Laravel is a powerful PHP framework, and a whole family of all-in-one ecommerce solutions has grown out of it. Between them they give a business everything it needs to build, design, run and manage an online shop.
More than 450,000 ecommerce sites around the world have been built and launched on Laravel. But why Laravel? Building an ecommerce platform on Laravel brings a number of real advantages. This article goes through the best Laravel ecommerce packages on the market, including:
- Aimeos: best for large-scale businesses and heavy customisation
- GetCandy: best for keeping bots out
- AvoRed: best for customer management
- Bazar: best for small businesses
- Laraship: best for all-round flexibility
- Bagisto: best for scalability and brand new sites
- Vanilo: best for getting the most out of your content
Ecommerce with Laravel
Aimeos, AvoRed and Bagisto are among the best open-source Laravel ecommerce packages available. What they all share is the simplicity, the flexibility and the well-defined framework they are built on: if you have followed my Laravel tutorial, you already know the ground you are standing on. If scalability matters to you, a Laravel ecommerce solution is worth considering as a long-term investment. When you pick one, remember that you need a full understanding of the ecommerce ecosystem around it. That is what makes sure the right data flows to the right place.
What is a Laravel ecommerce package
In short, Laravel gives you a simple, fast development process for building web applications. There are two different kinds of Laravel package: standalone frameworks and framework-specific ones. Writing a Laravel package is relatively easy and comes down to four essential steps:
- Set up the Composer.json file for the new package
- Add a service provider
- Declare the alias
- Finally, create a facade class
The 7 best Laravel ecommerce packages
With that said, let us go through each of these Laravel ecommerce packages in turn. This article covers the details of each one and the features it offers.
1. Aimeos
Aimeos is a well-known open-source PHP framework for ecommerce and online shops, with a reputation for being exceptionally fast and scalable. It handles multi-vendor marketplaces, multiple channels and warehouses, with a strong B2B focus. Shops holding up to 1 billion items can be rendered in as little as 20 ms. It supports more than 100 payment gateways through the Omnipay PHP library and ships a first-class JSON REST API.
Aimeos is a powerful Laravel ecommerce package. It has helped everyone from small online businesses to some of the largest manufacturers in the world build serious ecommerce solutions. Look at the numbers and Aimeos is clearly one of the most complete systems out there. Its fairly large ecosystem serves bigger companies more effectively than smaller ones. Aimeos is also the right choice for businesses that need extreme customisation, extensibility and a high-performance ecommerce architecture. Other features include email marketing, stock management, order fulfilment and SEO management, among others. Being open source, it is free to use, with paid support and extensions available to buy.
2. Lunar ( GetCandy )
Lunar is a headless ecommerce platform built for Laravel and unlike anything else on this list. It comes with an intuitive interface that lets you build a custom storefront quickly. GetCandy lets you walk away from platforms such as Magento or WooCommerce once you see what the Lunar API gives you.
GetCandy is essentially an ecommerce API combined with an admin system, designed to build feature-rich online shops that give the business complete control over the user experience. It can act as the launch pad that takes your business from concept to production in record time. From catalogue management to order processing, marketing tools and reporting, GetCandy covers every stage of the process.
3. AvoRed
AvoRed is another pioneering ecommerce platform, free and open source, built on Laravel. It is a modular platform that makes customisation painless and easy to fit to the needs of the business. It is also very mobile-friendly, which turns online shopping into a walk in the park. Its main features include product management, order management and search engine optimisation tools that help your site rank well. AvoRed is very developer-friendly, and one of the platforms developers tend to reach for thanks to the PHP framework underneath it.
AvoRed lets you create product categories and attributes for organised order management. That helps you keep track of orders, customer details and stock levels. AvoRed has a live demo video you can watch here: https://demo.avored.com/.
4. Bazar
Bazar is a fairly recent Laravel ecommerce package, still evolving and still adapting to the latest trends in the industry. Given how new it is, it suits startups and small businesses that are not looking to scale that fast. Bazar is a headless ecommerce platform built on Laravel. It gives you an efficient, clean dashboard that is easy to customise to your needs. Features include multiple payment gateways, automated tax calculation, shipping costs, several extensions and a smooth checkout process. Its solid foundations speed up the development of ecommerce sites with a ready-to-use solution. On top of that, it is a highly customisable platform where you can configure currencies, cart behaviour and more.
5. Laraship
Laraship, for its part, is a multi-vendor ecommerce solution built on the inner workings of Laravel. It is mainly used to sell several items through a single window. The Laraship package holds a large collection of themes and supports up to ten payment gateways. Laraship also comes with solid search engine optimisation tools, which makes it one of the best options available.
The benefits of going with Laraship include selling any kind of product, digital or physical, and access to some of the best ecommerce themes in the industry. Users can upload products quickly and easily, set the parameters and run promotional campaigns consistently.
6. Bagisto
Bagisto is one of the best open-source ecommerce platforms built on Laravel. It offers unrivalled user management with multi-warehouse inventory control, which makes it a complete ecommerce solution for any online business. Bagisto specialises in several key features, including industry favourites such as access control, multi-currency, multiple payment gateway integrations and localisation, to name a few. Bagisto takes a code-first approach that helps developers do what they do best, quickly and efficiently.
The most popular extensions Bagisto offers are progressive web apps, point-of-sale systems, B2B ecommerce, multi-tenant SaaS and a Laravel mobile app. This ecommerce solution also produces detailed analytics reports on customers, orders and product sales to help you track how the business is progressing. To top it off, Bagisto has a large support team offering maintenance services to give their customers peace of mind.
7. Vanilo
Vanilo is another modular ecommerce platform built on Laravel. Unlike Aimeos and Bagisto, Vanilo has a relatively smaller codebase, but that makes it more flexible and much easier to integrate. Vanilo gives you complete control over your code, meaning you can take it apart piece by piece to make sure everything is exactly as it should be.
Why choose Laravel for ecommerce?
Laravel is an open-source, web-based PHP framework with several remarkable tools that can lift any online business, not to mention its first-rate security protocols. Adding a Laravel package to an online business brings real benefits: protection against web attacks, authentication, authorisation, speed and scalability, plus template engines and a database migration system. PHP stands for “personal home page”. It is essentially an embedded scripting language that turns static pages into something far more capable. It can also build responses on demand. PHP for ecommerce sites is cost-effective, ready to integrate, faster and, above all, scalable.
Laravel is also free and comes with plenty of things any web developer will appreciate: detailed documentation, built-in libraries and excellent community support, to name a few. A Laravel package improves the performance of online shops, makes third-party integration smooth, keeps the site secure and gives you practical development cycles. It also makes site maintenance easy thanks to unit testing.
Omnichannel experience
Laravel gives you a genuinely omnichannel ecommerce experience that keeps online storefronts performing well. If you are a developer, Laravel is an excellent choice for building an ecommerce site. That said, if you are not a developer, it may be worth bringing in a development team or a freelancer, since coding experience is needed to get anything out of the software. Sometimes a high level of technical expertise is what it takes to see every task through.
Robust architecture for ecommerce
The robust, secure architecture of Laravel keeps ecommerce shops protected against web attacks. That is one of the hardest parts of running an online shop. Depending on the ecommerce package you choose, it can be quite easy to use and come with several different plugins and themes. Picking one of the best Laravel ecommerce packages can save you a lot of time and money.
Whichever package you choose, they are all relatively cheap and self-sufficient. Ultimately that means Laravel does not depend on third-party applications for extra features, which can bring the cost down considerably.
Summary
In short, Laravel is an unmatched ecommerce framework, more than capable of designing and building online shops that thrive in their own sector. Any business that settles on one of the best Laravel ecommerce packages is set up to grow and to hold its own in the online market. Laravel has become the go-to PHP framework, given all the powerful, innovative features it offers. The combination of what Laravel does well, from functionality to security, is what has drawn so much traffic to its ecommerce packages. The ultimate goal of Laravel is to improve the overall user experience, so you keep the customers you have and win new ones.
Over the years, Laravel has become one of the most reliable ecommerce solutions on the market. With Laravel, and if the code is written properly, you can build virtually anything you want for an ecommerce platform. If you are looking at one of the best Laravel ecommerce packages available, it is because you are planning a highly customised ecommerce experience. Otherwise, there may be no need to go to that level of development. All in all, Laravel gives you a robust, streamlined framework that can help you put together an exceptional online shop.
