Internet Strategy Forum and Society for Information Management (despite the fact they keep adding an ’s’ to my last name. Peter. Just Peter . Here are the slides:

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The main point is that web CMS tools need to provide:

1. Workflow management
2. Content management

And, in practice, they suffer from a number of issues. For instance, your product catalog might be in one database. Your images might be on Flickr. Your e-commerce engine might be somewhere else. You might use eBay as part of the fulfillment. Pulling those diverse data sources together easily to create compelling product pages designed to drive sales simply doesn’t work. Not near well enough.

What we really need is a system that can take data feeds (likely via XML) from multiple sources and expose those in a clean interface to a marketer. And allow for easy A/B testing of those pages. And do it inexpensively. Why is that so hard? Or am I missing something here?

Let me know in the comments.

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Tagged as: cms, content management systems, small business, small business e-commerce, small business e-commerce strategy