Shopify vs Spree Commerce: What To Choose in 2018?
If you find yourself reading this article, you’re probably interested in the magical world of e-commerce. Perhaps you have your own business and now you’re thinking of how to move it to the internet. And this is a great idea! The Internet has never played a more important role in our life and e-commerce has made our life so much simpler.
What are the reasons for shopping online? First of all, there are NO CROWDS. This means you won’t have to bustle through a crowd trying to grab the last pair of shoes. All you need to do is just open your laptop from wherever you are.
The e-commerce industry is quickly rising from year to year. Just take a look at these insane numbers.
Nevertheless, before making your business digital and moving it online, you’ll have to make an important decision. You need to choose the right e-commerce platform for your future online store.
In this article, we’ll take a look at two e-commerce giants: Spree Commerce and Shopify.
The first thing you should understand, is that Spree Commerce is a platform, while Shopify is an e-commerce solution. This means that if you decide to choose Spree, you’ll be the sole owner of your e-commerce store. On the other hand, a store built with Shopify will be managed and hosted by Shopify itself. Let’s look at them more closely.
Spree Commerce
Spree Commerce is an open-source platform for building e-commerce websites, which was created by Sean Schofield in 2007. It was built for Ruby on Rails and is available via Github. There are a few gems maintained in a single repository and meant to work together to provide a fully-functional e-commerce platform.
Since this platform is written for the Ruby on Rails framework, this makes it the best choice for developing super-fast, light, and good-looking websites. Another feature is the possibility to configure, replace, or add any functionality you want.
On the other hand, you should have a technical background. As for example, you’ll have to install and maintain this system manually. This means you may need to hire a team of skilled developers.
Again, since it’s open-source, all the code is 100% free and available to use. Besides, Spree has a huge community of developers. And these guys keep improving the code and making it more usable.
By the way, did you know that we also contributed to E-commerce? Our developers made beautiful gems that can make your E-commerce business stand out among the average looking ones.
We have extensive experience in working with Spree Commerce platform. That’s why we know this technology inside and backwards. Let us tell you about a few ideas that we successfully implemented using this platform.
The first one is a website for a premium delivery service with a restaurant-like dining experience. To be honest, we’re great fans of ordering food. That’s why we put some heart into this project and built a beautiful website, which offers a plethora of chef-made meals right to your door.
Another project we made is related to the beauty industry. It’s known like trèStiQue and the task we needed to implement required both technical and marketing trends/realities. To get a full picture of the project, take a look at our case study.
The last but not the least is a unique web application aimed to protect your privacy online. The system allows you to find out whether your personal data is compromised and exposed on the Dark Web.
Now you can see what this technology is capable of (in the right hands, of course).
Shopify
Shopify is a cloud-based platform, which was founded in 2004 by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake. At first, they wanted to open an online store for snowboarding equipment. However, they became disappointed with the existing (at that point in time) e-commerce solutions and decided to develop their own. Tobias Lütke worked with the open source web application framework Ruby on Rails for developing their online store.
Shopify uses its own programming language, which is known as Liquid. It’s a Ruby-based template language used together with CSS and HTML. It looks like a plugin or app looking platform, where you can fully customize your website.
For example, this allows us to fulfill in life Nucleus: an offline gallery-store that sells pieces of arts. They contacted us and asked to build a full-fledged representation of their store. And that’s what we have here:
Now when we have an idea of both platforms, let’s take a look at both the strong and weak sides of these technologies. Allow us to start with Shopify.
Shopify: Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Shopify has various great looking professional themes that will make your shop look great. You will agree that a well-looking website is crucial for any business (of course, if you want to engage your potential clients and help them choose your services).
- 24/7 Support. Did you meet some challenges while working with Shopify or just want to ask a few questions? There’re a lot of ways how you can do it, such as online live chat, email or phone. When it comes to business, every second counts. Shopify can support your business anytime. They even provide you with five international phone numbers, so you can choose the one that fits your region.
Cons:
- If you want to make a big customization of your theme, you’ll have to know how to code in Liquid. Remember, we already mentioned that Shopify uses its own language, which is known as Liquid. So if you want to make some modifications, you’ll need to hire a programmer who knows Liquid, who will be more expensive comparing with a usual developer.
- Transaction fee for every sale. Apart from paying a monthly service fee, Shopify customers will have to pay 0.5% — 2% transaction fee for their plans. However, you can remove all the transaction fees by using Shopify Payments. There are several scenarios: you may pay 2% if you’re using the “Basic Shopify,” 1% if you’re using the “Shopify” and half a percent if you’re using the “Advanced Shopify.”
Spree Commerce: Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Spree Commerce is absolutely free open source project. Basically, this means that you won’t have to pay for any license or give away a percent of your revenue. All you need to do is just download it and start using!
- It has a variety of cool features that can allow you to improve the performance of your store, including meta-descriptions of products, keywords targeting, permalinks and so on.
- Spree Commerce is built on the Ruby on Rails framework, which is considered as elegant, modern, and fast programming solution. Put simply, this can save you much time, efforts, and resources for implementing your idea.
Cons:
- Spree is a considerably young platform. Since its codebase is often being changed, you may need time to keep it up-to-date. Of course, these updates are not obligatory, though they may contain valuable bug fixes.
- Sometimes, some functionality, you could find common, may require some custom development. Again, this may happen as Spree Commerce is a relatively young platform (if we compare it with Shopify).
- To start working with this platform, you need to have a deep understanding of working with Ruby on Rails/CSS/HTML. Otherwise, you’ll have to hire a team of skillful developers.
The Bottom Line
In this episode, we only opened up a door into the E-commerce world. Nevertheless, there’s always be a controversy between resources, simplicity, and functionality of this technologies.
Before making a final choice, compare all the pros and cons. Be honest with yourself and answer the question: “Will my technical skills and capabilities will be enough to use this technology for implementing my idea?”
Summing up, Spree Commerce will be the right choice if:
- You want an easy optimization of your shop’s performance;
- You’re going to customize your shop in various ways;
- You like Ruby on Rails and a rapid upgrading of your online store;
On the other hand, Shopify is a “must need” if:
- You don’t want to deep into the details as well as learn any technical details of your eCommerce platform;
- You want to sign up and launch your store as soon as possible;
- You want to get a beautiful theme for your website.
Remember, whatever you choose, we’ll always support your choice. Both technologies are great in their own way and allow you to build a beautiful website. We in turn will make sure that your idea was implemented as good as possible.
