The future of Solidus

When Solidus 1.0.0 was released eight years ago, custom eCommerce applications were all the rage: on one hand, they were a necessity, as there were very few usable eCommerce platforms, and a lot of functionality had to be created from scratch. On the other, brands had a massive desire to innovate not just through their marketing and products, but also through their shopping experience.

Back then, Solidus was the perfect answer to a pressing need: it provided brands with all the primitives to build a large-scale online store, but still enabled them to customize every aspect of the experience. It’s no surprise that Solidus gave birth to some of the largest DTC brands in the world, many of which are still on the platform eight years and billions in revenue later.

During this time, the DTC industry has evolved a lot, as have the technologies that serve it. We went from not having any options to an abundance of SaaS platforms, apps, and system integrators. In many cases, DTC itself went from being the only sales channel to one of many channels a brand needs to achieve sustainable success.

As the needs and priorities of our users shifted, we knew we’d need a significant change in direction if we wanted Solidus to continue to thrive. That’s why we spent the last year talking to brands and agencies using Solidus and other platforms about their businesses and the role that DTC plays in them, and strategizing how we could align Solidus’ capabilities to best serve their needs.

Our new brand, website, and product vision are the result of that work, and we’re incredibly excited to finally unveil them today.

More features, more integrations, and more opportunities for innovation

As eCommerce technology has become increasingly commoditized in recent years, Solidus has continued to serve the needs of those brands large enough to require much more sophisticated workflows than the average DTC operation, or ambitious enough to use their digital experience as a competitive differentiator. By providing unmatched flexibility, we became known as the eCommerce platform for brands that don’t fit the mold.

But today’s brands are nimbler than before: they invest more surgically, and they move more quickly. They appreciate being able to innovate where needed, but they also want the reassurance of a foundation that’s “good enough” and that they can build upon.

To accommodate this need, we are doubling down on operator and developer fundamentals. That involves projects such as our new admin dashboard, which not only features a more modern UX, but also includes a UI kit that allows developers to build custom admin sections much more efficiently and with full forward compatibility. We will keep rolling out more and more native functionality and integrations, offering robust out-of-the-box solutions for problems currently solved through extensions or custom code.

Our goal is to offer all table stakes functionality right out of the gate, while at the same time retaining the ability for brands to customize every nook and cranny of their customer and operator experience. If you need it, each new feature we release comes with the developer primitives to make it truly yours. But if you don’t, everything should Just Work.™

Unveiling Solidus Cloud: the power of on-premises, the convenience of SaaS

Solidus could never be as powerful without its underlying technology and deployment architecture: an open-source, on-premises solution provides brands complete control over their store—a level of freedom that’s out of reach even with the most flexible headless platform.

Unfortunately, those same factors also create a significant maintenance overhead: on-premises applications require dedicated infrastructure and must be upgraded as new Solidus versions are released. This can quickly become a burden, especially for smaller teams that work under tight deadlines and are constantly being pulled in a million different directions.

We knew we could do better, so we set out to solve this problem by offering brands the same flexibility they’re accustomed to, with none of the maintenance overhead they currently incur—and that’s how Solidus Cloud was born.

Solidus Cloud combines the customizability of an open-source, on-premises solution with the hands-off experience of running a SaaS product. When you launch your brand on Solidus Cloud, you get a fully provisioned Solidus infrastructure that you control entirely: you can develop your customizations locally and deploy them just like you’ve always done, with no restrictions whatsoever. And when a new Solidus version is released, your application is upgraded automatically.

Solidus Cloud is a profoundly innovative product: no SaaS platform offers nearly the same level of power, and no on-premises platform offers nearly the same level of flexibility. We believe Solidus Cloud will create new paths to success for brands held back by traditional eCommerce solutions, and we can’t wait to see how our customers will use it.

Solidus Cloud is currently being beta-tested with select brands. If you’d like to give it a try, you can fill out our Get Started form!

The future of eCommerce is (still) custom

As we enter a new era of eCommerce and DTC, we believe more than ever in the power of customization. The DTC landscape is getting increasingly saturated, and for many brands, a bespoke shopping experience is a compelling way to stand out, drive incremental revenue and achieve sustainable growth. The fact that Solidus still powers some of the largest brands in our industry is a testament to its capabilities.

And while most incumbents are just now catching up to their customers’ requests for more freedom, our mission requires us to take the opposite journey: we already offer all the power a brand could hope for. The time has come to remove all barriers between that power and the customers that can wield it.

This is the future of eCommerce and the future of Solidus, and we’re very much looking forward to walking this path together.