Advertising doesn’t work – Thoughts from an ad-agency Web Developer

*EDIT* – Hello Reddit! It’s awesome to see all of you guys coming here to read my stuff! The way I write is that I just dump a stream-of-thought onto the page and post it. The benefit of having this post come up is that I managed to expand and make my point a bit more coherent. I will leave the original for posterities sake, and below I will copy in the comment I made on Reddit as I feel it expresses my feelings a little bit more

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Before I start, I want to preface everything by saying that what I am writing here is purely my own thoughts and opinions, and they do not in any way represent the thoughts/feelings/mindsets of my employer or any of my co-workers.

Recently, I just passed the one-year mark working as a Web Developer at an advertising agency. I’ve learned a lot in that kind of environment, I feel I’ve become slightly more aware of making sure that good code is complimented by good design and more importantly, I’ve learned that a lot of the time, you cannot save a customer from themselves when it comes to what they want vs what is advisable.

One thing that I haven’t so much learned, as reinforced, is my feeling that advertising is not as effective as everyone would have us believe.

I’ve watched first hand as marketing campaigns that cost clients huge sums of money have resulted in incredibly poor conversions, or in most cases when it comes to print and physical mediums, have no real way to measure the effectiveness of the campaign ROI at all!

And what about digital? Banner ads are so bothersome that people go out of their way to build software to get rid of them, and some companies will even fraudulently increase click-through rates to give the illusion that their advertising is working when in fact it is an army of outsourced workers being paid fractions of a cent per click.

Daily, we are bombarded with billboards, signs, video clips and soundbites all designed to convince us that we want, nay need to buy their product, but have you ever actually felt truly compelled to go out and buy something simply because an ad convinced you to buy it?

And it isn’t that agencies are not aware of the growing discontent of advertising either. They’ve moved from beating us over the head with their product to trying to trick us with things like sponsored content. Quite frankly, I find the idea of sponsored content to be immoral, disgusting and disingenuous. The author will try and convince you that they were being above board by including a disclaimer *somewhere* on the page noting that the article is sponsored content, but a lot of times, you won’t know until you get to the bottom of the page. If you think it is ethical to hide a sales pitch for your insurance company in an indistinguishable article on a reputable news site then you are more than likely a horrible human being.

More and more, people are turning to services like Netflix, Spotify or even pirating, for the simple fact that they allow us to consume our media both conveniently and advertisement free. And that is the thing that baffles me, the consumers are not so much speaking to the market as screaming at it that we are happy to pay for content if you provide it conveniently and ad-free. Unfortunately, until the crusted-into-the-boardroom executives who haven’t understood a technological advance since the radio let go of their stranglehold on our content we will be forever the people who paid to have the honor of being sold as a product.

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I must apologize for the irony of banner ads, I use free wordpress.com hosting which comes with banner ads, I strongly encourage everyone to not click on the ads.

I will admit, that part of what I wrote may have a slight bias towards anti-advertising as that is my stance on the issue, the mindset I had when I wrote this probably wasn’t conveyed as I write in a very stream-of-conscious way, but my feeling is that we’re so convinced that the old ways still work that we’ve been using the same methods for decades now. We throw tracking onto web ad’s and look at the ROI and convince ourselves “oh well, this is the best we can do” without even considering that if we tried to innovate in the field we might see better ROI. Not only that, but print and physical advertising is still a huge market which has more or less no measurable ROI metrics. Clients are essentially beholden to an agency saying “trust us, you’ll see more revenue from this campaign.”

The reason I say advertising doesn’t work is that even with targeted advertising, the products that are being targeted to us are of either a poor selection or are items we don’t need.

Do I have the answers? Of course not, I’m just a lowly developer with a bit of an axe to grind. But I can recognize a broken and outdated industry when I see one.

Javascript Fatigue? Or something more?

There has been a lot of talk recently about a phenomenon called “Javascript Fatigue”, whereby developers are getting confused and worn out trying to keep up with the slew of new tools and methodologies when it comes to developing Javascript.

The problem is they are right, especially when it comes to the tooling. We’ve suddenly gone from a couple a javascript files included into our html to needing to do the following:

1. Decide what type of new, cutting edge version of JS/ES you are going to write in
2. Figure out what combination of Babel + plugins will work properly with this version
3. Build your package.json and figure out what dependencies you needed
4. figure out the correct Babel config that will compile your code
5. once you’ve compiled your code, you need to compile it again so that the module system you are using works properly
6. but wait, you might also have an intermediary compile step depending on if you are using JSX and the tooling around that

For someone like me who wrote jQuery and was overly concerned with the issues that sprang from cross-browser compatibility before ES2015 or Node was even a thing, this current process is completely baffling. Suddenly, one day we are compiling our Javascript multiple times just to get it work.

I’m not saying these are bad things. Things like React and Node have done wonderful things for web development and allowed us to move forward in the web space in new and exciting ways. The problem is that we’ve created such a barrier around these great things that it is becoming increasingly harder to take advantage of them in a way that is reasonable.

Let me tell you about the times I have tried to use Babel. Yes, plural, because up until recently I could never get it to work. I wrote my ES2015 code, went to find Babel, only to be told that I needed babel-cli, once I got babel-cli I then figure out that it does nothing by itself and you need to download plugins. At this point I was confused, isn’t the point of Babel to compile modern JS code down to code we can use now? Why do we need to install plugins for something to do what it was built to do?

So I go and find the plugin, install that (thus my node_modules folder gets ever larger), and try again. Only this time it doesn’t work because I need to learn the arcane combination of compiler flags to even get it to just work. When did it become easier to compile using GCC/Clang than it is to compile Javascript?

Ok, so now I have a collection of Javascript files that have been transformed into something the browser can use, except it can’t because now I have this whole module system littered throughout my code. Apparently, figuring out how to deal with modules is a challenge left to the coder. So now, I have to figure out how to concatenate my compiled Javascript code so that it will work with these modules. So I go and grab Browserify because at the time, it seems like the most commonly used software to achieve this.

After again figuring out the ancient incantations of the compiler flags that would make even kernel developers blush, and again writing more config files, I finally have compiled my ES2015 code down to something I can include in my browser.

After all this, I load up my test.html file, and bask in the ‘hello world’ application I have just written in the new hotness that is ES2015. Except, now I have 2 actual source files (I was experimenting with ES2015 modules), 2 compiled files, 1 concatenated build.min.js file, and a ridiculous amount of configuration and build files.

This is what Javascript fatigue is, a complicated maze of dependencies that don’t quite fit together, tools which require mountains of configuration and cli flags, and multiple steps that should be folded down into one tool but for some reason are not.

If Javascript is to continue to thrive as it has been, then we need to as a community have a serious discussion about how we do things. We need to build tools that are easy to use and require one, if not a small number of steps. Imagine being able to download just one build tool that by default allows you to write something like ‘jsc /some/js/dir -o /some/build/dir –enable-jsx’ which not only does all the compilation but handles things such as modules etc for you, so that we can spend more time on building great applications and spend less time on downloading and configuring tools.

 

Australia doesn’t have a piracy problem, it has a content access problem

Myself, like most Australians, are voracious consumers of media, be it TV, movies, video games etc. In fact, so much so is our desire for more and more content and media, that according to Australia’s Attorney-General, George Brandis, Australia is the worst offender of content piracy in the world [1]. To combat this affront to profitability for the ‘Wolves of Hollywood’, the esteemed Mr Brandis has pushed through tough anti-piracy laws to crack down on those who would dare steal content and is even considering going so far as to outright ban the use of VPNs [2].

Let’s take a step back for a second. Myself, like many across Australia (or even the world!) are currently embroiled in the current season of Game of Thrones, and every week brings with it a fresh discussion on the affairs of the realm. The thing is, most of the people I know don’t have Foxtel. For those of you outside of Australia, Foxtel is the monopoly of a cable television company (owned by Rupert Murdoch) who owns exclusive rights to Game of Thrones in Australia, thusly, not owning Foxtel means no legal access to Game of Thrones.

The reason most people I know of choose the piracy route instead of purchasing a Foxtel subscription simply comes down to cost. According to the Foxtel website [3], the total cost per month of having Foxtel is $25AUD a month, which seems somewhat reasonable, until of course you factor in the fine print. First you need to have Foxtel installed in your house, which is a $75AUD installation fee + $125AUD in equipment fee’s, which means before you have even watched the first episode you are out of pocket $225AUD. And, to top that all off, if you are one of the swarm of people who probably only have an interest in Game of Thrones and not watching the same Simpsons replays on Fox8, you might be inclined to cancel your subscription once the current season of Game of Thrones has finished running. Except you can’t, at least not without it costing you more money. Even the entry level pack, which we are basing this on requires a $500AUD minimum spend and very vaguely includes cancelation fee’s of an unspecified cost and nature.

All in all, this seems like quite a lot of money to be out of pocket, just to watch one show. And it seems someone at Foxtel agree’s with you, hence according to this article [4] you can access Game of Thrones via Foxtel for the grand total of $30AUD a month. More than any other on-demand streaming service I could find in Australia.

The problem isn’t that Australians don’t want to pay for content (although, granted, there are those out there who really do just not want to pay for content), it’s that Australia has always been the red-headed step-child to America when it comes to media content and access, let alone any other kind of hardware of software. Remember the wonderfully colourful iPhone 5C? compared to other iPhone offerings came in a steal with the most expensive offering coming in at $199USD [5], while for us here in the land of down-under costs $529AUD [6]. How is it that the most expensive option (the 32GB model) can cost hundreds less than the cheapest model, given the only difference is the country it is being sold to?

We once had a Prime Minister who famously said ‘fair shake of the sauce bottle mate’, which is something that most Australians live by. Australians want a fair go when it comes to being able to enjoy the same things that the rest of the world do at a price where we don’t feel like we’re being ripped off. Australians have been put into a position where for many of us, piracy is the only way we can actually afford to enjoy things such as Game of Thrones or any of the other wonderful content being produced overseas. And to have not only the international community wag their fingers at us and shame us for trying to appreciate their hard work, but to also have a government who has no understanding of what they are actually legislating about [7] is just plain insulting.

As I sit here, pondering how best to end this, I’m reminded of the famous ‘mad as hell’ scene from Network, and in particular, I felt these lines from the movie seemed particularly apt:

We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’

Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. (shouting) You’ve got to say: ‘I’m a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!’

We, as Australians are the people just begging to be left alone with our TV’s and our pirated copies of Game of Thrones. I don’t want you to scream or rant or write to our esteemed Atorney-General or any of the other government members, not only would they not listen as politicians are ever so apt to do, but it probably wouldn’t make an ounce of difference. All I want you to do is get mad as hell, because I sure am.

[Featured image from: http://www.wall321.com/Architecture/Houses/winter_game_of_thrones_winter_is_coming_banner_house_stark_1920x1080_wallpaper_82566/download_1920x1080]

We Need to Talk About The “Mobile Revolution”

It’s been nearly six months since I left my last job working in the Mobile Consultancy game. These days mobile to me means a responsive web front-end or using Facebook/Twitter/That-thing-that-all-the-cool-kids-are-using, which to be honest, is fine by me.

Looking back at my time working in the mobile space, one thing seems pretty clear to me: There isn’t really any money to be made in mobile.

These days you are either are either the hot new Silicon-Valley startup enabling their users to use their software in a more native way on mobile (Facebook, Twitter etc) or you build your business model around being mobile first and find a way to make that model profitable (Uber etc). The problem is that in the eyes of the consumer, an app that you may have slaved hundreds of hours on to them is worth at most 99 cents, god forbid you do something crazy like ask for a measly $3.99.

A lot of people place the blame squarely on the shoulders of Apple and Google, and while yes, they do have some blame to shoulder, the real blame should go onto the consumer who has created this race to the bottom style of software. It’s a hard pill to swallow for most of us, myself included, the idea that while the average joe see’s their mechanic or plumber as someone who deserves a fair compensation for their work, we are under-appreciated to the point where people see our work as worth less than their morning coffee. It even reaches the point of insulting when you get co-workers, family, friends or even complete strangers who come up to you and ask you to build their “next revolutionary idea” and think they’ve somehow outwitted you by getting you to work to their idea of how long it takes to build an app for what is essentially no money (as a 50% stake in a crappy idea is still worth no money.)

Moving past the bitterness of past experiences for a while, another reality starts to set in. For those working in the mobile applications games, the only way to make money is as a consultant working on other peoples ideas. For those of us who have run the gamut of trying to do anything that might make us money will tell you, its between damn hard and nigh impossible to release an app that will provide you, the developer with any kind of sustainable income you can life off of (granted, exceptions do exist i.e. Flappy Birds). However, working as a consultant, your income is not tied directly to app sales (at least, I hope not), rather it is tied to the delivery of the app itself.

These days, every business wants a mobile app, most don’t even know why or even if they need one, but they are convinced they do, and in fact these are usually the cases where an app becomes less of a cost center, and more of a boost to their base revenue model. These are the companies that keep mobile application developers fed and with a roof over their head. However, these are also the customers who create the self-fulfilling prophecy of apps not being worth diddly-squat as the vast majority of these businesses release their app for free.

Really, I feel this was more of a vent than talking about industry problems, which is fine, it’s my blog, I can write what I want. And I also realize that one session of venting online is not going to inspire a radical shift in the industry, but at the very least, I feel some kind of duty to those who come after me to give fair warning as to the state of things in the mobile world.

Good luck brave soldier.

(Feature photo copyright Charis Tsevis)

My Thoughts on “The Realities” of Web Development

Recently, I stumbled across this post about what the author thought was the “realities” of a career in web development.

In a sense, I admire the author for writing something like this, currently there is a huge influx of young, “green” web developers coming into the industry, and as such, we need to make sure they are ready for what comes with being a modern web developer.

However, in saying that, the author seems more interested in teaching us that true experience, comes from years logged against a certain framework or language. And while I agree that in the current climate of web development, we need to be aware of the evolution of the web, it is naive to base an experience argument based upon buzzwords and current trends.

All too often, whenever I read articles about web development, they always seem to have an air of “oh, well if you are not working in technology X, then you aren’t doing REAL web development”, where X is the current trendy framework or language. It was only a few years ago that I remember X being Ruby on Rails, then suddenly, Javascript and NodeJS developers are looking down their noses at us, and now, my gut feels that ReactJS is slowly moving into the “top-dog” position.

Experience as a web developer is not about how many times you have rewritten your personal blog to make sure it’s just as hip and trendy as everyone else’s, experience is having the experience and wisdom to know when maybe using WordPress or Github/Jekyll to host a blog is a more stable solution than building your own. Experience comes from having been in the trenches long enough to provide sound technical advice and solutions to your team and/or client. Experience is language/framework agnostic.

The author then goes on to talk about how “Everyone starts at the bottom” as literally the next sub-heading. If everyone starts at the bottom, then doesn’t it make sense to accept that not every applicant has worked in your companies specific stack before? If everyone starts at the bottom then all hires will require some level of on-boarding and training. To me, it seems counter-intuitive to exclude an entire section of employable developers, most of which are probably experienced enough to have their on-boarding period that you are so convinced they need be significantly shorter than someone who’s entire development experience is 12 weeks in whatever is trendy at the time.

I’m not saying that code bootcamps are bad, nor am I saying that the current trends are bad. All I ask is that people re-evaluate their stance on what makes a good, modern web developer.

The thing killing open-source is the people

I have a bit of an admission to make. Something that a lot of people would consider to be a shame of sorts, but something I feel I should talk about anyways. I’m afraid to contribute to open-source.

It’s not that I don’t think I’m good enough, I’ve got enough production code under my name to back me up when I say I know what a loop is and why I should use one. Rather, my fear comes from the community around open-source.

Everywhere I look and everywhere I go, there seems to be a deep-seated attitude whereby abuse and hostility are not only ignored, but encouraged. Now, while I do have a thick skin from growing up being the subject of many bullies torments, I find it hard for me to justify volunteering my time and effort to contribute when there is a better-than-none chance that I will cop public abuse for my efforts. This is something very difficult for me, because I am a firm supporter of open-source software, and I do want to give back to the community-at-large that has enabled me to do so much with software.

And the thing that really bugs me is that if you look at one of the main perpetrators of this, the Linux Kernel Mailing List, then you would see a model whereby this happens almost daily, and it seems to work. And while I can understand that maintainers and people who are employed to work on the kernel should be held to a higher standard, that higher standard shouldn’t have to be enforced through fear and intimidation. And if you are someone who doesn’t think that it is fear and intimidation that Linus uses to keep his ‘minions’ in check, can anyone find a time where Linus has flamed someone and the recipient has returned with a ‘fuck you’ or any kind of fight back?

Others will say that they have no time for politics and only really care about code and the technology. Well, I would count myself among those people. Quite frankly I don’t care if it’s Joyent or some conglomerate of companies forming a governing body that rule over Node.js, just so long as I can continue building stuff that people can use then I don’t see why it matters. My point is, it is not politics to expect such minimal respect from people that you don’t end up mocked and chased out of a community, it’s basic human-fucking-decency.

The reason the title says ‘killing’ is that what happens when my feelings about this spread? The Linux Kernel admittedly has a problem with trying to get newer developers on board, and one day it might just be that there are no developers left who have the stomach to put up with the hostility and the Linux Kernel could die (in reality, I very much doubt any large company would let that happen). Without developers who are willing to step in and continue working on open-source projects, then open-source is effectively dead.

In saying all this, I want to finish on a somewhat positive note. To all those who make and maintain open-source software, I want to thank you for enabling me to keep building cool things.

 

Thoughts on “The Good Parts”

Recently I’ve decided to take another look at what is currently the trendy thing to be working on in software these days, which to me seems to be anything written in Javascript.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Javascript, I can see the power it offers in creating dynamic web pages, and the idea of AJAX has changed how we work on the web. However, Javascript is a funny beast that occasionally does strange things (the most famous example of which is demonstrated here).

Javascript has also had, long before it became in any way popular or “trendy”, a lone knight claiming that Javascript not only doesn’t suck, but has “good parts”. Now, I’m not going to sit here and rip on Douglas Crockford, because the man does have some good points. However, after watching his live talks “The Good Parts” and “The Better Parts”, I’m convinced that a lot of his points are either subjective, riding the trends of today or are just claims with no evidence to back them up.

My particular sticking point comes from his proclamation “I am done with loops”, claiming that without loops Javascript becomes a purely functional language. You can’t just not use a feature of the language and suddenly turn it into something different, not to mention the whole idea that not using features of the language is stupid. It’s naive to think that you can solve every repetition problem solely through recursion.

Also, using foreach, map etc instead of loops is “not using loops”, rather, it is just abstracting away the loop from the programmer. Given up until ES6 there was no tail-call recursion, how do you believe foreach() and map() were implemented?

However, after saying all this, I will say that I’m not overly against saying that he is right, and Javascript does have its good parts. In fact, with all the things coming in ES6, Javascript is the closest thing to my ideal programming language that I have in my head (minus static typing). I’d like to see Javascript evolve and shake off it’s terrible past and evolve into something that will carry the web forward for the next decade.

The Cult Of Agile

The original version of this post was much different. I wanted to talk about my feelings towards the cargo cult of those who sell us the Agile Manifesto and talk about software architecture while it seems, at least to me, they probably haven’t written a line of code in many years.

However, after writing a first draft, I feel the need to revise what I think is the real cargo cult in the current age of software development. I did a lot of research, reflected on my experiences, and even talked to a few people.

Agile is a great idea in theory, given that software is a field where estimation is near impossible. The problem with Agile today is that enterprise saw it as a solution to turning software into a profit centre instead of a cost centre. As much as I’d like to remove myself from thinking in terms of business (I’m an engineer, not an accountant), I want to concede that it does make sense.

The reason why this has been bad is because enterprise is based on years of practices around charting and estimating and other such things that we pay project managers for, which allows business to do cost-benefit analysis and other such things. Agile makes these things difficult, and therefore today’s version of Agile is bastardised to reflect what enterprise thinks it needs.

Let’s lay out how I feel Agile should be practiced in an enterprise setting:
1. Pointy-Haired Boss comes up with a project
2. Meetings are held with developers to nut out specs, stories, etc.
3. Sprint meeting is held to decide what is to be done in upcoming sprint
4. Sprint is locked down, and it is iterated to the client that during the sprint things CANNOT change
5. Developers code for duration of sprint
6. While project is not complete, goto 3

The problems I have personally experienced with modern Agile reflect issues with two things I think are important in this process; a lack of QA/testing during the sprint, and clients who see customer collaboration and responding to change as meaning they can change the specs and requirements at any time.

Admittedly, the first problem is solved on the developer’s end. Having continuous integration and nightly builds means that every day there should be a new build to be tested. While developers should be aiming to have their sprint as bug-free as possible, sometimes it is not possible to finish the sprint and fix all the bugs in a given sprint – this is what sprint meetings are for, as they allow for the client to be notified of existing bugs and for bug fixing to be scheduled in as a part of the project.

The second problem is one of communication. Clients need to understand that if things are to be done on schedule, you can’t keep adding more targets to hit along the way. Explaining to clients that while yes, Agile is designed for changing requirements, the reason we have sprint meetings is exactly to evaluate regularly the priorities and needs of the project – and to schedule such changes into the development process.

A good Agile developer/project manager needs to recognise these shortcomings not just for the sake of the project, but also for the sake of the sanity of his developers.

2014 in review

Holy shit! Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that little old me would get 2600 views! Thank you so much to everyone who read and commented and supported. Bring on 2015!

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,600 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 43 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

WordPress, the blogging CRM used for anything but blogging…

One of my friends does quite well as an independent web development contractor, he’s not too flash when it comes to things like complex backends and doesn’t really keep up to date with things like single-page applications, but his clients rave about him because not only can he deliver a good looking website, but with it being built on top of WordPress, it allows the clients control over content long after delivery.

(I realise for some, calling someone who works primarily in WordPress a web dev contractor is a stretch, but bare with me)

WordPress is one of those things which these days is prevalent everywhere you go online. Hell, even this blog runs on top of WordPress. Time and time again it’s proven to be a solid and effective open-source blogging platform that anyone can set up and run with some patience and a googled tutorial.

My friends clients however, aren’t interested in having their own blogs, they want dynamic content, e-commerce setups and the like, which with the plethora of WordPress plugins available on the market these days, are easily deliverable.

It’s a struggle for me to wrap my head around the idea of beating a blogging platform into an e-commerce solution, it reminds me of a quote from PHP: a fractal of bad design:

I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.

You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.

You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways.

You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough, so whatever.

And on you go. Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to make itcompletely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools.

Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door.

That’s what’s wrong with PHP.

And in my head, I silently append “and doing non-blogging things with WordPress…”

And what makes it worse is that the majority will rise up and tell me I’m an idiot. That why bother with those complex things like Magento and Shopify when WordPress is easy? Why break consistency? But these still fail to address the main issues surrounding WordPress doing non-Wordpress things.

• Given the size of the plugins and themes required (6.5 MB for WooCommerce alone), it’s an enormous amount of effort to beat WordPress into submission, with all these changes, the room for area widens
• I don’t see any of the top WordPress e-commerce plugins going through rigorous public pentesting or PCI compliance
• All pages are from what I understand are called “virtual pages”, in that the page content is loaded by inspecting GET variables and injecting page content based upon those variables. This seems like a surefire way to damage performance (I’m happy to be proven wrong on this point if someone can find any data on this)
• Adding products feels just like adding a post with a SKU and a price

And these were the only things I could think of and research given ten minutes of effort.

The point I am trying to make here is that instead of making a product do something it was not designed for, invest the extra time and effort to choose a product that was built by people who have your end goals in mind, instead of people who spent twice the effort making a horse into a camel.