Sylius

Sylius is worth considering when you don’t need yet another standard online shop, but a platform built around the way your company sells. Perhaps prices depend on the customer or channel, products need configuring, orders go through their own approval path, and the shop has to exchange data in real time with your ERP, PIM or warehouse. In that situation an off-the-shelf platform can start holding you back just when sales are picking up.

At Okinet we build online shops and sales platforms tailored to specific processes. We can run a Sylius implementation from requirements analysis and UX/UI design, through development and integrations, to data migration, launch and ongoing maintenance. We don’t add features just because they are available. First we work out how your sales operate, where the data comes from and which elements genuinely give you an advantage.

Sylius is an open-source e-commerce framework built on Symfony. You get a proven foundation: catalogue, product variants, basket, orders, payments, shipping, promotions and sales channels. We can extend it to fit your business model. Getting started takes more work than launching a shop from a ready-made template, but in return you keep more control over each future stage of development.

If you are considering a Sylius shop, we can start with a short analysis of your most difficult processes and tell you whether this technology makes sense for your project. Tell us about your e-commerce. The honest answer is sometimes “Sylius” and sometimes “a simpler platform will do”.

• 2010: The future founder of Sylius builds an online shop for his family’s cosmetics business.
• 2011: Rewriting the solution in Symfony and publishing the code on GitHub marks the start of the Sylius open-source project.
• 2013: The community helps create the first pre-alpha releases.
• 2014: Lakion is founded, a software house that implements Sylius and supports its development.
• 2015: Lakion’s growing team becomes the core of the future Sylius team.
• 2016: A major rebuild of the platform brings the alpha and beta releases.
• 2017: The Sylius organisation is founded and the first stable version, 1.0.0, is released.
• 2018: The Solution Partner programme is launched. The organisation adopts a management model based on holacracy.
• 2019: The commercial Sylius Plus edition is added to the offer.
• 2021: The sylius/sylius package passes one million installs.
• 2022: The first SyliusCon takes place, a conference dedicated to the platform and its community.
• 2023: New leadership joins Sylius and continues developing the project.

This timeline covers the years highlighted by the platform’s creators.

Key versions and why upgrades matter

Sylius did not appear as a finished product built in a single release cycle. Its founder started the open-source project in 2011 with standalone components for Symfony. In 2013 development expanded into a full e-commerce platform, and at the end of 2015 the team decided to rebuild its architecture. The 1.0 alpha and beta versions released in 2016 and 2017 laid the groundwork for the first stable release.

The version number has a practical impact on security and maintenance costs. According to the published schedule, regular maintenance of Sylius 1.14 ended on 31 December 2025, and security fixes for that line are planned until the end of December 2026. If your shop still runs on 1.x, that doesn’t mean you suddenly have to rewrite the whole platform. It is, however, worth preparing an upgrade plan before support ends for the version or key plugins you use.

Before a migration we check the PHP and Symfony versions, API changes, custom entities, templates, the checkout process and extension compatibility. We then split the work into stages that can be tested and protect the most important scenarios with automated tests. This way the upgrade is based on the real state of your shop, not just on the version number in the documentation.

Sylius works best in medium and large projects where the way you sell is part of your competitive advantage. You can use it to build a complex B2C shop, a B2B platform, a multi-brand store, several markets in one system, or a digital product that can’t sensibly be built from a set of standard plugins.

Sylius is worth considering when:

• the shop has an unusual catalogue, a product configurator or its own way of calculating prices,
• prices, product range and availability differ between customers, countries or channels,
• sales require integration with ERP, PIM, WMS, CRM, POS or your own applications,
• you are planning a B2B, omnichannel, headless or marketplace model,
• your current platform is holding back growth and more and more of the budget goes on workarounds,
• your company wants full control over the code and plans to develop the system for years to come.

If you have a simple catalogue, sell in one market and use a standard checkout, WooCommerce, PrestaShop or a SaaS solution may be faster and cheaper. Sylius gains the upper hand when the cost of adapting an off-the-shelf platform keeps growing and your company’s processes can no longer be handled comfortably with available modules.

Ask yourself one question: should the shop adapt to your business, or can you sell the way the platform dictates? If you need the first option, Sylius belongs on your shortlist.

If you sell to consumers, you mainly need easy purchasing, a smooth checkout, promotions, payments, delivery and good catalogue management. Sylius lets you adapt each of these without rewriting the whole platform. We can build a classic storefront, a headless solution or several interfaces that share one sales engine.

In B2B sales you may need a completely different process. One customer sees retail prices, another their own price list, and a third terms negotiated for a large order. Add to that company accounts, staff roles, spending limits, quick ordering by SKU, requests for quotes, repeat baskets and order approval by a manager. These features cut down the daily work of buyers and sales staff, so they are worth designing around their real tasks.

Sylius provides a foundation for building such a process in the project code. Sylius Plus also offers paid B2B modules, including dedicated price lists, organisation management, advanced shopping lists, search and requests for quotes. Before choosing a module we compare what it covers with your company’s process. Sometimes a ready-made module significantly shortens the implementation; other times an extension built for your specific sales model will be simpler and clearer.

It isn’t enough to copy the retail process and add a field for a tax ID. A good wholesale platform takes into account how the buyer, the account manager and the order fulfilment team work. Before we propose features, we will check where the team loses time and which decisions can safely be moved into the system.

As your e-commerce grows, the shop becomes one of several systems working together. Descriptions and images may come from a PIM, prices and documents from the ERP, stock levels from the WMS, customer data from the CRM, and shipment status from the logistics provider. Sylius provides an API and extension mechanisms that let us connect these elements without modifying the core of the platform.

We start integration work by establishing who is responsible for which data. We agree which system is the source of truth for products, prices, stock and orders. Only then do we design the direction of synchronisation, how often data is updated and what happens when an error occurs. This matters more than the choice of library or file format.

Typical integrations include:

• ERP and accounting: prices, business partners, invoices, payments and order statuses,
• PIM: catalogue structure, attributes, descriptions, translations and media,
• WMS and logistics: stock, reservations, picking, shipments and returns,
• CRM and marketing automation: customer profiles, consents and segments,
• payment providers, couriers and pick-up point networks,
• external marketplaces and mobile apps.

A large catalogue import or a retry of communication with the ERP can be processed in a queue. A temporary outage of an external system then doesn’t have to stop a customer from placing an order. We also set up logs, monitoring and safe retries, so your team can check what happened to a specific order, even several weeks later.

If you sell in several channels, multichannel simply means being present in each of them. Omnichannel goes a step further: the channels share data and create a single process for the customer. Your online shop, app, physical stores and customer service can then work as parts of the same system.

Sylius can be the commerce layer that ties these scenarios together. Implementing the platform alone won’t deliver omnichannel, though. First we agree the rules for reservations, fulfilment and returns, and then connect the shop with the POS, ERP, WMS or OMS systems you need. Some mechanisms can be provided by paid Sylius Plus modules, including Multi-source Inventory, Returns Management, Loyalty System and Partial Shipment.

The benefit is very practical: the customer chooses the most convenient way to buy, and the business uses shared stock instead of keeping separate pools of goods for each channel. The official Soulz case study shows that Sylius can bring together a mobile shop, a chain of stores, local pick-up and external systems that manage prices and stock levels.

For many brands, marketplaces are now a key channel for reaching customers. Allegro (the largest marketplace in Poland), Amazon and industry platforms can quickly expand your sales reach, but they also bring their own rules for listings, commissions, availability, shipping and returns. Handling several channels manually only works up to a certain scale.

Sylius can act as the central sales engine or as one part of a larger architecture. Through the API we can send products and prices to a marketplace, fetch orders, reserve stock and send back fulfilment status. The scope of the integration depends on where you store your data. The source of your offer can be Sylius, a PIM or the ERP: what matters is that each type of information is managed in one agreed place.

Before we start the implementation, we will agree together:

• which products and prices should go to each channel,
• how quickly to synchronise availability so the same item isn’t sold twice,
• where cancellations, returns and complaints are handled,
• how to map delivery methods, payment methods and order statuses,
• what to do when the marketplace API is temporarily unavailable.

This is integrating Sylius with an external marketplace, not building your own marketplace. The two projects are often lumped together, even though they differ completely in scale and responsibility.

If you build your own marketplace, your company becomes the operator of a platform for many sellers. You need to handle their registration, products and offers, commissions, order splitting, payments, documents, communication and settlements. On top of that come catalogue moderation, quality standards and responsibility for the whole purchasing process.

Sylius Plus offers Marketplace Suite, a commercial module for building multi-vendor platforms. It covers seller management, a shared catalogue, split payments, reports, communication and document handling, among other things. The module doesn’t replace business analysis or integration design, but it gives you a ready starting point for processes that you would otherwise have to build yourself in the free edition.

Your own marketplace makes sense when you have a plan not only for a website with offers, but also for recruiting sellers, a commission model, dispute handling and day-to-day operations. The technology will provide the mechanisms you need, while well-defined rules will let the team grow the platform without piling up exceptions.

Sylius is built on Symfony and provides an API built with API Platform. Your technical team can work with familiar tools, test the code and extend the system through services, events and separate modules. In practice this means an unusual sales rule can be implemented as a predictable part of the platform, rather than yet another fragile workaround.

An API-first approach lets you use one back end for your online shop, mobile app, sales rep panel or self-service kiosk. You can choose a classic front end or a headless setup, where the presentation layer runs separately. Headless gives a lot of design freedom and makes it easier to serve multiple interfaces, but it adds a separate front-end application, caching, authorisation and maintaining the API contract to the scope of the project.

That’s why we don’t suggest headless just to make the project sound modern. It makes sense when the business needs several channels, an unusual shopping experience or independent front-end development. For a simpler shop, a classic storefront can be faster, cheaper and just as effective.

A good implementation starts before the first feature is written. First we get to know your catalogue, order process, user roles, sales channels and external systems. Together we separate the requirements needed for launch from ideas that can safely be added later.

1. Analysis and discovery. We describe the processes, data sources, risks and success criteria for the project.
2. UX/UI and architecture. We design user journeys, the catalogue model, integrations and the responsibilities of each system.
3. Development. We configure Sylius and build the extensions, storefront and admin panel you need.
4. Integrations and migration. We connect external services and prepare a controlled data import.
5. Testing and launch. We check key scenarios, performance, payments, shipping and behaviour when things go wrong.
6. Maintenance and development. We monitor the system, update dependencies and plan the next stages based on real usage.

For a risky or unusual process it is worth preparing a proof of concept first. It is better to test the ERP integration, a configurator or a custom checkout than to start with the home page, which is rarely the biggest unknown. You can see our experience with e-commerce, applications, Symfony and REST in the Okinet portfolio.

There is no single honest price for a Sylius shop. Your budget will depend not only on the number of products, but above all on your processes. A standard retail purchase requires a different scope from a platform with individual price lists, several warehouses and two-way integration with the ERP.

We estimate the budget after a short analysis. We separate the cost of design and development from hosting, external services, Sylius Plus licences and later maintenance. This gives you a clear picture of the launch costs and the costs that will arise after go-live.

When comparing quotes, also factor in your team’s manual work, handling integration errors and the time each change takes. A cheaper start can mean higher costs in the years that follow. A well-designed Sylius platform delivers the most value when it automates repetitive tasks and lets you add new features without rebuilding the whole system.

If you are moving your shop to Sylius, simply copying tables from one database to another isn’t enough. You need to keep products, variants, customers, addresses and order history, while understanding how the current platform calculates prices, reserves stock and handles statuses.

We start with a data audit and mapping. We check which information is still needed, where there are duplicates and what can’t be transferred one to one. Then we prepare a trial import and a discrepancy report. Only once it is approved do we plan the final migration.

SEO is a separate topic. We keep valuable URLs wherever possible and map the rest with 301 redirects. We transfer metadata, control indexing and check the most important pages before and after launch. The migration should also have a rollback plan, a data backup and a clearly defined switch-over window.

We can protect sales continuity with a phased migration: import a large part of the catalogue in advance, then synchronise changes, and finally move the last data. We will tailor the exact plan to the size of your shop and how long the old and new systems need to run side by side.

After your shop launches, your offer, sales channels and customer expectations will keep changing. A payment provider will update its API, and the libraries you use will receive security fixes. That is why, already during implementation, we design the system so that future changes don’t require taking it apart every time.

We can take care of application and queue monitoring, error analysis, backups, updates to PHP, Symfony and Sylius itself, feature development and integration support. We will also set up business alerts. The website being online isn’t enough if orders have stopped reaching the warehouse: monitoring should catch that kind of problem too.

Regular, smaller updates are usually safer than a big jump made once every few years. Automated tests of prices, promotions, checkout and integrations let you check quickly whether a new version has changed a key process. Before a larger upgrade we also assess the compatibility of the plugins and custom extensions you use.

We will match the scope of support to the real risk in your sales. A B2B platform taking orders on working days may need different response times from a shop with heavy round-the-clock sales.

Sylius Standard is the free open-source edition under the MIT licence, previously often called the Community Edition. You get the core needed to build a shop and full access to the code. This edition may be enough if your project’s advantage comes from your own processes, which have to be built individually anyway.

Sylius Plus extends the platform with commercial modules and support from the vendor. The current offer includes B2B Suite, Marketplace Suite, Advanced Multi-store, RMA returns management, multi-source inventory, partial shipments, loyalty and extended permissions, among others.

We don’t make the decision based on the size of the company. We compare the licence cost with the time needed to build and then maintain your own solution. If a module covers most of the requirements, Sylius Plus can speed up the launch and reduce upgrade risk. When the process differs a lot from its assumptions, an extension built specifically for the project is often the better option.

The licence is only one item in the budget. When comparing editions, also take into account development, infrastructure, integrations, updates and your team’s time. Only this full calculation shows the real cost of owning the platform.

There is no single best e-commerce platform. You need a solution that fits your company’s stage of growth and way of selling. WooCommerce works well for many small and medium shops, PrestaShop offers lots of ready-made features, Shopify simplifies the launch and infrastructure, and Magento has a wide range of enterprise-grade capabilities. Sylius takes a different approach: it provides the foundation for building your own platform.

If your buying process is typical and a quick launch is the priority, an off-the-shelf system may be the better choice. Sylius gains the advantage when the shop needs to work closely with internal software, support several business models or change its sales rules frequently.

When comparing Sylius with PrestaShop, Magento or WooCommerce, it is worth looking beyond the number of features available straight after installation. What counts is the cost of customisation, the quality and availability of plugins, ease of upgrades, performance after the platform has grown, and how much the next big change will cost. With Shopify there is also the question of how much control you have over the back end and how dependent you are on the platform’s service model.

Before a migration or a new project, we suggest a short discovery phase. It lets you test the most difficult process, estimate the integrations and compare the total cost of several options. The technology should follow from these answers, not the other way round.