Macromedia Contribute was launched a few years back as an off-the-shelf content management system that just about anyone that uses a web browser, would be able to master.

I’ve recommended it to many clients and often use it myself, when I need to do a quick update on a site without having to fire up Dreamweaver.

But what about using Contribute to manage an ecommerce website? Surely this makes no sense. I mean there are tons of ready made ecommerce systems out there, quite a number of these are quite good, often free (at least to start with), and just about every web design company worth their salt will have their own (usually bespoke) systems to use.

So why would anyone in their right mind seriously consider using what is essentially a content management systems, to manage products on a ecommerce site. In fact in my experience it actually makes a lot of sense, and can often outperform a designed ecommerce system in conversion and therefore profit.

The problem with ecommerce shopping carts is that they tend to be designed as a one-fit solution for all types of products. And generally much of the actual product and cart page is fixed, so you have little choice if you want to change the layout or colours a bit to improve things.

But why would you want to change things when the same layout is used by many others seemingly very successfully. Anyone who has worked on a site to improve the conversion rate will know why. Even a small change in the position of a button or link, a different colour can make a huge difference to the final conversion and therefore profit.

So if you create an ecommerce pages like any other with much more control over the layout and to some extent, the design, it follows that with a bit of testing you can also go a long way towards improving the conversion rate.

This is where Contribute comes in as it is a very easy way to edit and publish pages. The image below is taken from a site called www.PoshMums.com. The site is entirely managed using Contribute with templates original designed in Dreamweaver.

The buy buttons are linked to a hosted shopping cart system called www.Mals-e.com which is a very effective solution.

Because this is not a fixed page ecommerce site we were able to try out different layouts of the template, including moving the buy buttons, text and pictures until we were getting the best possible conversions.

The current conversion of the site is a very healthy 4.5% and we may be able to get it higher still.