As Spree Commerce gains popularity, more and more companies are enlisting it to power their eCommerce offering. At Made we recommend Spree because of how well it scales, its flexibility, and the benefits it offers over paid solutions and other open source platforms.
**Spree can be tailored to any scenario**
When choosing Spree you have access to a wealth of official and community written Spree extensions. Furthermore, while they may require some integration work during development, your application will be able to take advantage of any gem available in the wider Ruby ecosystem.
All of this ensures your storefront can be as unique in its feature set as it is visually.
**Who is using Spree Commerce?**
Spree is powering the online storefronts for companies from a diverse range of retail sectors. In luxury food, it backs the storefront for Fortnum and Mason. In DIY, it ensures potential Dulux customers cannot only get inspiration for their new projects but can also purchase the paint necessary to do so. In fashion, it’s helping to sell clothing for Finery London and SHOWStudio. In home decor, Spree enables SurfaceView to sell bespoke wall covering from an extensive catalogue of prints, maps, and murals. And in sportswear, it’s helping to sell the unique On Running cloud running shoes.
And that is just a small snapshot, there are countless more.
**Do all the stores look the same?**
As you can see from the sites above, with a myriad of possibilities in terms of the features your software engineers can add to your application. The look and feel of any Spree Commerce storefront can be as flexible and unique as your business.
Since Spree Commerce version 3 both the user facing site and admin area have utilised the Bootstrap framework. Using Bootstrap alone opens the door to a lot of customisation options without even editing any HTML, just pick your colours and you’ll have an individual looking shop in next to no time.
However, if you do want a completely bespoke look, there’s a little more work involved. Fear not though, because Spree has thought of this too. Spree maintains a Ruby gem called Deface. Deface will easily override and customise any template in the Spree codebase – it will even work on a given extension. This allows you to really tailor every page to your needs, or the needs of your client, and when coupled with custom styling you’ll get a one of a kind storefront.
**tl;dr**
Spree is a great platform, and by using official and community extensions you can create highly customised storefronts that are as unique as your business requirements. The flexibility of Spree doesn’t end with the possible application features either. Making use of Deface the front end of the your storefront is completely configurable too.
So, a Spree storefront can be built to suit any client whatever their needs may be.
About the Author
Lead Software Engineer at Made Tech
