Why to choose Spree Commerce for your e-commerce store?

Spree Commerce is a popular open source software based on Ruby on Rails that e-commerce businesses are increasingly considering to base their online store on. If like these businesses, you are also considering it, here are some of the advantages of using Spree for your e-commerce store, that you’ll enjoy, on opting for it:

Advantages of using Spree Commerce for your online store

• Spree has a lean code base and it, therefore, helps you build a lightweight storefront. Using just about 45K lines of code, it makes all the processes related to operation and development smooth for you.
• Spree takes care of the server requests rather quickly and it can manage high traffic density well on your ecommerce store. Generally, your server might be able to handle many requests together, but, in case of a sudden traffic spike, its performance may suffer. Spree takes care of this situation.
• Spree is built on Ruby on Rails, a programming language that supports high productivity and sustainable programming. So, Spree is more developer-friendly for Rails developers, as compared to how Magento is for the PHP developers.
• The Rails framework, being more efficient and minimal, lets you skip a long learning curve otherwise involved, and therefore, this helps you save a lot of your time and money.
• With Spree, Payment integration is easy since it is easy to integrate with more than 125 Payment processors.

Here are some specific advantages of choosing Spree as the platform of choice for building an e-commerce store along with some famous examples from around the industry:

1) Lean code base and flexible API

Spree is often admired for its flexible API, which is one of its best features. So, if your business needs any third-party app or software to run, you need to connect it to your platform via API. This becomes a bit tricky when the API is not flexible.For example, if your business has multiple sales channels, Spree can easily sync the inventory with the sales through all of them. Connecting your ecommerce inventory management software to a Magento store can be difficult on the other hand, owing to its larger code base.

For example: Bonobos.com is built on Solidus which is a fork of Spree Commerce.The brand has expanded into multi-channel retail and it has become the largest apparel brand ever built online in the United States leveraging on this expedient platform based on a lean code base and flexible API.

2) High degree of scalability

We know that Spree supports your online store to scale extremely well, even over 30,000 products. This makes it a perfect choice of platform for the businesses that are constantly growing and that need to constantly go on adding products based on the new locations undertaken. So, if your business is witnessing steady growth, Spree helps you scale exactly in accordance with your specific business needs.

For example: The brands like Chipotle a famous Mexican restaurant chain website in the US, has crossed $4.5 billion of revenue in 2015 and yet, is steady with growing its operations. For their online store, Spree has proven to be ideal platform supporting such massive growth.

3) Startup friendly

Startups frequently encounter a common issue with the flexibility of the platform to scale. So, if you are a startup that wants to be able to scale as and when needed, Spree is a smart choice of the platform. So, with Spree, once your business is ready to scale, you won’t be forced to switch to a different platform. This helps you save a lot on the money wasted in the name of development cost.

For example: The startups like Stowaway Cosmetics are gaining popularity in the beauty industry with an average growth of 35% month over month. Based on Spree, their e-commerce store has been well supported all along while they have scaled up to where they have reached today.

4) Flexibility

Spree offers you the flexibility to craft perfectly optimized customer experience to make their online shopping journey pleasant. This helps boost the sales for your brand and help you up your search engine ranking as well. With its flexible frontend, it does not only allow your ecommerce store to look exactly how you want, it also allows you to completely customize the flow of your website to its most important pages. This imparts a lot of control to you over the performance of your store and its conversion rates.

For example: The brands such as Huckberry have e-commerce store featuring apparel and gear in a ‘members-only’ setup. A bootstrapped startup, Huckberry has grown rapidly, covering US$15 million of revenue in under first 5 years. For their ‘email drivel retail’ model of business, Spree has played a critical role by allowing them to customize all the important pages and the website flow, driving sales merely with the emails leading to their impressive product pages.