Looking to sell products online? Spree, formally known as Railscart, is a flexible and powerful e-commerce solution for the Ruby Enterprise fits that profile. Designed with the programmer in mind, Spree is built to be customizable and extensible, which is perfect for the freelance designer especially for the ones who venture into the e-commerce world. It has all the essentials and according to Spree, uses ActiveMerchant to access over 50 different payment gateways.
As an e-commerce solution this may rival other open source e-commerce platforms, such as Magento, which currently has over 60,000 merchants using its software. However, Spree has quite a bit of work to do if it wants to compete from a global (online) perspective. Spree shows a lot of promise and just by giving it a test run appears to run faster and smoother than its Magento counter-part, if you need a few examples of what Spree can do, or simply looking for inspiration for your next e-commerce platform you can visit Yellow Bird Project or Cosas de Regalo.
Designers, its time to step outside our comfort zone and get our feet wet in a new programming language and that being Ruby. To test Spree for yourself without downloading the necessary software to get up and running visit their demo page.