European Digital Sovereignty Starts with Your Open Source eCommerce Stack
Spree Commerce delivers the open-source, self-hosted, fully customizable eCommerce infrastructure European businesses need to achieve true digital sovereignty — with native multi-country, multi-language, and multi-currency capabilities purpose-built for pan-European commerce and the EU single market.
Europe’s eCommerce Infrastructure Has a Sovereignty Problem
The numbers tell a stark story: 97% of Europe’s cloud infrastructure market is dominated by non-European providers. Three US-based companies alone control 65% of European cloud services.
And if you’re running your eCommerce operation on a US-based SaaS platform, every customer record, every transaction, every behavioral data point flows through infrastructure governed by US law — not European law.
This isn’t a theoretical concern. GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the AI Act, NIS2, and the incoming Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) are all converging on a single message:
European businesses must control their own digital infrastructure. The Franco-German Berlin Declaration of November 2025 made it explicit — digital sovereignty means the ability to act autonomously and freely choose your own solutions.
Yet most European eCommerce operations are built on rented American land.
Your storefront runs on a platform headquartered in Ottawa or San Francisco. Your customer data sits in US data centers. Your product roadmap is gated by a vendor’s release cycle. Your costs scale with their pricing model, not your infrastructure needs.
And if geopolitical winds shift — as they demonstrably have — you have no fallback.
The question for European CTOs and engineering leaders is no longer whether digital sovereignty matters. It’s whether your eCommerce stack is architected to deliver it.
SaaS Platforms Are a Structural Dependency, Not Just a Vendor Choice
When a European business builds on a US-based SaaS eCommerce platform, it creates a dependency that goes far deeper than a software subscription. You’re not just buying a product — you’re accepting a set of constraints that compound over time.
Your data is governed by US jurisdiction. The CLOUD Act gives US authorities potential reach into data stored by US companies, regardless of where the servers sit. No amount of “EU data residency” marketing from a US-headquartered SaaS vendor changes the underlying legal reality.
Your compliance team knows this. Your DPO knows this. And increasingly, your customers and regulators know this too.
Your roadmap is governed by US priorities. SaaS platforms ship features their largest markets demand. European regulatory requirements — country-specific invoicing formats, VAT rules across 27 member states, accessibility standards, cookie consent frameworks — get addressed when they get addressed. Your business waits.
Your costs are governed by US pricing models. Platform fees tied to GMV mean you’re paying a revenue tax that compounds as you grow. At €10M in annual sales, that’s €250K–€350K per year in platform fees alone — capital flowing out of Europe into Silicon Valley.
This is the structural dependency the EU’s digital sovereignty agenda is designed to address. And your eCommerce stack is either part of the problem or part of the solution.
Open Source Is the Foundation of Digital Sovereignty
Digital sovereignty isn’t achieved by switching from one SaaS vendor to another. It’s achieved by owning your infrastructure.
And in eCommerce, that means building on open-source foundations where you control the code, the data, and the deployment.
Spree Commerce is a fully open-source, API-first eCommerce platform with over 13 years of active development and thousands of contributors.
But for this conversation, what matters isn’t the feature list — it’s the architectural implications for European sovereignty.
You own the code. Every line is auditable, modifiable, and forkable. No black boxes. No proprietary runtimes. No vendor-specific scripting languages. Your engineering team works with standard Ruby on Rails on the backend and any frontend framework via API — skills that exist abundantly in the European developer talent pool. If the project behind Spree disappeared tomorrow, you’d still have the complete source code and every customization your team ever built.
You own the data. Deploy on any European cloud provider — OVHcloud, Hetzner, Scaleway, Deutsche Telekom Cloud — or on-premise in your own data centers. Customer data, order data, payment tokens stay exactly where European law says they should: under European jurisdiction, on European infrastructure, governed by European data protection standards. Not because a US vendor pinky-promises “EU data residency,” but because you control the physical and legal reality of where your data lives.
You own the deployment. No forced updates that break customizations. No vendor deciding when your infrastructure scales or how your security patches get applied. Your team controls the release cycle, the security posture, and the infrastructure architecture. Self-hosting flexibility means deploying Spree anywhere — AWS Frankfurt, Azure Netherlands, GCP Belgium, or a sovereign European cloud provider that doesn’t exist yet but will by the time CADA takes effect.
Full Regulatory Adaptability Without Waiting for a Vendor Roadmap
Europe’s regulatory landscape is the most complex in the world — and it’s accelerating. GDPR, DSA, DMA, the Accessibility Act, ePrivacy, PSD2, country-specific invoicing mandates, VAT rules that differ across 27 member states. Each regulation demands specific technical implementation. Each new directive requires adaptation.
On a SaaS platform, every regulatory adaptation is a feature request. You submit a ticket, it enters a global prioritization queue, and you wait. If the regulation is uniquely European — and most of them are — it competes for roadmap space against features that serve the platform’s larger North American market. Your compliance timeline is no longer in your control.
With Spree, regulatory compliance is an engineering task, not a vendor negotiation. Your team implements country-specific invoicing directly. Your team builds the consent management framework your DPO requires.
Your team adapts checkout flows for PSD2 strong customer authentication. Your team implements the accessibility standards the European Accessibility Act mandates. No tickets. No waiting. No hoping the vendor agrees that your regulatory deadline matters.
The security-hardened architecture of Spree’s Enterprise Edition adds the enterprise-grade controls European compliance teams expect: AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS 1.2+ in transit, SSO via any SAML/OIDC provider, PCI DSS compliance with tokenized payments, role-based access control, and comprehensive audit logging. SOC 2 and ISO 27001 aligned — deployed on infrastructure your compliance team actually controls.
This isn’t just about meeting today’s regulations. It’s about having the architectural flexibility to meet tomorrow’s regulations without a re-platform. When the next directive lands — and in Europe, there’s always a next directive — your team adapts. That’s sovereignty in practice.
Pan-European Commerce Was Designed In, Not Bolted On
Here’s where the sovereignty argument meets the single market opportunity. Digital sovereignty doesn’t mean digital isolation. Europe’s strength is its single market — 450 million consumers across 27 countries, multiple languages, multiple currencies, unified by common trade rules.
The eCommerce platform that serves European sovereignty must also serve European commerce.
Spree was architected for exactly this scenario. Multi-region operations aren’t a premium add-on or a third-party plugin — they’re core to how the platform works.
Multi-currency from a single admin. Each store supports multiple currencies with ISO 4217 compliance. A German business selling into France, Spain, Poland, and Sweden manages EUR, PLN, and SEK from one dashboard. Currency conversion happens at catalog and checkout level. No middleware. No separate currency management system.
Multi-language without separate instances. Spree’s internationalization system supports localized content — product descriptions, taxon names, storefront UI — across any number of languages. A single product catalog serves customers in German, French, Italian, and Dutch. Each store defines its default locale and supported locales. Customers see a language selector automatically.
Multi-country with localized tax, shipping, and payments. Shipping zones, tax rules, and payment methods configure per country. VAT handling across the EU, country-specific payment preferences (iDEAL in the Netherlands, Bancontact in Belgium, Klarna across the Nordics), and region-specific shipping carriers — all managed centrally, executed locally.
This is what pan-European commerce infrastructure looks like: one platform, one team, one deployment — serving the full complexity of the European single market. Not 27 separate instances. Not a patchwork of plugins for each country. A single composable commerce architecture designed for the reality of European business.
One Architecture Serves Every European Business Model
European commerce isn’t just DTC. The single market creates opportunities that span business models — and the platform you choose determines whether you can pursue them without re-platforming.
Spree’s Enterprise Edition delivers three modules that transform a single infrastructure into a multi-model commerce platform:
Marketplace. Launch a multi-vendor marketplace alongside your existing operations. Vendors onboard automatically, products and orders sync bidirectionally, payments split via Stripe Connect, commissions manage themselves. One catalog, one checkout, one team. European marketplaces competing with Amazon and Zalando need infrastructure they control — not infrastructure controlled by the platforms they’re trying to compete against.
B2B eCommerce. Add wholesale and enterprise procurement alongside your consumer business. Customer-specific price lists, buyer organizations with approval workflows, gated storefronts — without a second platform or a second implementation. European manufacturing, industrial, and wholesale businesses operate in a regulatory environment that demands precise control over pricing, invoicing, and buyer relationships. A US SaaS platform’s B2B module was built for US B2B conventions. Your team builds for European ones.
Multi-tenant eCommerce. Run hundreds of independent branded storefronts on single shared infrastructure. Each tenant gets its own admin dashboard, product catalog, and branding. Franchise networks, white-label SaaS platforms, multi-brand enterprises — all on one deployment. For European retail groups operating across multiple countries and brands, this is the difference between managing one platform and managing dozens.
And because all three modules run on the same architecture, a European business can start with DTC, add a marketplace when the strategy evolves, layer in B2B when wholesale opportunities emerge, and expand to multi-tenant when franchising makes sense. No re-platforming. No new vendor evaluation. No migration project. The architecture was built for business model evolution.
The True Cost of Sovereignty Is Lower Than the Cost of Dependence
The honest trade-off: open source requires your team to own the deployment. There’s a setup investment. There’s infrastructure to manage. This isn’t a zero-effort proposition.
But compare that investment against the compounding cost of dependence. Platform fees at 2.5–3.5% of GMV. App marketplace subscriptions for capabilities that should be native. Revenue flowing to US vendors instead of European infrastructure investment.
Compliance risk from data jurisdiction uncertainty. Re-platforming costs when the SaaS vendor’s roadmap diverges from your regulatory requirements. Engineering talent demoralized by working within black-box constraints instead of building on code they understand.
For any European business with complexity beyond simple DTC — and in Europe, multi-country operations make even “simple” businesses complex — the crossover point comes fast.
Zero platform fees means your cost scales with infrastructure, not revenue. At €10M GMV, that’s the difference between €0 and €300K+ per year in platform fees alone. At €50M, the math becomes overwhelming.
This is capital that stays in Europe. Invested in European infrastructure. Employing European engineers. Building European technology capability. That’s what digital sovereignty looks like on a balance sheet.
The Platform You Choose Now Defines Europe’s Digital Future
The EU’s digital sovereignty agenda isn’t just policy — it’s an industrial strategy. And eCommerce is critical infrastructure for European business. The platform decisions European CTOs make today determine whether European commerce runs on European terms or American ones.
Spree Commerce offers European businesses something no US-based SaaS platform can: genuine infrastructure ownership.
Open-source code your team audits and extends. Self-hosted deployment on European infrastructure your compliance team controls. Native multi-country, multi-language, multi-currency capabilities built for the reality of the single market.
Enterprise modules — marketplace, B2B, multi-tenant — that support the full spectrum of European business models on one architecture. And the architectural flexibility to adapt to every regulation Europe’s lawmakers can produce, on your timeline, not a vendor’s.
This isn’t about nationalism or protectionism. It’s about making a strategic infrastructure decision that compounds in your favor — control, flexibility, cost efficiency, and regulatory compliance that improves with every year you own the stack instead of renting it.
Get started and see what sovereign eCommerce infrastructure looks like in practice — or talk to the team about your specific European commerce requirements.
