The term "e-commerce" encompasses a wide array of applications. It includes everything from simple shopping-cart powered Internet stores to large-scale business-to-business systems. Fortunately, many of these applications begin with a similar set of technical needs. These include storing, updating, and retrieving important information from a data store (usually a database), rendering information in a common format such as HTML or XML, and interacting with users who will consume, manipulate, and process the information.

These basic needs happen to align with a design pattern known as Model-View-Controller (MVC). MVC is intended to simplify the construction of applications by dividing it up into three manageable parts: the model, which is focused on storing and structuring data, the view, which presents data exposed by the model, and finally the controller, which provides a means of interacting with and manipulating model data.

Django follows this design pattern, but prefers to call it Model-Template-View (MTV). It retains the model concept from MVC, but refers to the controller portion as "views" while replacing the MVC view with what it calls the "template". These can be standard HTML templates with added functionality provided by a Django specific template language. This language can be replaced with other template languages, such as Python's popular Jinja or Cheetah template systems. Django can also use templates to render other formats such as XML or JSON.

Django's MTV pattern is a powerful approach, especially for designing web-based applications. It allows components to be created in a reusable and modular way so that pieces of the system can be upgraded or replaced without disrupting the others. This simplifies development. By focusing on the abstraction each MTV component represents, developers need not worry about the implementation details of the other components, only how to interact with them. Django's implementation of the MTV pattern should be a comfort to e-commerce developers because it is a well known and solid foundation to build upon.