Spree Commerce, the open source, Ruby on Rails-based eCommerce solution, announced today that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by True Ventures. Also participating in the round were Aol Ventures, and angels like Sean Glass. Spree has also brought on some notable advisors, including Dries Buytaert (Creator of Drupal), Luke Kanies (Creator of Puppet), Tom Preston-Werner (Co-founder of Github), and James Lindenbaum (Co-founder of Heroku).
Some readers may be familiar with Spree from Github, where the startup received hundreds of contributions and was translated into over 30 languages, making it one of the more popular open source projects on the social coding platform. As Spree grew in popularity, Founder Sean Schofield also created Rails Dog, a services company that focuses on building highly customized sites based on Spree’s platform to enable those without engineering experience implement the solution.
Going forward, Schofield said, Rails Dog will continue to offer consulting services, but beginning today Spree has been officially incorporated as Spree Commerce Inc. and will focus primarily on refining its eCommerce platform to make it more flexible and customizable. Schofield also said that, while the team plans to offer additional support and services to its community, the platform will continue to be open source, and the licensing and terms of use will remain the same, intended for both personal and commercial application.
For those who may still be a little bit confused as to what exactly Spree does, the platform provides both hosting and support, as well as an easy customization process. Specifically, Spree gives businesses full access to its code so that businesses can create a customized checkout flow, with a single page or multi-page checkout with the amount of steps tailored to the business’ needs. Spree also uses semantic HTML, which allows users to begin with a minimalist style that can be customized and added to depending on the user’s requirements.
The platform also offers a flexible product management system, inventory tracking, and the ability to add extensions to create a product assembly based on existing products, order processing, and more. And, in terms of the latter, finding the right gateway and merchant account can be a huge pain in the ass for eCommerce companies, so Spree enables integration with over 50 different payment gateways and services, including Authorize.net and Paypal.
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