Note from Benoit Today we have a guest on the Pikka blog, Pierre-François from the Caféfrappé agency who will tell us about Sylius. We are indeed continuing our exploration of the E-commerce CMS ecosystem with a Sylius Expert who will tell us about it in detail.
Hello, I'm Pierre-François from Agence Caféfrappé , based in Le Mans, Nantes and Rennes. With Pikka, an agency specializing in Shopify, we decided to carry out a battle between 2 major E-commerce solutions, Sylius vs Shopify. Advantages and interest of each of the solutions, what are they worth to each other? Discover the answers to these questions through our two articles.
For my part, I will tell you about Sylius, the rising technology for the creation of e-commerce sites. To read the counterpart of this Shopify version match, go here on the Caféfrappé website and discover the article by Benoît from Agence Pikka.
At Caféfrappé, we put our development expertise at the service of complex and specific projects. When we started working on e-commerce issues, we chose a technology in line with the energy that drives us on a daily basis: responding to the challenges posed by our customers by offering innovative and personalized technological solutions. . This is why in 2021, we have chosen to become an official partner of Sylius and to develop all of our e-commerce sites using this framework.
Sylius, a meteoric rise
For Sylius, it all started in 2010, when Paweł Jędrzejewski wanted to create an e-commerce site for his mother and sister who had just started a small cosmetics business. He then shared some of his components with the Open Source community and this marks the beginning of a meteoric rise.
2014 marks the beginning of the generalization of this framework with the creation of a Sylius agency, in charge of developing applications on this Framework. In 2017, the Sylius agency became the publisher of Sylius for the whole world and the first stable version was released in 2017. Since 2017, Sylius has stopped with more than 3000 merchants in 2022 who have built their ecommerce site on a Sylius base .
Sylius, for whom? Why ?
Open source framework based on Symfony, Sylius has 5 major advantages for e-merchants:
A tailor-made e-commerce site
Sylius is designed to allow e-merchants to create a 100% personalized front office. No more theme or technology constraints, Sylius' headless approach completely dissociates the back office from the front office to allow you to create a unique customer experience and to have an e-commerce totally in your image.
An API First build
APIs are the basis of Sylius! You can simply and efficiently connect all your business tools. In addition, Sylius embeds all the tools to develop routines that will communicate with your commercial management software, stock management or other. From now on, you can manage your e-commerce from the outside and have total governance over your digital ecosystem.
Ready for PWAs and mobile apps !
Here again, Sylius' API first construction allows you to use your e-commerce back-office to feed and manage your Progressiv Web Apps, but also SPAs and all of your native applications. A single back-office for the web and applications, making your life easier.
Sylius, fast e-commerce !
Thanks to its minimalist and modular construction, Sylius only embeds the functionalities necessary for your project, thus allowing optimal performance. Similarly, you can trust the Symfony technical base to maintain a reliable, efficient and up-to-date solution. Sylius, don't get heavy with time!
Sylius, multi-everything e-commerce !
Here we are touching the Holy Grail of entrepreneurs. Have a solution that can adapt to almost all your current and future needs. Whether you want to set up a market place, a multi-lingual business with country-specific content or to have an ultra-specific payment tunnel, Sylius offers you customizable plugins that meet all of your problems, no matter how complex. be them.
To illustrate all the advantages of Sylius, I'm going to tell you about a great project carried out at the Agency.
Eurocave, or non-standardized international e-commerce.
When you are French and a world leader in the marketing of products as specific as Eurocave wine and champagne cellars, the choice of technology for your e-commerce site is not an easy task. After testing other e-commerce technologies, the Eurocave marketing team quickly realized that their business required a different technical approach from the current solutions on the market.
3 main issues guided Caféfrappé in the choice of Sylius to create this site.
1/ The need for an international site with very strong specificities in terms of content, products and price. To meet this specific need, Sylius' 100% headless approach seemed obvious. A single back-office to supply the various front offices enabled Caféfrappé to offer Eurocave real flexibility in terms of tree structures and the customer experience offered in the different country versions.
2 / A top-of-the-range image to enhance. Excellence and quality are the foundations of the Eurocave brand. With Sylius, Caféfrappé was able to develop a 100% personalized front and reflect the brand's values down to the smallest detail.
3/ A Eurocave wine cellar is more than just a product, it's part of the equipment in your home. Built-in or not, choice of size, colors, so many product specificities that a standardized catalog management could not have grasped. With the modularity and customization capacity of Sylius, Caféfrappé was able to design a product catalog 100% adapted to the issues of the Eurocave brand.
In summary, Eurocave, due to its business and its positioning, could only choose Sylius, which offers it real flexibility in the management of its internationalization and in the degree of customization that the brand wanted to meet its image objectives.
Sylius vs Shopify: The Match!
The main objective of these two solutions is the same: Provide a high-performance and secure e-commerce site, but each with a radically different approach. While Shopify is based on a turnkey approach allowing e-merchants to have a site quickly, Sylius bases its entire philosophy on tailor-made and personalization. From a technological point of view, same principle, Shopify embeds in its solution a set of functionalities designed to meet the majority of e-commerce needs. Sylius, for its part, is differentiated by its Use What You Need approach, allowing each advertiser to focus only on the really useful features.
Shopify strengths:
- Getting started and getting started quickly to have a high-performance tool as soon as possible
- An open SaaS (open-saas), export your data to wherever you want and have 18 APIs to connect your e-commerce to your business tools.
- The biggest e-commerce appstore in the world to answer most of your problems.
Sylius' strengths:
- The most advanced customization to have an e-commerce in your image down to the smallest detail.
- An ideal solution for creating a marketplace or responding to all the particularities of your business
- Easier and tailor-made management of promotions and customer returns, and many other features to deliver a one-of-a-kind customer experience.
Finally, one of the big differences between Shopify and Sylius is their business model. If Sylius requires development skills and therefore has a higher set-up cost, with Shopify you will have to pay a monthly subscription and a commission on each sale made.
To conclude, Sylius & Shopify are two particularly interesting solutions for the creation and operation of an e-commerce site. Each of these solutions meets different needs and projects. Before choosing one or the other solution, it is therefore essential to ask yourself the right questions. Go ahead and ask your agency to recommend the best solution for your project.
At Caféfrappé, we will be happy to direct you to Pikka to create Shopify according to the rules of the art and to support you if Sylius seems to be the solution most likely to suit you.
