Maintainability implies that solutions change. E-Commerce solutions, just like any other application, change in terms of systems requirements. The look and feel of an e-Commerce site often goes through high-frequency change, and the content of an e-Commerce site must often be constantly updated.
These are the more obvious maintainability challenges of an e-Commerce site and the subtle ones include changes to underlying technology. Thus, the architect must think of maintainability when designing solutions.
The architectural needs of e-Commerce solutions do not disappear on the day the solution goes live.

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A design pattern is an effective means to convey/communicate what has been learned about high-quality designs. The result is:

1. A shared language for communicating the experience gained in dealing with these recurring problems and their solutions.
2. A common vocabulary of system design elements for problem solving discussions. A means of reusing and building upon the acquired insight resulting in an improvement in the software quality in terms of its maintainability and reusability.

An object can access its private variables directly. But doing so could greatly affect the maintainability of an application, which the object is part of. When there is a change in the way a particular instance variable is to be defined, it requires changes to be made in every place of the application code where the instance variable is referenced directly. Similar to its client objects, if an object is designed to access its instance variables through accessor methods, any change to the definition of an instance variable requires a change only to its accessor methods.