When our teams at Turbine Kreuzberg began working with Spryker in 2015, it was then still a nascent Berlin startup in the Project A Ventures incubator ecosystem. For years before, our development teams had been gathering project experience in the commerce space – and growing increasingly frustrated with the solutions available at the time. The rigid, out-of-the-box commerce suites available made it necessary to bend them to project requirements. Valuable time was often spent painstakingly removing features and services that came in the package, but were not required, or adding new capabilities through custom development.

Along came Spryker with a simple promise: new flexibility in building and scaling applications. How? By offering a modular commerce software platform, which consists of loosely coupled, independent components that could be used as-is, extended or removed as needed and as requirements changed.

Soon after, the chance to put Spryker to use in a first hands-on project presented itself. Swiss giants Swisscom and Coop were joining forces to build a new marketplace and had chosen Spryker as its basis (Disclaimer: Before joining Turbine Kreuzberg, I used to be a developer at Spryker). The project offered our teams two things: the opportunity to test out what building with Spryker would be like, as well as to get in early on the development of an upstart new commerce technology and to help shape its trajectory. Four months later, our team launched the first ever Spryker-based commerce platform in the world.

Basis for rapid innovation

The fact that commerce is becoming more and more data-driven is just one reason company requirements are in constant flux, leading to ideas for additional services, which need to be implemented quickly in order to be tested in the market. Companies are also continuously evaluating and expanding their tech stacks, integrating new payment platforms, customer relationship management or CMS tools. Spryker’s modular architecture ensures that new service innovations can be integrated quickly and reliably into production installations, and then evaluated for their success.

Spryker Commerce OS takes this even one step further. Spryker Commerce OS takes this even one step further. The use of machine-generated data for warehousing and production or even blockchain transactions is supported by Spryker’s architecture, allowing the seamless integration of back-end technologies. With increasing automation, IoT-based warehousing and fully automated processing of B2B transactions — “bot commerce” — are not far off. This future can benefit from relying on an open framework like Spryker.

On the other hand, many business models that require only minor changes over the years are becoming more customized and sophisticated in this age of digital transformation. Instead of running the risk of having to start from scratch, Spryker’s foundation enables the development and operation of technical innovations in parallel with the running system. If it then becomes clear that the existing solutions can also be implemented well in Spryker, you can migrate gradually. As a result, companies are no longer faced with the “either/or” question, and can instead benefit from a smooth transition.

Frequent updates and quick response times

When it comes to updates, Spryker’s strategy is much different from other vendors. While other vendors usually release only one major version of their software per year, Spryker relies on continuous update releases of their individual models, which leads to a continuous update process that doesn't require big-bag major version migrations. This ensures up-to-date features and security at all times while easily being able to estimate costs.

Speed is one of the most important factors in commerce. Everyone will agree: slow performing websites are a dealbreaker. Spryker’s approach ensures that the shop will never become the bottleneck for any marketing activities such as TV, newsletter or SEM campaigns. One of the best advantages of a fast application is the ability to run the shop for testing, preparation and production purposes on little and affordable cloud models. If you don’t need to put so much effort in optimization, the hosting perimeter will be much simpler.

By default, Spryker is a cloud solution, meaning you do not have to worry about hosting or heavy, recurring maintenance. Of course, if you feel more comfortable managing everything in an “out-of-the-box”approach, Spryker can attempt to accommodate your request in a flexible, composable commerce approach.