Adding a e-commerce facility to an existing rails application

Question

I have an existing Rails 3.1 application with a model Products with price, description, etc...

The website owner is now considering adding a e-commerce functionality to use with the existing products in the database.

What would be an effective way to achieve this?

Would adding Spree to an existing application be recommended?

Or would building from scratch a shopping cart using something like Activemerchant be more suitable?

Answer 1

I have same problem one year ago at work. Options are three:

1. Linking an ecommerce like Spree using OAuth in order to share your webapp authentication
2. Include parts from other open source solutions as ror_commerce or Substruct
3. Building from scratch: not so simple, there a lot of issues about payment, warehouse management and so on

We choose 1. 'cause Spree it is a complete ecommerce solution with a big community and a lot of plugins. I want to suggest to watch to ror_ecommerce because it is an elegant and simple piece of software.