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What is e-commerce mainly about?

What Ruby on Rails (web framework) Multivendor Ecommerce should a new E-Commerce Startup consider that provides that optimal balance of speed, flexibility, and scalability?

  • I plan on starting my first ecommerce platform very soon built through Rails, and my most limiting factor is deciding what software/platform to use for the entire cart/checkout system? It's come down to Spree or Stripe as the ecommerce checkout tool, and I'd like opinions on which they feel is more secure, more customizable by the coder, and more standard with integration of Visa, Mastercard and PayPal payment options. The platform is not expected to grow to gigantic proportions of a network/corporation, but rather I'd like to know the best software for, say, a couple thousand customers per month.

  • Answer:

    The best ecommerce solution (at least for me) is Magento but is in written in php. I'haven't tried Spree but certainly is the best choice if you chose Ruby. If you are a coder or you have a great coder in your staff I suggest to start to write your own ecommerce solution… sometimes is less complicated start to write a simple platform that meets your needs that use a big solution where you use 10% of features.

Davide D'Agostino at Quora Visit the source

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I spent several hours testing out Spree and found a ton of positive attributes to report. I especially like the active user community and intuitive admin. The cart also integrates with several processors, including all the major players like PayPal and Braintree. Here's a review that goes into more details about general ease of use and features, in case it's helpful: http://www.merchantmaverick.com/shopping-cart-software-reviews/spree-commerce-review/

Sara Billups

We have built a Ruby on Rails e-commerce website using spree. I can state that it has a lot of things done right and can be easily customised and extended to tailor your needs. Depending on the taxonomy of your products and internal workflows. Especially Spree got some funding and released version 1.0 after several years of development. It has lot's of plugins (free, not as in magento) that can help you add functionality.

Alexey Vorobiev

A e-commerce platform may have a significative amount of custom code, mainly for the UI (importance of branding and style)I, and maybe for the business logic too. I guess Spree would be a solution in a full integration project approach. An alternative approach (slower to start but more flexible) could be to develop a custom Rail application and adding a e-commerce component to it. For example : http://www.piggybak.org/ http://ror-e.com/

Franck Gille

Our recommendation at Spark Solutions (http://sparksolutions.co/) is Spree Commerce! We've just finished what I think is the biggest RoR & implementation in the world - a multi-merchant with 3 million products from 50+ merchants, one checkout, one payment, multiple integrations - it took us a year and 8.5 thousand commits. In order to accomplish that we had do many custom modifications and still managed to achieve 3.16 out of 4 CodeClimate rank. That shows you the flexibility of Spree Commerce... If you have any questions, let me know.

Michal Faber

I've audited Spree, Ecwid, Shopify, Business Catalyst, Shop Locket. Spree is very good, but all of Spree's code is compiled and cannot be modularized. It makes scaling and customization very difficult (Good for single developer / single product). Ecwid gives you a lot of options UI customization WYSIWG and is easy to use, but their interface items are so poorly designed that I would not be able to get this platform through design review. Shopify is overly expensive. Business Catalyst lets you customize, but their templating system is very deep into the code and requires a system build out. I liked Shop Locket a lot, but they aren't taking any more customers. Anyone with a solution please post.

Yoonsun Lee

We at Crowd Interactive use Spree for several stores. We have found that Spree is flexible enough to be mold to our clients specs. At least you should worry less about 3rd party integrations and backend and focus on having a great UX for your clients. Recently we have found this other eCommerce platform written on Ruby but we haven't tried yet http://tryshoppe.com

Mario A Chavez

If you have the resources, I’d advise you to create your own e commerce platform from scratch because more often than not you will need to do extensive customization on a standard framework to suit your business needs.

Gideon Kitili

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