CUSTOMER FACING FEATURES
User Shopping Experience
Beautiful decoupled storefront
Spree may be easily customized with an on-brand, custom storefront built in React, Angular or Vue, as a separate app speaking to the backend engine using REST API V2.
Native mobile apps
Spree may very well serve as an Ecommerce engine and admin dashboard for native mobile apps on iOS or Android, talking to them using modern Storefront REST API V2.
Mobile First Experience
RWD
Spree uses Bootstrap, a responsive, mobile-first component library for quick prototyping with prebuilt components and powerful plugins. Bootstrap 4 support coming soon!
PWA
Spree works well with a custom, progressive frontend – blazing fast, app-like storefront, always up to date, working even with a very poor mobile connection or offline.
Re-usable components
With the right approach you may be able to simplify development and maintenance of your web store and online apps by using the same components. Such a time saver!
Site search and guided shopping
Blazing fast search
Spree combined with Elasticsearch, a powerful search engine, provides amazing user experiences at “ludicrously awesome speeds” even with millions of SKUs.
Suggested search results
Upsell easily by suggesting products with images matching a search phrase, while the user is still typing it. Elasticsearch keeps your users exploring brands or categories.
Quick product listings
Allow your users to sort or filter product listings with Elasticsearch within milliseconds. Even with tens of products those pages will load within a blink of an eye. On mobile.
Experience Personalization
Product recommendations
Suggest products matching individual user’s interests. Go for simple Spree recommended products or apply advanced analytics and machine learning with 3rd parties.
Personal relevance
Fine-tune product listings or search results to surface items with healthy profit margins or display products relevant for an individual user based on their shopping history.
Wishlists
Monetize the power of wishlists. Send out promo offers for wishlist products, alert users about products coming back in stock or share wishlists with other users for gift shopping.
Product Personalization
Gift packaging
Allow users to add gift packaging, a personal note and a recipient shipping address to turn a regular order into a personal gift. Promote it before holidays and special occasions.
Name or initials
Allow your users to personalize their orders with their name or initials to make them special and… personal. Gifts also go very well with recipient’s initials.
Photos
Pull users’ photos from Instagram or Facebook to place them on your products and make them a bit more personal. Allow image manipulation and final preview before fulfillment.
Payment Methods
Credit & debit cards
Spree accepts all major cards through one of the 144 supported payment gateways. Spree stores only the card type, expiration date, name and last 4 digits for PCI compliance.
Country-specific payments
Spree supports local, country-specific payment methods in over a hundred countries. Review a country list supported by Active Merchant, a Shopify library used also by Spree.
Instalment payments
Spree combined with Afterpay allow sellers to offer instalment plans for online shoppers, allowing a purchase to be paid for in four equal amounts, due every 2 weeks.
Fast Checkout Support
PayPal Express Checkout
With Express Checkout, the buyer checks out and pays without entering any shipping or billing info because PayPal provides the stored information, expediting checkout.
Apple Pay
Apple Pay allows users of iOS apps, watchOS apps and websites in Safari to quickly and securely checkout without even providing their payment, shipping, and contact information.
Amazon Pay
Amazon Pay‘s checkout streamlines the whole process for buyers with existing Amazon accounts and can help increase conversions & lower cart abandonments.
Subscriptions Support
Spree subscriptions
Built in Spree subscriptions allow to set subscription period, but also skip charge and delivery when needed. All the settings are available to both the user and store admin.
3rd party subscriptions
Spree works well with 3rd party subscription solutions, such as Chargebee, allowing to laverage multiple pricing plans, trial period, pro rating and many other functionalities.
Membership sales
Spree allows to create Amazon-Prime-like experiences, granting members access to discounts, free shipping, priority customer support and other privileges.
User Convenience
Expedited shipping
Spree allows to split an order into multiple shipments. If some items go out of stock, only the in-stock items will be shipped immediately, while the others will be backordered.
Returns
If a customer finds the item they ordered doesn’t fit or was damaged in shipping, a store admin may issue RMAs (Return Merchandise Authorization) and process their return.
Refund or exchange
While processing an RMA a store admin selects a reimbursement to refund a user, once the items are returned and approved, or an exchange to ship a new item to the customer.
OMNI CHANNEL & INTERNATIONAL FEATURES
Omnichannel Capabilities
Online sales
Spree is a fully featured online store allowing to run multiple storefronts from a single admin dashboard, supporting multiple stock locations for omni-channel sales.
Wholesale
Go big with a wholesale business model with your online store. Manage stock by moving it between stock locations to optimize fulfillment. Negotiate payment terms for B2B clients.
Retail
Sync product catalog, inventory and orders between Spree and retail stores. Optimize shipping by moving inventory in bulk from one stock location to another.
Call center
Support incoming customer requests or outgoing campaigns with a store dashboard, so the agents may place orders, adjust line items, apply discounts, process refunds or exchanges.
Mobile apps
Connect your native mobile apps to the Spree backend holding a central product catalog, inventory levels, but also users’ carts and order history for a seamless shopping experience.
VIP guided sales
Service your VIP clients by guiding them, even screen sharing while exploring the product catalog, placing orders on their behalf, handling their returns, reimbursements, exchanges.
International Sales Capabilities
Multiple storefronts
Use Spree to run and manage multiple country experiences with local translations, product catalogs, pricing, currencies, payment methods, tax calculators, shipping methods.
Fixed or dynamic pricing
Pre-set prices per each country or run a dynamic currency exchange to mitigate exchange rate exposures. Adjust pricing per each country to optimize for a local market fit.
Translations
Allow users to use a country picker and switch to their native language translation. Spree supports both Left to Right and Right to Left orientations allowing you to truly go global.
MARKETING FEATURES
Content & Campaigns Management
Spree CMS
Spree comes with a simple content management, which may be fitted with any popular WYSIWYG editor, to edit homepage elements, editorial product listings or T&Cs.
WordPress integration
Keep the familiar WordPress dashboard, let users add to cart from blog posts, display cart, enable checkout, enrich product listings with editorials. Spree and WP under one domain.
Headless CMS
Combine a headless CMS you fancy, with a complex publishing workflow and a custom Spree frontend blending content and commerce on both desktop and mobile.
Marketing & Merchandising Support
A/B testing
Forget trial and error. Experiment and streamline your shopping experience to get those mobile and desktop conversions up. Use Optimizely, Google Optimize, Crazy Egg.
Big data
Make your marketing data-driven and keep optimizing your business. Use Segment.com to gather user-focused data, store it, mine it, visualize it, understand and act on it.
Analytics
Sales reports
Use Spree Reports to see what your orders’ item total, adjustment total, and sales total was for a selected period of time, for each currency you accept. Slice it anyway you want.
Analytics dashboards
Explore your business metrics on mobile or visualize it on desktop. Use Spree with KISSmetrics, Mixpanel to track your KPIs and make informed, data-driven decisions.
Social Media Integrations
Social login
Allow your users to sign up and sign in to your store with Facebook, Google, Twitter, Linkedin. Spree handles authorization, account creation and association.
Social sharing
Spree allows you to leverage Facebook Open Graph protocol to enrich product pages and allow effective social sharing. Decide what you want to show: a title, description, an image.
Facebook integrations
Facebook (with Instagram) is a key marketing platform, so why not go all in with Facebook Pixel, Facebook Ecommerce Catalog or Klaviyo segmentation and automation.
Community & Social Ecommerce
Client reviews
Engage your user base with Spree product review and rating functionality or connect 3rd party engines, such as Yotpo, to then display customer content at key conversion points.
Live chat
Introduce some human touch allowing users to contact your customer staff, chat with them, log all conversations, create self-service knowledge base, track chat metrics.
Promotions & Rewards
Promotions
Spree promotions functionality allows you to offer coupons and discount to your site’s users, based on the conditions you choose. Configure Rules and Actions to rule them all.
Store credits
Reward or appreciate your users by granting them Store Credits, a virtual currency of your store. Users will be able to use it to make partial or full payments on checkout.
Gift cards
Dress up Store Credits as Gift Cards and hand them out to your users. Or allow users to purchase gift cards as regular products – either digital (by email) or physical (regular shipping).
Upselling
Product collections
Group products by an underlying theme, such as an upcoming season or a dress code, traversing product categories. Organize matching products in a list for easy browsing.
Product bundles
Bundle a small number of products which go well together for easy add to cart action. Suggest which tie goes well a shirt and a jacket, slap your seal of approval on it.
Multipacks
Suggest purchasing multiple containers, quantity bigger than one for a particular product (line item), for user’s convenience, to save them the trouble of running out too soon.
SEO Support
Basic SEO
Spree makes sure to yield relevant, meaningful URLs, infuse product pages with keywords, use clean and mobile-friendly code, which search engine appreciate.
Advanced SEO
Spree supports Schema.org microformats, up to date sitemaps, let’s you optimize for speed with full page or fragment caching, host static assets on S3, use a CDN, use lazy loading.
Unique content
There’s no SEO silver bullet, but what sure matters is unique editorial content blended with products and user generated content, such as client reviews. Social reputation helps.
BACK OFFICE FEATURES
Customer Management & Support
Customer data & history
As an Admin you can create users, set their roles, edit and delete them. Review their personal data, address book, orders, items or store credit balance.
Helpdesk integration
Integrate Spree with any customer support or CRM solution. Connect support tickets to products, orders, shipments, payments, refunds, reimbursements, user accounts.
Customer self-service
While answering customer support questions, build a searchable FAQ knowledge base to allow customer self-service. Nothing beats response time of an FAQ list.
Product Catalog Management
Product management
Spree features a robust product interface for designing a product catalog which may be later explored, searched, filtered, sorted for superior SEO, UX and sales results.
Category management
Define as many separate category trees as needed. Empower users to browse and filter products in multiple currencies, languages, wholesale or retail groups.
Contextual commerce
Create a unified taxonomy structure for all types of content, such as articles, multimedia, shoppable products, to present them contextually in order to drive traffic and sales.
Inventory Management
Stock tracking
Spree gives you a great deal of leverage in managing inventory across sales channels and locations. Track stock movements, receive stock, make stock transfers, optimize!
Source of truth
Spree automates tracking stock changes and integrates well with other sales channels or locations, so it may very well serve as the inventory source of truth for other systems.
RMA support
Sales process is never linear, so Spree tracks inventory while processing returns and exchanges, allowing reimbursements only upon product receipt and approval.
Taxation Management
Tax configuration
Spree features a robust taxation engine with Tax Categories, Zones and Rates integrated with shipping calculators, order adjustments, with various user presentation settings.
Multiple tax regimes
Spree not only supports various types of taxes for product categories, but also various tax calculations for all the zones and jurisdictions (US, CA, EU) your multiple storefronts operate in.
Avalara AvaTax
AvaTax delivers zip code based real-time rates directly to Spree at the moment of purchase for 12,000+ U.S. tax jurisdictions. It’s critical for the shopping UX to get it right.
Shipping Management
Shipping methods
Define as many Shipping Methods as needed, per each geo Zone, in compliance with pre-set Shipping Categories, utilizing robust Spree Shipping Calculators for a great checkout UX.
Shipping costs
If you need to fetch shipping costs in real time from one of the shipping carriers, while a customer is checking out, integrate Spree with Shippo, ShipWire or ShipStation.
Tracking shipments
Providing a tracking URL to a user is a must for any shipping method. Use Spree to track packages from any Stock Location or use a 3rd party for improved, detailed tracking.
Order Management
Managing orders
Spree empowers admins to search, review and manipulate customer orders – processing payments, issuing refunds, confirming shipments, applying adjustments.
Processing payments
Spree admin dashboard surfaces payment states and risk flags for each payment made through every payment method. Make informed decisions and expedite orders.
Processing shipments
Spree let’s you control each factor affecting the shipping process, both globally or for each order: shipping structure, shipping states, split shipments, special shipping treatment.
DEVELOPMENT CAPABILITIES
Flexibility
Developers in control
Most business owners will not be satisfied with the generic templates and functionality. Spree is flexible enough to accommodate most needs, but offers devs full control. It’s open source!
Time saver
Spree is a production ready store, but it is also a developer framework to be used as a solid foundation for a more sophisticated application. Either way, time saved!
Ruby on Rails FTW
Spree is built with Ruby on Rails, which simplifies repetitive developer tasks and greatly speeds up delivery. Airbnb, Kickstarter, Linkedin, Shopify, Zendesk are all built on Rails.
Extensibility
Official extensions
Spree offers a collection of officially maintained and developed extensions which provide additional, optional functionality, while keeping the Spree Core simple and lean.
Extend on your own
Keep your code simple and beautiful. Extensions are a convenient way for organizing and isolating discrete chunks of functionality or sharing reusable code with one another.
3rd party integrations
Using industry leading 3rd party solutions not only saves time to market, but also let’s you focus your efforts on the Ecommerce core business and optimizing your platform.
Microservices & Integration Support
REST API V1
Spree REST API V1 is designed to give developers a convenient way to access data within Spree. It makes it easy for Spree to talk to the rest of Ecommerce ecosystem.
REST API V2
New Spree Storefront API v2 is based on JSON API spec and uses blazing fast Netflix fast_json_api serializer library. Check it out on Github and new Spree Guides.
GraphQL
We will continue to work on REST API in the form of the Platform API but alongside that effort, we would like to include GraphQL support for the Storefront part.
Cloud Readiness
Spree on Heroku
Heroku is a container-based, auto-scaling cloud platform, with a powerful ecosystem of dev tools for deploying and running modern apps. Spree ♥ Heroku. And S3, too!
AWS, Azure, Google Cloud
More demanding applications scale nicely on any popular cloud platform. Load test have proven that with the right architecture, Spree scales up to 10,000 concurrent requests.
CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Delivery allows developers and testers to shorten delivery cycles and automate testing. Speed shouldn’t compromise quality.
COMPLIANCE
PCI Compliance
Spree follows Ruby on Rails security guidelines as well as industry standard security practices in handling credit card data. It also relies on payment gateways for PCI compliance.
Accessibility
Make your website compliant with WCAG by setting the right order of focus throughout the site, correct HTML syntax, sufficient contrast and proper handling of pop-ups. Easy!
GDPR Compliance
GDPR regulations are not about any specific tech solutions and Spree is secure as much as it can be out of the box, so just hire a GDPR lawyer and use a compliance progress meter.
Spree functions in an ecosystem of Ecommerce apps and solutions. Delivering some of the above mentioned functionality may require you to install Spree extensions, perform 3rd party integrations or apply Spree customizations.
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