Why Spree Commerce is the platform of choice for e-commerce developers

The upsurge in the number of both e-commerce users and portals continues as we head towards the last quarter of 2020. These soaring trends call for innovation within the ecommerce industry to keep the progress going. As such, a question arises as to which ecommerce platforms can be relied upon to serve that level of innovation? One of the best ecommerce solutions to bear this purpose, undoubtedly, is Spree Commerce.

 

Spree Commerce, or simply Spree, is a promising e-commerce platform that is built upon Ruby On Rails 6. It was launched in 2007 and with over two dozen updates so far, it has been well maintained ever since by an active community of developers and authors to compete with other technologies and deliver excellence to the ecommerce industry. It is an open-source platform that is free to use and comes with no licencing restrictions.

 

Spree Commerce 4.1.0

The latest version of Spree Commerce is 4.1.0. It offers all that a modern ecommerce portal requires from customization to flexibility, scalability and novel/contemporary features. The distinguishing aspects of this ecommerce platform are listed below:

 

Customization

Spree offers developers the ability to customize the functions and UI of the e-commerce portal to a great extent. In the UI, header & footer customizations can be done upon the logos, categories and subcategories, banners, company info, contact details, social media icons, links, etc. Product listing and product details pages can be designed distinctively to represent the business. Loyalty programs such as discounts, coupons, gifts and promotions can be connected to the process, and language localization can also be set up.

 

Development

Spree’s mobile-first methodology can be utilized to create powerful PWAs too. Features such as SASS support smoothens up the UI building process. Developers can use REST API and GraphQL efficiently to build the ecommerce website. The modular structure of Spree Commerce doesn't just give flexibility to the development process but also leads to faster development of the application and one can set-up a fully-running ecommerce portal within weeks!

 

Extensions & Integrations

Extensions (reusable modules) for subscriptions, marketing campaigns, roles and permissions, delivery slots, carts and checkouts, asset management, admin reports, item returns, etc. can be used for faster application development. Apart from this, 3rd party integrations for integrating to ERP, POS, analytics dashboard, etc. are all available to the developers.

 

Marketing

Spree Commerce 4.1.0 scores quite high in terms of marketability benefits it offers. Email marketing and SEO can be well-managed on Spree Commerce built websites, thus helping business owners. Spree websites load relatively faster and also owing to other SEO and utility features, they score higher on Google rankings and SEO tests, get more conversion rates as well as reduced bounce rates. SEO management as per recommendations can be done through structured data, Open Graph preview, srcset fallback, images lazy loading, etc. User analytics are available for research and planning on marketing campaigns.

 

Other Features

Spree hosts several ecommerce features like inventory management, customer relationship management and shipping management. It adheres to secure authentication and authorization principles including token-based REST API and strong password encryption. It has built-in ROR security features. The Spree Commerce documentation is a rich resource to begin with the process of ecommerce website development.

 

With over 1.1 million downloads at the time of this writing, Spree Commerce truly is the platform of choice for e-commerce website developers. This involves prominent brands like GoDaddy, Southern Kitchen, MilanStyle, Felix Gray, Everlane, Urban Ladder, Garmentory, Huckberry, and others. Spree Commerce has the capability to cater to all kinds of e-commerce functions including B2B, B2C and multi-vendor operations domestically and internationally. The ROR developers at Sarvay Xenia have several years of expertise in building robust E-commerce applications based on Spree.