Presented at the Open Commerce Conference on June 28-29, 2016 in New York City

2. Yours Truly
Damian Legawiec
Spree Core Team Lead
Spark Solutions CEO & CTO
Mike Faber
Spree Evangelist
Spark Solutions COO

3. Agenda
● The Past
○ Spree born in 2008 to empower the world’s sellers
○ Spree since then - projects, community, extensions
○ Evolution of Ecommerce solutions landscape 2008-2016
● The Present
○ What Ecommerce Architects and Developers say about Spree?
○ Why and when use Spree?
○ Spree Core Team & Community
● The Future
○ Vision: Spree as a lightweight Ecommerce Framework for complex and demanding projects
○ Spree 3.1, 3.2 and further dev roadmap
○ Support & community

4. The Past

5. Spree born in 2008 to empower the world’s sellers
Spree began as an open source ecommerce platform in 2008
● Mission: to empower the world’s sellers
● Success due to:
○ Robust tech stack including Ruby on Rails
○ Modular, extensible, API based platform
○ Enabling easy customization and integration
○ Allowing for short time-to-market
○ Vibrant international developer community
● Spree-based success stories speak for themselves

6. Spree since then - projects, community, extensions
Success:
● Thousands of stores around the
world running on Spree
● Involved dev community
● Galaxy of extensions
● Multiple forks
Challenges:
● Migration paths between versions
● New functionality requirements
● Performance & optimization
● Customer front end customization

7. Evolution of Ecommerce solutions landscape ‘08-’16
● Ruby on Rails vs. PHP open source solutions
○ Spree
○ Magento, WooCommerce, CS-Cart, Presta Shop and others
● SaaS Ecommerce platforms
○ Shopify for SMB
○ DemandWare for Enterprise
● Enterprise solutions
○ IBM WebSphere Commerce
○ SAP Hybris
○ Oracle ATG

8. Evolution of Ecommerce solutions landscape ‘08-’16
20 Ecommerce solutions comparison criteria
● Solution type
● Deployment time
● Deployment & maintenance cost
● Functionality out of the box
● Functional extensibility
● Frontend customer experience
● Reporting & analytics support
● Consumer engagement
● Payment methods support
● Storefront admin panel functionality
● Devs & admin onboarding cost
● Architectural flexibility
● Scalability & its cost efficiency
● Performance & availability
● Internal & 3rd party integrations
● Devops best practice support
● Transparency & monitoring
● Regulatory compliance
● Security & business continuity
● Seo & social media support

9. The Present

10. What store owners / developers say about Spree?
● flexible Ecommerce FRAMEWORK
● with an EXTENSIBLE lean core
● for SCALABLE solutions which are...
● ...MODULAR, open standards based
● easy to INTEGRATE through APIs
● and CUSTOMIZABLE for a great customer experience
● with a relatively SHORT TIME-TO-MARKET
● and a very COMPETITIVE COSTS structure for deployment & maintenance

11. Why and when use Spree?
● build the exact storefront you want quickly
● automate your business by integrating 3rd party solutions
● relatively easily maintain your solutions and integrations
● onboard new developers or transfer your project easily (no humans harmed)
● follow your business evolution with custom software development
● scale up at a lower cost than with SaaS or Enterprise solutions
● control every aspect of the platform, including your unique CX
● use lightweight and battle-proven technology - keep it short and simple

12. Spree Core Team & Community
● Core Team
○ Experienced Spree developers maintaining multiple Spree-based stores
○ Looking for new Core Team members! Talk to us at slack.spreecommerce.com
● Contributors
○ All-star developers from all around the world
○ Agencies and Dev shops contributing back to the community
● Supporters
○ Braintree & Go Daddy
○ Rise New York
○ Influencers, media & bloggers, tech community organizations
● Users
○ Retailers and online businesses
○ Their staff - admins, customer service

13. The Future
Spree as a lightweight Ecommerce Framework for
complex and demanding projects

14. Spree as a lightweight Ecommerce Framework
● A set of Ecommerce building blocks for the exact storefront that you want
● For demanding, highly custom projects and complex integrations
● It’s built by developers for developers for flexibility, extensibility, scalability
● So you will need to deal with developers and technical stuff
● It’s cheaper than enterprise class solutions, delivers rich functionality,
enables innovation, great UX/CX and relatively short time-to-market
If you just need a typical SMB, non-custom Ecommerce solution without any
complex integrations you’d probably be better off with a SaaS solution.

15. Spree 3.1
● over 1,2k commits
● New features like Store Credits, Versioned API, prices depending on zone
for VAT countries, product discontinuation, RWD notification emails
● Revamped and improved Admin Panel
● Improved automatic test suite
● Overall performance improvements and massive amount of bug fixes
● Easy upgrade from 3.0

16. ● Rails 5 compatible
● Faster & leaner
● Mobile-ready Admin Panel
● Higher-quality and smaller codebase through massive refactorings on all
fronts
● New features like bulk Promo Code generator, multiple Shipping
Addresses per Order, Product Tagging
Spree 3.2

17. Spree Future
● API driven
● Smaller, more modular core
● Decoupled customer frontend so you can use native mobile apps or custom
javascript frontend
● More frequent, smaller releases leading to 4.0
● Easy migration path and continuous support for stores running 3.x versions

18. Support & community
How we as the Core Team & Community can help you:
● share advice and point you in the right direction
○ Slack: http://slack.spreecommerce.com
○ Google Groups: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/spree-user
● Resolve your issues at GitHub: https://github.com/spree/spree/issues
How you may help to make Spree better:
● submit PRs for GitHub issues or contribute your code back to the community
● maintain an existing extension you like or create a new one
● join the Core Team or the Contributor community and share the spotlight

19. twitter.com/opencommerce_
www.facebook.com/opencommerceconference/
slack.spreecommerce.com
github.com/spree/spree