Hi all,
First post on the forum.
I’m looking at solving the problem of having an hosted ecommerce platform integrate with a CMS platform.
Is it best practise to try and match up the primary navigation on both platforms and have them redirect between sites, or is it best to make it obvious that there is two sites?
Does anyone know of any examples where a site has a different ecommerce domain and how they interact with each other
Thanks
Martin
First off, welcome to the forums, @martinm! Thanks for posing an interesting question.
My strategy has always been to have as coherent a site as possible; usually this means standardizing design elements like navigation across the domains. Your customers don’t care that you have multiple domains handling different parts of your business: to them, the shopping experience is one coherent adventure into your site. The more you can do to make that experience coherent and consistent, the better off you’ll be.
Hey @martinm – welcome!
I’m with Doug on this. My experience tends to be with community platforms + CMS platforms rather than eCommerce, but I think the principals are the same.
The bottom line for me is making the experience as intuitive as you possibly can, and that generally means consistency.
The person we need to hear from here is @Louise – she specialises in the UX of eCommerce sites.
Hi @martinm- welcome!, @dougcollins - hi 
, @HAWK - thanks for the heads up!
I need some background on the end user.
You mentioned:
"Is it best practise to try and match up the primary navigation on both platforms"
What are the primary tasks on both platforms, will they be different?
"and have them redirect between"
Who will be using the platforms? Are the roles the same on both? Or are they different?
"is it best practise to try and match up the primary navigation on both platforms"
Depends on the information architecture you want to create for whom it will be serving - on each platform.
I agree with @dougcollins on standarzing navigation. Sometime though on large platforms where the cms is being used by editorial staff, the look and feel will be totally different from the main site, because it has to accommodate 3rd party enterprise design that comes out of the box, that doesn’t have a budget to be maintained.
Let me know how it goes!
Louise