E-commerce is changing rapidly. Today's customers expect flexible, personalized experiences, new business models emerge almost overnight and, at the same time, platforms need to be stable and maintainable for years to come. If you want to be successful in this environment, you need technologies that can do both: Stability and radical adaptability. This is precisely why we at punkt.de have been relying on Sylius for many years - and are proud to be an official Sylius partner.
With Sylius 2.1, the framework once again demonstrates how consistently this approach is being pursued: At first glance, the accessibility according to WCAG-AA stands out - a strong signal that modern platforms must be accessible to all. However, the release brings much more to the technological basis: support for PHP 8.4, Symfony 7.3, Doctrine 3 and API Platform 4.1. This means that Sylius is technically positioned in such a way that companies can continue to develop their platforms in the long term without coming to a dead end.
The future is modular: From monolith to composable commerce
We often talk about the modularity of Sylius. A term has become established in the industry that hits the nail on the head: composable commerce. The idea behind it is simple but revolutionary: instead of using a rigid all-in-one system that can do everything a little but nothing perfectly, you put together your e-commerce platform from the best special tools available on the market ("best-of-breed").
Sylius acts as the powerful centerpiece here - the pure commerce core. The best solutions for their respective tasks are then connected via APIs:
- Content management: A professional CMS such as TYPO3 or Neos for rich content worlds.
- Product data: A central PIM system as a "single source of truth".
- Search: High-performance search solutions such as Elasticsearch.
- Payment: Flexible payment providers such as Klarna or Stripe.
This approach gives companies the freedom to design their infrastructure exactly according to their needs and to replace or modernize individual components without having to rebuild the entire system.
From buzzword to practice: what AI and headless really mean
The Sylius roadmap clearly looks to the future, especially when it comes to AI and headless. But what does this mean for your business in concrete terms?
AI-supported customer experiences that sell
Artificial intelligence is more than just a buzzword. When integrated into a flexible platform like Sylius, it becomes a decisive competitive advantage. Instead of simple "customers also bought" logic, modern AI integrations enable real, personalized experiences:
- Intelligent, semantic search: Your store understands what users want, even if they phrase it imprecisely. A search for "warm jacket for winter without hood" delivers exact hits because the AI understands the intention behind the words.
- Hyper-personalization: Product recommendations that adapt to the user's click and purchase behaviour in real time and thus demonstrably increase the conversion rate.
- Automated content: AI can automatically create compelling product descriptions or SEO-relevant category texts based on product data from the PIM.
Headless commerce: one backend, countless channels
The term "headless" describes an architecture in which the backend (the "body" that contains the data and logic) is decoupled from the frontend (the "head", i.e. the user interface). For your company, this means one thing above all: absolute freedom in multiple channels.
With Sylius as the central "brain", you can use an unlimited number of frontends:
- A high-performance, modern web store based on React or Vue.js, for example.
- A native app for iOS and Android.
- A customer portal for B2B customers with individual catalogs.
- A terminal in the store (point of sale).
- Even connections to voice assistants or IoT devices.
All channels access the same central logic for products, orders and customer data. This is the definition of a true omnichannel strategy.
BIKAR Metals GmbH - Customer Portal, Shop & Website
Before the three projects website, customer portal and store could be tackled, it was important to create a new basis in terms of design, UI & UX. As a purely technical agency, without our own web design or specialized UI/UX expertise, we have been working very successfully with our partner agency made in together.We had already invited our partner agency to the workshop. This also paid off directly in the creation of the "digital design system" . Without complicated onboarding for the projects, made in was able to create a superordinate design system with BIKAR that works for all three projects. Fonts, markups, colors, graphic elements and individual components were thus already created as a cross-media design before the actual development began. To avoid additional effort during development , our front-end developers are involved in this process right from the start.
Read the B2B store case study now
Our approach at punkt.de: Your sparring partner for sustainable success
That's why we see our role not just as developers who deliver code, but as sparring partners at every stage. This often starts before a project even begins: we support companies in their initial evaluations of Sylius, show them how the framework fits into their own business model and help them make the right decisions for the future.
