Sylius eCommerce Platform — Why Choose It?

Open-source eCommerce platforms

An open-source eCommerce platform comes into the game when a free and easily adaptable solution is required. The open-source powers you with the flexibility of extending or overriding out-of-the-box features, following the needs of your business and your customers. A good open-source product usually has a strong community of developers, which provides proactive and enthusiastic support to both the product and the additional bundles you can install on top of it.

What is Sylius?

Sylius is an open-source eCommerce platform based on the popular Symfony PHP framework, and published under the flexible MIT license. It’s a modular application supporting headless, API-first concepts. Sylius can be integrated with every aspect of your eCommerce environment. Furthermore, thanks to the decoupled architecture, you only use the bundles you need, without accumulating obsolete code. There is well-detailed documentation, which can give you a good start with the platform. The platform is developed and maintained by a dedicated team. A large community of developers has formed around the product, who are there to help if you have any questions. Sylius comes with all the out-of-the-box features a modern online store should have: a product catalog (with taxons, product variants, options and attributes), a cart and checkout, and order and delivery management to name a few. However, one of the major benefits of Sylius is the architecture that allows it to override every single feature without the risk of losing the changes with the platform’s new version’s installation. High coding standards make the Sylius platform fast and capable of handling heavy traffic.

Who is the Sylius platform for?

The Sylius platform is suitable for eCommerce solutions for medium and large companies looking for a flexible and easily customizable platform. One of the main principles of Sylius development is to make the solution lightweight, unlike other popular eCommerce platforms on the market. The Sylius platform’s standard feature set can meet up to 80% of your eCommerce needs, and the remaining 20% is integration and customization to your unique business needs. If you need and work with different inventory sources on multiple devices, then Sylius is the best solution.

What special attributes does the Sylius platform have?

Sylius comes with great performance already out-of-the-box, so you don’t have to waste time on tuning it up. The headless architecture opens up many possibilities for integrating various frontend clients and applications (ERP, CMS, CRM). Thanks to the Symfony framework the platform has great scalability for further growth.

Is Sylius free?

The platform offers users two options: Standard and Plus. Standard is the free version, which uses an open-source MIT license. The free version allows you to create a fully working online store with useful features for customers.

Sylius: Standard version vs. Plus version

Why choose Sylius?

Great possibilities

Sylius brings multifunctionality to any eCommerce business. You'll be able to work with multiple inventory sources, integrate solutions on any digital device, and work with different countries and currencies.

Support for different business models

The Sylius platform offers flexible and reliable solutions that can be used for any eCommerce business — B2B, B2C or multi-vendor marketplace.

Best-in-class technology

Sylius is at the top of the food chain. Symfony is an enterprise-level framework with many proven free and commercial bundles on the market, which work seamlessly with many developers specifically to extend the features of Sylius. You can use best-in-class technology to integrate software or customize marketing solutions.

Customized store

Most out-of-the-box eCommerce solutions may limit your ability to extend existing features due to their legacy monolithic architecture. With Sylius you have complete control over the online store and its processes. Adding a custom product configurator or developing a unique checkout path? Sylius has the solutions to both.

Platform API

Looking to develop a mobile application for an online store, or share the online store data with company CRM? Look no further! The platform API is the key to establishing communication between Sylius and any other application or platform.

Scaling and hosting

Thanks to the Symfony PHP framework you can easily scale a Sylius online store with almost any cloud hosting provider. Adding a CDN, storing product images on cloud storage or handling visitors sessions across multiple instances — Symfony has a solution for every challenge a modern internet solution could meet. In partnership with cloud services, provided by market leaders like Amazon or Digital Ocean, you can build a real bullet-proof solution that could scale and downgrade automatically, based on your visitors’ activity.

Support for different payment systems

With Sylius you have a payment processor at no extra cost. The platform offers ready-made interfaces for common payment gateways.

Created for both developers and end-users

The Sylius platform has the highest quality code thanks to following SOLID principles and extensive testing setup, to provide a reliable development environment and backward compatibility. Online store owners can benefit from a user-friendly admin dashboard and great out-of-the-box performance.

Release cycle

Minor updates are offered every few months with a strong Backward Compatibility (BC) promise.

Community

Sylius has a large support community. The Sylius channel in Slack gathers developers and product owners who are already working with the platform and are ready to offer help and support. You can become part of the Sylius family and share your experience with others.

Other great things about Sylius:

Evolution instead of revolution

The Sylius platform grows along with the business. With continual development, you can't change the platform every few years. Sylius solutions provide high standards of service and quality for better results.

Headless

Headless means freedom. Freedom to choose the framework for building a storefront or a mobile application.

Open source for freedom of creativity

Access to the source code and comprehensive product documentation helps developers better understand the platform.

No geographical restrictions for eCommerce

The internet is your only border. Built-in support of multiple zones with their own taxation and delivery rules and currencies lets you expand your business worldwide with a click of a mouse.

Sylius standards

The highest coding standards adopted by the Sylius team set the bar high for other developers who want to contribute to the development of Sylius features.

Ecosystem

The Sylius ecosystem is evolving fast thanks to the developers who constantly introduce new plugins to extend Sylius features.

One more thing about Sylius

Three things that make up Sylius

1. Symfony framework. A powerful set of decoupled libraries for PHP applications.
2. A complete eCommerce platform. Ready-made components for smooth eCommerce deployment of any size. You can create your own eCommerce shop based on Sylius, using Symfony and the many modules available.
3. Free. The open-source version comes free, which means you don't need to invest a lot of money to start your online shop.

TOP Sylius Benefits

1. Highly customizable
   eCommerce shop will be fully customized to your needs

2. Top quality
   Ested by many developers on many deployments

3. Performance
   Sylius offers great performance out-of-the-box

4. Easily Integrated
   Sylius integrates seamlessly with other apps and programs

5. Symfony
   Powerful and robust PHP framework

6. Omnichannel
   Sylius offers solutions to enable you to offer great user experience in different channels and on different devices

7. Headless
   Sylius offers enhanced REST API features

8. One backend
   You can manage all your shops from a single point

What Business is Right for Sylius?

For B2B

Thanks to additional plugins, Sylius can easily be turned into an eCommerce platform for the B2B sector. Special bundles offer excellent business solutions when dealing with distributors or manufacturers. The platform takes into account the flexibility and scalability of your business operations. The main advantages of Sylius for B2B are:

• Flexible payment options
• It integrates easily with any external system
• Powerful order management
• Customized solutions for highly specialized businesses

For B2C

Sylius offers excellent opportunities for scaling your business. The platform's professional features will help you create a unique user experience and avoid customer hold and cart abandonment. Sylius will help you to set up several sales channels for effective growth. The main advantages of Sylius for B2C are:

• Convenient marketing solutions to create a better user experience
• Ability to use social media as additional sales channels
• Ability to create an architecture for fast checkout
• Use of different methods for payment and delivery of goods
• The omnichannel nature of the platform allows you to create solutions for different digital devices to deliver content
• Personalisation that will provide users with a better experience with your eCommerce

For multi-vendor marketplaces

Marketplaces are growing every year. Solutions for multichannel marketplaces include a variety of tasks: from delivery to user experience. Sylius offers open-source code and tools allowing you to create unique solutions for your customers. The Sylius platform helps you cover all the features you need for your business model.

Sylius plugins

Platform developers offer more than 80 plugins in the Sylius Store. Most are free, and six are open-source. Here are some of the open-source plugins. Don't forget that for open-source plugins you can add your own personal enhancements, and make changes that will work individually.

• Elasticsearch
  A handy plugin that helps offload resources by providing the store with a search engine. The same plugin helps you develop filters for product categories.

• Analytics and Facebook Tracking
  Plugins for tracking analytics and traffic from social networks.

• Invoicing Plugin
  A plugin that creates invoices that can be downloaded.

• CMS
  An extension that helps create subpages and enhance the homepage of your e-shop.

Conclusion

We have collected the main advantages of the Sylius platform. It is important to note that Sylius is not just a flexible and convenient solution for your eCommerce, but also a smart allocation of your company's power. With Sylius, you don't have to be entangled with unnecessary complex technical platforms and imposed offers. You can distribute funds wisely and not overpay for tools and services that do not help your eCommerce business to grow.