As a team with more than 8 years of experience in Ecommerce website development, we’re often asked why we keep choosing Spree Commerce.

This article answers this question by elaborating on various aspects of the platform.

What is Spree Commerce?

Spree Commerce is an open-source, Ruby on Rails-based platform that allows you to build fully-featured and highly-customizable Ecommerce websites such as online shops or marketplaces. Since it was first introduced in 2007, the popularity of Spree Commerce has been growing steadily. As a result, the project attracted $1.5 million in investments from True Ventures and AOL in 2011.

Advantages of Spree Commerce

Speed of development. The Ecommerce platform is based on the Ruby on Rails framework, which allows for creating Ecommerce websites blazingly fast. In other words, if you’re building a startup and your deadlines are tight, Spree Commerce is the perfect option.

Infinite customization. One of the distinctive features of the platforms is that it’s completely modular. You can add new functionality or change the existing one however you want and whenever you want.

Adaptive design right out of the box. Any website built using Spree Commerce is mobile friendly by default. You don’t need to spend extra time and money on implementing that feature from scratch. This is especially helpful if you’re going to enter the Chinese market where 97.5% of all online users use smartphones to surf the net.

User-friendliness. The admin panel in a Spree Commerce-based website is very easy to use while being lightweight and powerful. It may not have all the features, but it has enough of them to effortlessly manage your website.

In-built localization. The out-of-the-box version of Spree Commerce comes packed with the most popular languages, which again saves your time and money.

User analytics. You can monitor and analyze the behavior of your customers from the outset. (Need I to say that understanding the way your audience thinks is one of the most crucial aspects for any type business!?)

Tons of themes. There are a whole bunch of custom themes you can download and apply to any Spree Commerce-based website. If

Integration with payment gateways. The way the platform is built for smooth and reliable integration with the most popular payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, eWay, Skrill, etc. From the experience we’ve had with Spree Commerce, its one of the few truly enjoyable platforms to work with.

Large and helpful community. Like any other open-source project, Spree Commerce is maintained by a community of volunteer developers who work day and night to make the project better (e.g. creating new gems and extensions, implementing integrations with new payment gateways, etc.). In addition, you can always turn to them for help with related issues.
How do you find them? The first and the most interactive place is public Slack channels. There, you can communicate with skilled engineers and other people who are directly or indirectly involved in the development of Spree Commerce. Another place you can receive useful information from is the mailing list. Lastly, you can always visit the GitHub pages of Spree Commerce.

Security. Since the platform is built on Ruby on Rails, it inherits all of the best qualities of the framework including security. For example, Ruby on Rails comes with everything necessary to prevent SQL injections and XSS attacks. At the same time, unpatched vulnerabilities are a common thing in Magento and WooCommerce plugins.

Translating the theory into practice

From the aforementioned points, it’s clear that Spree Commerce is a first-rate platform. Even if you take out a couple of advantages, it is still a great solution. Why isn’t it as popular as, for example, WooCommerce, Magento, Opencart or Shopify?

Well, it’s really quite simple.

As cliche as it may sound, Spree Commerce isn’t a mainstream product.

First, the platform is too elegant and powerful to use it for building overly simplistic websites. Second, it has a long learning curve from the technical point of view.

In other words, if you need to build a trivial Ecommerce website with some plain functionality, WooCommerce/Shopify are your choices since you don’t need much technical knowledge to work with either of these platforms.

That’s the reason they’re considered mainstream. On the other hand, using Spree Commerce for this purpose is like building a 10-meter concrete foundation for a bus-stop sign.

It just makes no sense!

This leads us to the point that Spree Commerce is perfect for mid-size and large businesses.

Speaking of the learning curve, if you choose Spree Commerce as the basis for your website, you should look for a skilled team of web developers. Without them, unlocking the full potential of the platform is hardly possible… well, unless you’re a tech-savvy expert.

When you combine those two factors, it’s easy to understand why the platform isn’t setting records in terms of popularity. But how popular — or should I say unpopular — is Spree Commerce exactly?

What does statistics say?

According to the data from Alexa, the number of WooCommerce-based websites is 315 times bigger than the number of websites built using Spree Commerce.

However, if you look at the top 100K selection (which is basically the turf of mid-size and large businesses), the figure falls down to 16. Even though the difference is still quite big, it only corroborates the fact that Spree Commerce is a premium-grade solution.

Finally, there is the marketing aspect.

No product can achieve great market success without proper marketing and media promotion following its launch. From what we’ve learned from history, whenever something becomes insanely popular, its quality sooner or later decreases. Oftentimes, it’s rather sooner than later.

In the case of Spree Commerce, the amount of effort usually expended on marketing and related activities is extended to actual improvements, making the platform a better product both for developers and businesses.

Because of that, Spree Commerce has naturally reached the point where people chose it not because they saw it in a youtube commercial or a promotional blog post, but because it’s actually a great solution that doesn’t need advertising… well, maybe a little! :-)

Real-life examples

Earlier in this article, I said that Spree Commerce is infinitely customizable. Some of you might have thought it was just a figure of speech and what we actually meant is that the platform only allows for changing a few pieces of functionality.

However, unlike other platforms, Spree Commerce actually comes with next level customization abilities. Here are a few examples from our experience:

Abandoned cart feature

Project: trèStiQue is a US-based online store offering a wide range of easy-to-use makeup tools for women. You can check out the full case study on the project here.

The essence of the feature is sending unobtrusive notification emails to customers who put some items in their cart, but for some reason, didn’t make the purchase. If you think the era of email marketing has past, then you’re underestimating its power.

In practice, the abandoned cart feature is extremely effective. More than half of these notification emails are read while one third of them ends with a completed purchase.

I’ve also covered the way this feature works in more detail in one of the articles on our blog.

It’s worth mentioning, though, an abandoned cart doesn’t mean someone didn’t like the product offering on your website. Oftentimes, it’s a result of such issues as slow website performance or too complex checkout procedures. You should tackle these problems first, but the abandoned cart feature is a good way to return your customers.

Cloud integration

Project: An online store allowing distributors to sell IoT tech (due to NDA agreement, we can’t disclose its name). One of the tasks we had while working on the project was to integrate Spree Commerce with a cloud service to analyze data from smart homes and connected devices, and their users.

In a nutshell, the client wanted to have the ability to:

• manage user subscriptions in a smart home app;
• synchronize the information about specific users and their orders.

I’ve successfully implemented this piece of functionality by developing custom user authentication. As a result, a Spree Commerce-based website is now in use with a cloud service as a system for control and management of smart homes.

Is that all?

The examples I’ve described above are just a small part of what Spree Commerce is capable of.

If you need to have the most advanced and fastest search on your website, you can integrate it with Elasticsearch.

Do you want to modify the way orders are processed? — Easy as a pie!

Or do you plan to customize every bit of the admin panel? Spree Commerce enables you to do that as well.

As I’ve said, you can customize practically anything, e.g. override validations to implement the feature of sending and receiving gift cards.

The list can go on forever.

Conclusion

So, with all that said, how do you know if you should choose Spree Commerce?

Well, it’s quite simple to determine. Look at the points below. Does any of them have a match on your to-do list?

• you have a mid-size or large business and you’re going to build a high-performance and customizable website with powerful functionality;
• you’re going to expand your business, i.e. growing the customer base, expanding the product line, adding new pieces of functionality, etc.
• you are willing to spend a bit more money to create a unique Ecommerce website with advanced business development abilities.

If so, you should go for Spree Commerce.

However, Spree Commerce is not a one-size-fits-all type of solution. If your requirements include either of points below, you should look for alternatives.

• you need to build a very simple website while being on an extremely tight budget;
• the team you’re working with isn’t familiar with the platform;
• you’re not going to expand your business and the website is a tool for interacting with an existing audience.

I hope the information in this article has given you the idea of what Spree Commerce is. However, if you have any related questions, you can always write them in the comment section below or send at [email protected]. We are happy to hear from you.

Is Spree Commerce the Best Solution for Your Business ? — The Ultimate Review was originally published in JetRuby on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.