Open-source e-commerce development: PrestaShop, WooCommerce and Sylius with integrations

An online store on open-source software

Open-source platforms give you what a subscription store can't: access to the code, your own data and your own hosting, with no commission on sales and no risk of the vendor changing its terms. In return the store needs looking after: platform and extension updates, security checks and someone who understands how the integrations work. BeGiga works with PHP-based e-commerce engines, most often PrestaShop, and the platform choice comes down to how the company sells and who will develop the store.

Choosing an e-commerce platform

The platform is matched to the sales model, catalogue size, number of channels and the team that will work with it. The decision shapes what the store costs to run for years, so on larger projects it follows a pre-project analysis.

PrestaShop

A standalone store platform with an extensive back office, multistore mode, support for many languages and currencies and a large module market, including Polish integrations with payment providers, couriers and wholesalers. It works well for stores with a large catalogue, for B2B and B2C sales and for several stores run from one back office. It's BeGiga's main specialisation, described on the PrestaShop stores page, and moving older stores to the latest version is covered on the PrestaShop upgrade page.

WooCommerce

A WordPress extension that turns a company website into a store. It suits companies that already run a large WordPress site, publish a lot of content and sell a small or medium range of products. The number of plugins can become the limit: each one needs updating, and after bigger updates the store and translation plugins can stop working together, as covered in static site generators or WordPress.

Sylius

An e-commerce framework built on Symfony, designed for bespoke builds and API-driven work, including headless setups where the store and its front end run separately. It's the choice when the sales logic doesn't fit a ready-made store: unusual B2B price lists, product configurators or orders governed by contracts. Most features are written in code rather than installed as modules, so Sylius needs a development team.

Other PHP-based engines

Stores on OpenCart, Magento Open Source or other PHP engines are covered when a project calls for it, most often when taking over a store from another developer or preparing it for migration. The review shows whether the store is worth developing on its current engine or better moved to another platform.

Marketplace and price comparison integrations

Selling across many channels means listings, prices, stock and orders have to match everywhere. A store can connect directly to Allegro, Amazon, eBay or Empik Marketplace, or go through a multichannel sales system such as Base.com that gathers orders from every channel in one place. Price comparison sites such as Ceneo and Google Merchant Center come on top: they download product feeds from the store and check that the data on product pages matches the feeds.

Most of the work usually goes into mapping categories and attributes to each marketplace's requirements, product variants, stock reservation when selling in several channels at once, and order and return statuses. Integrations also have to survive the platforms' own changes, as they revise their interfaces and requirements from time to time. Bot protection mustn't block them either, as explained in why Cloudflare is not blocking bots.

ERP, warehouse, payment and courier integrations

A store rarely works in isolation from the rest of the company, and each kind of connection is handled differently.

ERP systems and accounting software, such as Subiekt, Comarch or enova365 in Poland, usually connect through dedicated integrations from third-party companies that specialise in that system. That's how invoices get from the store into the accounting software and on to KSeF, the Polish e-invoicing system.

Payments and shipping are the simpler part. Payment providers such as Przelewy24, PayU, PayPal or Stripe, and couriers and pickup point networks, mostly offer their own modules for the popular platforms, so the work is mainly configuration and testing.

For stock levels, it works best when the store itself is the source of truth. When the ERP holds the stock, the store reads it through an integration with that system. To pull products, prices and stock from wholesalers that publish XML, CSV or API feeds, we either write dedicated solutions or use the ready-made wholesaler integrations in services such as Base.com or Apilo.

Migrations between platforms

Moving a store from Shoper, Shopify, WooCommerce or OpenCart to another platform covers products, categories, variants, customers and order history, to the extent the old platform allows. Features such as discounts, loyalty programmes or integrations can optionally be rebuilt too. A new platform usually builds URLs differently from the old one, and URLs matter most for Google visibility, so when the URL structure changes, old product and category addresses receive 301 redirects, and SEO titles and descriptions move over with the data.

B2B stores and wholesale

Wholesale works differently from retail. A typical B2B store needs:

• business registration with VAT number verification, company data filled in automatically and account approval by the seller,
• prices per customer group or contract, plus quantity-based price tiers,
• a catalogue visible only after login and minimum order values,
• a simplified interface for repeat orders: quick ordering by SKU, cart import from a CSV file, reordering from order history,
• deferred payment terms and credit limits,
• several buyers under one company account, each with their own permissions,
• e-procurement, connecting the store to the customer's purchasing system (for example via OCI or cXML), where the customer's staff build the order in the store and approve it on their side.

Depending on scale and how unusual the processes are, these stores are built on PrestaShop, which keeps gaining built-in B2B foundations, or on Sylius when the sales logic is more complex.

How an e-commerce project runs

1. Pre-project consulting. Sales model, channels, current systems and who will develop the store after launch. The result is a report: a platform recommendation with reasons, the list of integrations, a migration plan and a quote before work begins.
2. Delivery. Build, migration or integrations on a development copy, with testing of the whole purchase path.
3. Launch and maintenance. Go-live on the production environment, on an agreed date for critical operations, documentation and an optional maintenance agreement.