Our road to Saleor Commerce
A short six months ago, based on community enthusiasm for Saleor Open Source, we redoubled our efforts to make Saleor the enterprise go-to for developers finding Shopify inflexible and Magento non-performant.
To be honest, we weren’t sure what enterprise go-to would mean for Saleor. We only knew our work keeping brands on the cutting edge of e-commerce had gained huge traction and that we’d fielded hundreds of requests for: more baseline functionality, a cloud version, support for apps.
We’ve spent our development careers contributing to and advocating for OSS. We’ve seen a lot of successful OSS projects, but also some failures to strike the right OSS-to-commercial balance. Projects with no commercial utility often fall by the wayside while others become so commercialized that their OSS soul becomes unrecognizable. We determined to find a path to make Saleor OSS both sustainable and foundational to who we are. We think we found our path.
Through interviews with many of you, we’ve discovered that everything we do with Saleor is about customer-centricity. Although we play a supporting role to the developer’s lead one, our end game is helping developers deliver customer-centric e-commerce that the boilerplates can’t match. What’s customer-centricity mean at Saleor? E-commerce that is ultra-fast; dynamic; personalized and beautiful on all devices. These platform benefits are always claimed and seldom delivered.
But, we also want to apply customer-centricity to Saleor’s relationships with developers. Hopefully, our commitment to developers has already been made clear in the OSS project, but as we look to build some paid applications around Saleor OSS, customer-centricity will mean ensuring that we’re honouring the developer’s role in doing what’s right for the project.
For example, we think our Cloud offering will add a lot of value, but if it doesn’t for a certain project, we’ll be just as excited to see that developer’s project on OSS. We’re also working to minimize vendor lock-in; we’re aware that today’s fit for cloud may be better served on OSS tomorrow and vice-versa, so we’ll maintain enough continuity between Cloud and OSS to minimize switching costs. And we’re building a Saleor Apps marketplace and any costs for that will finance proper code reviews ensuring Saleor-vetted code and remedying a terrible weakness of other platforms. I could go on with other examples, but suffice it to say, a customer-centric mindset will keep Saleor developer-friendly.
So, to close out a letter that is a bit longer than my usual, I would like to first thank the Saleor community again for its support. Every time that you take a minute to send us a link to your Saleor-based project, we share it on our Slack channel and the whole team is amped. Second, speaking of team, I believe ours is among the best in the world — thank you Saleor/Mirumee team! Third, I would like to offer a summary of what’s in store for what we’ve decided to call Saleor Commerce:
- We’re onboarding our first customers for our AWS Saleor Cloud offering. The early results are amazing. We’re excited about the performance gains and developer savings, but also things meant to ease the workload such as the CLI tool.
- We’re forming an advisory board of what will become Saleor Partners, a highly-vetted network of agencies and independent developers experienced with Saleor.
- Our data science team is working hard to improve the business statistics available in the Saleor dash and to launch Saleor AI, both aimed at enhanced decision making.
- We’re creating the infrastructure required to host Saleor Apps built by ourselves and by other vetted partners
As I review the notes from our most recent release, I can’t help but think how far Saleor has come in such a short period of time. It’s astonishing really. But, as I reflect on what customer centricity will mean for Saleor OSS, Saleor Cloud, Saleor Apps and Saleor AI, I have no doubt that the best is yet to come.
Thank you!
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