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Rolling out your Powerful Ruby on Rails Ecommerce


Software Development

Why choose Ruby on Rails Ecommerce to attract online shoppers?

Is taking your retail store online, one of your top priorities? Do you also wish to hold credits for owning a well-rounded website? But it’s not as easy-breezy as it sounds. The very first step is understanding that ruby on rails ecommerceyour eCommerce store will only flourish if it can engage web customers by keeping them glued to the screens. So, to make things easy, you will need to approach your eCommerce store development from the visitor’s point of view. A number of factors have to go into the making of such a website. With about 76% of consumers wanting their shopping experience to be simple, mobile-friendly with a clog-free path to purchase, nothing gets really enough.  The next step is to pick a channel that gives the best appearance, speed, product pages, and transactions to coax everyday customers. However, most of them get stuck at this point wondering which framework they should commit to. But what if I told you that Ruby on Rails development will take your web store to the top throes of popularity? You need not think twice! Indeed ROR can be your real savior if you want your online business to excel every step of the way. First of all, let’s see what makes it so attractive.

What makes Ruby on Rails much sought after?

Ruby on Rails started small and ended up with some compelling functionalities for eCommerce. It’s been in the market since 2006 and has powered about 800k stores including many global brands like Groupon, Airbnb, GitHub, Shopify, and SoundCloud to name a few. And if you thought of integrating ROR with NoSQL databases like MongoDB, it is like adding fuel to the fire. I bet your eCommerce platform can have a huge impact in terms of scalability, efficiency, and performance. However, let’s take a detailed look at the benefits of Ruby on Rails technology:

Cost-saving:

Being an open-source framework ROR comes free for both companies and individuals. In that case, it can be the best choice for startups as they can build their websites quickly incurring lesser development costs. Without any licensing fees, you get a higher ROI even if you are looking to run a normal website or a web store.

Efficient framework:

You do not want your eCommerce platform launch to eat up all your time, but also need to ensure that it is optimized for the web. So, RoR’s efficiency is non-compatible as it harbors some pre-build conventions and a wide RubyGems library to walk you through the whole process. Even if you burden it with heavy code, the platform carries it seamlessly with its stable performance. Again, Ruby on Rails development eliminates the delay in configuration again and again sticking to the paradigm of convention over configuration.

Security and Community:

Ruby on Rails does not disappoint developers or entrepreneurs in terms of application security. All popular attacks like CSRF and SQL injection are prevented using built-in systems. Talking of community support, Rails consists of gems. When you look for bug and error fixes, you will find that somebody has already solved your problem and made a gem available for common access. New gems keep making it to the Ruby on Rails ecosystem every now and then. This is sufficient proof of the widely supportive community of developers.

Most importantly, the RoR web application framework gives you the freedom to modify code. This indicates that your eCommerce platform can adapt to any possible market changes in the future. Blending all of its power-packed features, ready-made functionalities, and plugins Rails makes your online store a reality.

Components of an eCommerce site that ROR caters to:

Storefront

We all know how first impressions matter and coming to an eCommerce storefront plays an even bigger role. It’s the storefront that prospective customers see the moment they land on your website. Also, keep in mind that the storefront tells your customers whether you are well-managed and caring for your customer’s needs. Imagine if your competitor’s storefront looks appealing and delivers a warm welcome. In no time you will experience drastic dropout rates. ruby on rails ecommerceGone are the days when a single photo and pricing details did all the work. Shoppers prefer seeing high-pixel images from different angles and people using them in different environments to come to a decision. A good storefront with product descriptions, contact, and shopping information indicates that a solid framework is working behind it. Likewise, if you want your users to say a “WOW” looking at your user interface, then ROR can do the talking. You can get hold of a variety of customizable themes and solutions from the powerful ROR framework called Spree. It also allows for views with mobile and tablet screens, zooming in to feel the minute details without disturbing the visual experience. Another spectacular feature that comes with ROR’s Spree is the spree_related_ products to keep your customers hooked or in a way to let them know that “you can understand their choices”. Above all, your eCommerce storefront will translate into an excellent one with ROR’s ability to convert the product details into any language making it accessible globally. Why just first impressions, leave lasting impressions on your customers’ minds with Ruby on Rails for eCommerce.

Inventory Management

Now, product inventory management if not taken seriously can harm your online business by leaps and bounds. You definitely need to keep a track of products that are overstocked, understocked or out of stock to make sure that customers are delivered the products within the time they anticipated. With ROR’s inventory management, you can make confident reorder decisions with complete sales data. You get the benefit of:

  • Real-time alerts about products low in stock
  • Greater visibility into warehouses for checking and examination
  • Warns about the products with lesser shelf-life and removal of those that trigger no customer satisfaction.
  • Again the ROR’s Spree assists you with all of these functions while also helping you manage products based on their size, season, type of sale, and other parameters.

Payment

Once the product is selected and carefully added to the shopping cart, the rest of the process has to do with transactions. But what are the most likely difficulties that customers face during this important process? Imagine at this point you demand high shipping costs, asking them to create accounts for purchase and saying no to certain payment methods. You couldn’t have screwed them any better!

Never mind, using Ruby on Rails will keep you from failing your customers. The community offers integrations to accept all types of payment gateways like Paypal, Stripe, and Amazon Pay to name a few. Additionally, you can use extensions like Spree-gateway and Spree-multi-currency to ensure glitch-free payments anytime globally. Since we have covered a great deal about why Ruby on Rails is the best for your eCommerce store, I will now brief you about the tools for building an online store on RoR with ease.

5 Tools that Put Ruby on Rails to Work

If Ruby on Rails has become your choice for taking your products out the door and money into your pocket, the following tools will help you achieve out-of-the-box results to achieve the same.

Piggyback

It is a Rails Engine that is a quick fix to some of the major shopping cart problems. Piggyback looks after the basic process of adding, updating, and removing items in the cart, single-page checkout with tax calculation, a well-developed admin panel for entering and managing orders, and configurable payment methods. It is again a free and open-source engine that is user-friendly and modern too.

Sharetribe 

By far one of the popular open-source platforms that run on ROR to help businesses build marketplaces for rental, service, or selling a product. It comes with plenty of built-in functionalities helping you customize every little aspect of your online store. Some of the other features it supports include language and currency changes, International Payment System, and order management systems, all of this even owing to a mobile-friendly design approach. Moreover, Sharetribe is also easily testable and well supported, also hoping to make elastic search-based functionalities a reality for your RoR eCommerce websites.

Shoppe 

Shopee is again an open-sourced ROR Engine that is released under the MIT license. The perfect place for anyone to get started with design, compatible payment gateways, admin interface to extract the wealth of eCommerce functionalities with Ruby on Rails.

ROR-E.COM

A complete package covering all your e-commerce needs with impressive features for the Cart, accounting, coupons, deals, and product creation. Now, this tool lets you promote standard marketing practices in addition to selling goods through coupon mechanisms.

Spree commerce 

Spree Commerce has over 20,000 successful stores running under its magic. Online stores with any level of complexity can be easily built using this open-source codebase. It offers a full-featured web store with advanced search, convenient payments, a tracking system, product personalization, and social media integrations. But is that all? Spree Commerce features indeed deserve to be explored deeper and sometimes in comparison to its offshoot – the Solidus.

Spree vs Solidus: Who wins?

It’s true that I’ve been mentioning a lot about Spree in the previous sections of this blog. So, without much delay, we will look into what Spree Commerce is all about, also keeping Solidus in close comparison. With an official launch in 2009 Spree Commerce is an open-source project that grew and adopted into the web application frameworks of several top brands. However, the development of Spree slowed down when it was acquired by First Data. Now, Spree’s lack of solid community support caused a lot of lingering issues that let to its forking, giving birth to Solidus. ruby on rails ecommerce

But as both the solutions are ROR it gives the chance for developers to write quality codes. Again, coming to the design parameters, both the tools fare well on custom designs and modifications to build a beautiful storefront. However, designing a storefront equally relies on additional features and extensions which are fewer in Solidus but of a higher quality. With Spree, you get many third-party designed extensions that can be modified from the source code but most of them are error-prone. In terms of scalability, both Spree and Solidus are capable of managing high-traffic websites with less effort. But if you’d want to pick one, then Solidus can be a safer choice for its clean code and community support. Considering other factors like customer interaction, and optimized search, Spree and Solidus are equally strong. But talking about the payment channels, you can lean on Solidus for delivering better transaction experiences to your users. To sum it all up, you can see that in most cases they share some core points. And developers wouldn’t mind switching from one to the other based on the projects. But as a final word, Solidus appears to be much less complicated with maintenance and support and will definitely matter to your eCommerce venture in the longer run.

Head to Pattem Digital for Robust ROR Services today!

If you are an entrepreneur striving hard to make your online marketplace buzz with some noise, then we will get you covered. Pattem Digital’s ROR hosting professionals set up an execution plan according to your business model to deliver a codebase that works best for you. Together we implement the best practices in creating high-performing, stable, scalable, and flexible online stores that run quickly and smoothly. Ready to roll with our Ruby on Rails development services? Tell us about your project today!

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