One of the first and vital decisions an e-commerce entrepreneur has to make is choosing the online shopping platform that will serve as a foundation for his ecommerce store. A shopping platform not only affects the look and layout of an online store but is also responsible for handling the backend functions of the website. Functions such as- inventory management, discount management, delivery tracking etc. In essence, the shopping platform manages your store operations, so choosing the right one is absolutely necessary.
In this write up we will compare Spree Commerce and Magento, two online shopping platforms with very different backgrounds. Magento is an online shopping platform owned and run by eBay Inc. while Spree Commerce is an open source platform developed by the collaboration of many contributors. This one factor results in a lot of differences in the nature of the product and defines the features and target customers of both platforms.
Magento is a large and feature rich shopping platform that has a reputation for being not very easy to in order understand. It performs complex functions such as unusual sales promotions and discounts (Buy two – get one free), multiple currency-location support and is generally suitable to manage operations from one or more larger online stores. With 30% of the online platform market, it is popular amongst large enterprises and it gears its services and prices towards this market. In other words it provides a wide variety of features and quick services at a considerable cost.
Spree Commerce could be said to be the opposite of Magento. It is an open source platform with over 400 contributors helping to develop it. The utilization of such a wide variety of experts results in a platform that is very well designed and very light. Like many open source softwares and products, it is geared for use by the small or medium sized enterprise. It is therefore priced accordingly. The downside is that it is missing a lot of the features that come with the larger Magento. However it is said that the Spree contributor’s community is rapidly growing and making well designed changes to the platform to make it compete with the features of Magento while at the same time keeping the platform light and responsive.
Having a large developer community is a tremendous advantage for Spree and would yield great dividends in the future. However, as of now it is Magento that can fulfil all your complex needs, if you are a large enterprise that needs multiple storefronts, constant trouble shooting and large scale global operations. If you are a smaller enterprise looking for a cost effective product, you might find a solution in Spree Commerce. cheap domain . Who knows, you may end up growing along with Spree to the point where you end up becoming a large online business and Spree ends up becoming a complex platform that challenges Magento on their turf. The Spree team certainly seems to be heading that way.