In today’s eCommerce world, the strength of a platform’s community can be just as crucial as its features. In the broader digital world, online communities play a vital role in shaping digital spaces where people connect, share, and engage with brands, directly influencing eCommerce success. An authentic online community is now a core element of eCommerce, fostering customer loyalty, engagement, and emotional connection.
In this aspect, we can observe two distinct approaches to community building. On one side, we have platforms with extensive but loosely connected user bases, and on the other - systems built on close collaboration, where the community actively drives development. In the latter, users not only support each other but also have a real impact on the platform’s development - from reporting and fixing bugs to implementing new functionalities. Fostering meaningful relationships within a brand community is essential for long-term customer loyalty, advocacy, and sustainable growth.
After the technical comparison of Magento, Shopware, and in our previous article, let’s take a closer look at how their communities operate. Online shopping has evolved significantly with the rise of community-driven platforms and the integration of social commerce, enabling direct purchases through social media and enhancing digital marketing strategies. Let’s start by explaining how an active community can shape the development of an eCommerce platform.
Building a strong brand community is now a strategic advantage for eCommerce platforms, helping to boost brand awareness, reduce marketing costs, and drive organic growth.
Why is an active eCommerce platform community so important?
An active community is one of the pillars of any eCommerce platform, driving innovation, providing crucial support, and ensuring the platform's continuous evolution to meet new market demands. Beyond just technical development, the community creates an ecosystem of shared knowledge, best practices, and tested solutions that can significantly reduce implementation time and costs while improving the overall quality of eCommerce projects. Let's examine the key benefits that a strong community brings to an eCommerce platform.
1. Faster problem resolution
First and foremost, accessing an engaged community becomes invaluable when tackling day-to-day technical challenges. Through active community support channels like forums, Slack workspaces, Discord servers, and other groups, developers and merchants can quickly find solutions to their challenges. The collective knowledge base on platforms like Stack Overflow and GitHub serves as an extremely valuable resource, offering pre-tested solutions and code snippets that can save hours of troubleshooting time. Additionally, user-generated content, including comprehensive documentation, step-by-step tutorials, and frequently asked questions, creates an extensive knowledge repository that helps address common issues before they escalate into major problems.
2. Comprehensive integration and extension of ecosystem
Secondly, a thriving community improves platform capabilities through its continuous contribution to the integration ecosystem. Thanks to active community involvement, you get access to a wide range of pre-built integrations that easily connect your eCommerce platform with essential business tools. This includes ready-to-use integrations with ERP, PIM, or CRM systems, as well as various sales channels.
Moreover, the ecosystem can offer a rich selection of specialized plugins covering critical functionalities such as payment processing, logistics management, and UX personalization. This number of ready-to-deploy solutions enables businesses to rapidly adapt the platform to their requirements while reducing implementation time and costs.
3. Lower maintenance and implementation costs
Speaking about the costs, the strength of a platform's community directly impacts the overall costs of the project. A robust developer ecosystem, characterized by numerous skilled professionals and agencies familiar with the platform, creates healthy market competition and ensures more flexibility and competitive pricing for their services. The availability of open-source solutions developed and tested by the community eliminates the need to build every functionality from scratch, significantly reducing development time and associated costs.
The community's collective knowledge base serves as a valuable resource that allows businesses to fix issues faster and more cost-effectively. Instead of contacting specialists each time an issue occurs, businesses can browse documentation, guides, and case studies.
4. Innovation and security
Furthermore, a vibrant platform community increases safety and drives innovation. When hundreds or thousands of skilled developers regularly work with the same technology, they quickly spot and fix potential security issues before they become more serious. This collective approach to security means that instead of relying on a single vendor, you have an entire network of experts watching out for your platform's safety.
The beauty of community-driven development shows in how quickly new features and improvements emerge. Rather than waiting for official updates, the community actively develops solutions to real-world business challenges. For example, when a business needs a specific integration or feature, there's a good chance someone in the community has already built and tested a solution.
What makes this especially valuable is the wealth of practical knowledge shared among community members. Every successful implementation, clever solution, or lesson learned becomes part of a shared knowledge base that helps everyone build better, more secure eCommerce platforms.
5. Scalable growth infrastructure
When an eCommerce business enters a growth phase, it faces numerous challenges - from managing increased traffic to expanding into new markets. This is where a strong platform community becomes a powerful ally.
The practical benefits become clear in real-world scenarios. For instance, when planning to handle increased holiday season traffic, businesses can learn directly from community members who have already optimized their systems for high-volume periods. Instead of discovering scaling challenges through trial and error, companies can implement proven solutions shared by community members.
Perhaps most significantly, when expanding into new markets, businesses can leverage ready-to-use community solutions. Need to add local payment methods for the German market? There's likely a pre-built, tested integration available. Looking to implement region-specific shipping rules for Great Britain? Community members have probably already developed and shared similar solutions.
6. Professional network development and strategic partnerships
Last but not least, the platform community opens doors to new business connections through industry events, community meetups, and collaborative workshops where companies share implementation experiences and get new partnerships.
Through regular community events like hackathons and specialized conferences, companies gain direct access to industry experts who have solved similar technical challenges or explored new market opportunities. The shared technical foundation makes it easier to collaborate on joint projects, integrate complementary solutions, or even develop new market offerings together. Many successful eCommerce businesses have discovered that their most valuable partnerships emerged from community connections, leading to joint ventures, shared technology development, and expanded market reach.
Engaged community comparison between Sylius, Shopware, and Magento
Now, let’s analyze the Sylius, Shopware, and Magneto platforms in terms of their community engagement and ecosystem dynamics. Effective community management plays a crucial role in maintaining active and healthy communities, addressing challenges such as engagement, moderation, and resource allocation.
This analysis of the mentioned communities reveals distinct characteristics of these ecosystems. Additionally, each platform uses different metrics to measure success in their community-building efforts, such as engagement levels and participation rates.
Cultivating an engaged community is essential for platform growth and long-term sustainability. Let’s begin with the size of a community.
Size of a community
Magento (Adobe Commerce) community
Magento stands as the industry veteran with over 130,000 implementations and the largest community. With over a decade of market presence, its community has developed an extensive knowledge base across multiple channels, including GitHub repositories with over 1500 contributors and the Slack channel with 9,500+ users.
However, Magento's story took an interesting turn when Adobe acquired the platform. While this acquisition promised new integration possibilities between the two ecosystems, it also created some uncertainty in the market and reduced the community’s impact on the product, as the commercial version, Adobe Commerce, focuses on experienced businesses and enterprises.
Shopware community
Shopware has cultivated a rapidly expanding community, particularly dominant in the German-speaking markets and Western European regions. The platform's community shows impressive growth, especially in developer engagement and merchant adoption rates. Their structured approach to community building, including active support from the solution, comprehensive documentation, and active forum participation, has created a robust ecosystem that effectively increases its customer base.
While open to community contributions, the platform strongly aligns with its roadmap. There are over 9,000 users on shopware Slack and almost 500 contributors on GitHub.
Sylius community
While smaller in numbers compared to its competitors, the Sylius community demonstrates exceptional engagement levels, particularly within the PHP and Symfony ecosystem. This highly technical community focus has resulted in superior code quality, innovative architectural solutions, and strong adherence to modern development practices. The community's tight integration with the broader Symfony ecosystem provides additional advantages, especially for businesses requiring custom eCommerce solutions with complex technical requirements. Despite its size, the community's technical depth and collaboration quality often surpass larger platforms in terms of innovation and fast problem-solving.
The Sylius Slack channel is always active and provides support from almost 7,000 Sylius developers and experts. What’s more, Sylius has already reached 8,000 stars on Github, where over 680 contributors devote their time to making Sylius better each day.
Resources and support
Magento
Magento, with the largest user base among eCommerce platforms, offers extensive documentation and educational resources accumulated over a decade of market presence. With thousands of articles, video courses, and community tutorials, developers can find solutions to many implementation challenges. User generated content, such as tutorials and reviews contributed by the community, further enriches this knowledge base and adds authenticity to the shared information. Community support is available through various channels, including Stack Overflow, blogs, and online forums, which serve as key platforms for engagement, customer interaction, and building brand loyalty. Magento also uses these channels to gather feedback from its community, helping to improve the platform and better address user needs. However, this vast knowledge base comes with its challenges - users often have to wade through outdated materials, and access to some advanced training requires significant financial investment, especially for Adobe Commerce features.
Shopware
Shopware provides comprehensive and well-structured technical documentation complemented by detailed implementation guides and API documentation. The platform maintains an active forum with regular engagement from both community members and official representatives. Clear community guidelines are in place to help maintain a positive environment and support effective moderation. Shopware ensures a safe and welcoming space for all members by consistently enforcing these guidelines and fostering trust. The forum is designed to be a welcoming space that encourages participation and open discussion. While the quality of available resources is high, there are two main limitations: a significant portion of advanced materials and discussions remains in German, and advanced support is clearly focused on Enterprise version users.
Sylius
Sylius offers excellent technical documentation, particularly valuable for developers familiar with Symfony and modern PHP practices. The platform also provides a dedicated coursefor Sylius beginner developers, helping developers quickly get up to speed with the platform. The community shows especially strong engagement through Slack channels and GitHub, where developers can expect quick, technically precise answers from developers worldwide. The support model emphasizes direct communication between developers, with active participation from the core team in technical discussions. This approach helps build deeper relationships among community members, fostering loyalty and ongoing collaboration. Community managers play a key role in facilitating discussions, maintaining engagement, and ensuring a positive environment. Additionally, Sylius leverages community interactions to gain valuable insights, using feedback and shared experiences to inform platform improvements and strategy. This technical focus results in high-quality, implementation-oriented support.
Extensions
Magento
In the case of Magento, extensions are available on the Magento Marketplace, where there are many plugins for the eCommerce store, from social media integrations to payment gateways. Magento also supports loyalty program integrations, which incentivize ongoing engagement, encourage repeat purchases, and help with customer retention. While this provides unmatched flexibility in terms of functionality expansion, a significant portion of these modules comes with considerable licensing costs.
Worth mentioning here is that Magento 2, apart from the open-source version, offers only one commercial version – Adobe Commerce, with no other flexible pricing options. Given only one paid version of a platform, a company needs to decide whether the budget can cover the cost of this license.
Shopware
The Shopware Store offers a collection of around 3000 extensions maintained under strict quality control by the platform team. While this centralized approach ensures high reliability and compatibility of available plugins, it also means a more restricted marketplace with fewer third-party options. Also, only around 500 are available for free.
Shopware regularly introduces new features and extensions designed to attract new members to its community. Certain extensions are specifically created to boost engagement and keep the community active through events, challenges, and interactive tools.
Sylius
The Sylius Store offers a smaller but highly flexible set of plugins that excel in custom implementations. While there are fewer plugins available compared to competitors, Sylius’s architecture makes it easy to create custom solutions tailored to client needs. All plugins are free and provide core functionality, which, combined with the platform’s flexibility, makes Sylius an ideal choice for businesses requiring heavily customized eCommerce stores.
Sylius also fosters collaboration around shared interests in development, encouraging members to connect over common goals and values. This collaborative environment creates a strong sense of belonging among community members. As more users contribute and participate, the Sylius community grows, enhancing brand visibility and long-term success.
Summary
Wrapping up, each platform has its own strengths in terms of community and support. Despite having a smaller community than its competitors, Sylius shows impressive growth, with monthly installations reaching around 70,000 and growing interest following the Sylius 2.0 release. Building a thriving community and a thriving online community is an ongoing process that requires consistent effort, engagement, and keeping the community engaged.
Brand loyalty and loyal customers are fostered through active community engagement, which is essential for a brand's success and long-term growth. Brand ambassadors and word of mouth marketing play a crucial role in expanding the reach of the brand's community, while word of mouth further accelerates organic growth. Offering exclusive content, members-only content, and offering exclusive benefits helps foster loyalty and create a loyal community.
Emotional connection and shared values are key to building strong relationships within the community, making members feel valued and connected. Customer feedback and valuable insights from the community inform business strategy and product development, ensuring the brand remains relevant and responsive.
Embracing community commerce is not just a buzzword—it has a real impact on e-commerce brands and the e-commerce industry as a whole by fostering authentic engagement and sustainable growth. Social media platforms, social platforms, Facebook group, and LinkedIn groups all play vital roles in building and engaging online communities.
Understanding the target audience, reducing reliance on paid ads, and ensuring that members feel appreciated and connected are essential for long-term success and a vibrant, loyal community.
https://bitbag.io/blog/sylius-2-0-new-functionalities-and-upgrade
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