Sulu Meets Sylius: A Partnership for Redefining Online Shopping

The partnership underscores the importance of best-of-breed solutions. When building an online presence, businesses have to decide between two options: They can combine individual best-of-breed systems to build a custom business application solution or pick an all-in-one business suite.

Picking a suite means accepting all components that this suite offers. It is virtually impossible that every single component of a business suite is the best component in its class. Even a “Best-of-suite” solution often involves compromises. By combining individual systems that have proven to be the best-of-breed solutions, businesses can build a custom platform that outperforms all-in-one suites by any measure.

All-in-one suites typically struggle to meet the complex requirements for content and e-commerce, as they might not offer the same level of specialization as dedicated solutions. The best-of-breed approach allows businesses to choose the optimal application for each functionality (CMS, e-commerce, back-office, etc.) without compromising on quality or features.

In a partnership between best-of-breed vendors, each partner can focus all their attention on making their particular product great while ensuring that it works well with their partner’s product. This is the sweet spot that Sulu and Sylius enable through this partnership.

The best-of-breed approach fails to deliver if the applications do not work well together. The added friction of integrating two separate systems may have a detrimental effect on the best-of-breed benefit.

With Sulu and Sylius, this is not a problem at all, and here is why.

• Both products share the same technological foundation. Sulu and Sylius are Symfony applications, and this has a two-fold benefit. First, developers do not have to learn two different technology stacks. If they know Symfony, they can work efficiently with both systems. Second, integrating the two systems is virtually frictionless, just as if the two were a single best-of-suite solution.
• Both products are designed from the ground up to be open systems in every regard, from being open source to providing open and highly flexible integration options.

Sylius and Sulu are deeply rooted in the Free and Open Source (FOSS) world and share a love and ability to create and maintain high-quality standards for their products.

Technological details aside, Sylius and Sulu also make an ideal team functionally. The two systems complement each other perfectly to create an integrated commerce and content platform that is more than the sum of its parts. Through powerful and flexible integration options, Sylius and Sulu help build a seamless user experience with an uninterrupted user journey from the user’s first contact with the website to becoming a happy customer.

A well-designed CMS can act as your brand ambassador, information center, shopping window, and front door, while a full-fledged e-commerce system can provide an outstanding shopping experience, taking care of everything from offering products to managing the checkout and the after-sales experience. Together, they can build an unparalleled experience for visitors and customers.

Now, all of this sounds good in theory, but we’re not just making up our reasoning out of thin air. Here are two success stories from clients who have built an integrated commerce and content platform with Sylius and Sulu.  

Mofakult

A “Mofa” (short for “Motor-Fahrrad”) is a kind of two-stroke moped popular between the 1960s and 1980s. Later, it became a cult item.

Mofakult.ch is a Swiss company selling spare parts for those mopeds. Struggling with their previous e-commerce platform (an all-in-one suite), they looked out for better options. Together with Fusonic GmbH, they created a new platform based on Sylius as an e-commerce platform and Sulu as the content management system.

The new platform left no trace of the 5–10 seconds wait time the previous platform had. Users enjoyed the highest performance and a smooth interface, while the Mofakult team benefited from the system’s adaptability. 

Brille24

Selling glasses requires more than a lemonade stand. Brille24, one of the leading European online opticians, had high expectations when seeking an alternative to their current platform, which was about to reach its end of life. The successor product wasn’t able to meet Brille24’s requirements, so after thorough research, they built a new platform based on Sylius and Sulu.

The switch resulted in a streamlined platform that replaced a grab bag of different technologies with a Symfony-based software stack. The Brille24 team said that the new platform was very flexible and easy to integrate with other systems, thanks to its headless approach. Sylius and Sulu both fully support this approach out of the box.

Later, Brille24 merged two Sulu instances to further streamline the system.

The Sylius/Sulu combination has already proven to work, but still, we see exciting times ahead!

A tandem of best-in-breed e-commerce and CMS systems has a strong position in the marketplace. Our collaborative partnership aims at generating more innovation around integrated commerce and content platforms. Future customers will benefit from enhanced solutions combining the strengths of both systems and enjoy an extensive, high-quality ecosystem with a robust infrastructure.

If you would like to explore this combination to see if it meets your needs (hint: it will, with a high probability), or if you want to become the next Mofakult or Brille24, get in touch with us to discuss potential projects.