Broadleaf Commerce
Customized Open Source Framework for Accelerated eCommerce

Open source technology has become the vehicle of choice for eCommerce startups, owing to its ability to provide lower operational costs, interoperability, qualitative code, and vendor lock-in free capabilities. In such a scenario, an established name in this space is Addison, TX, based Broadleaf Commerce, which specializes in open source commerce, providing platform solutions for customized enterprise eCommerce. The firm’s framework consists of an administrative platform, specialized tools, and service models to facilitate the development of customized eCommerce solutions. “The sole goal of our company is to provide businesses with flexible framework that allows improvement of eCommerce channel and acceleration of ROI,” delineates Brian Polster, President, Broadleaf Commerce.

The Broadleaf Commerce architecture leverages open source Java technologies such as Spring Framework and Hibernate. “The properties of Spring allows us to proffer a feature-rich eCommerce framework that can easily be extended, customized, controlled by a developer, and deployed on any number of servers,” says Polster. The company, by virtue of these features, possesses the ability to support B2C, B2B and B2B2C firms. In one such instance, The Container Store, a Texas-based retailer of storage and organization products, needed to replace their existing eCommerce platform, in order to meet their growing business requisites. The client’s requirement for a highly scalable platform was effectively met by leveraging Broadleaf’s framework that possesses advanced customization features. The company’s framework enabled the client to develop a platform that improved integration capabilities between store and online systems. Additionally, the newly developed eCommerce site allowed the client to manage six times more customer traffic.

From extending Broadleaf’s entity to adding more custom entities, the company’s framework allows replacing any entity without having the need to change Broadleaf’s libraries or source code.

The sole goal of our company is to provide businesses with flexible framework that allows improvement of eCommerce channel and acceleration of ROI

The company allows such extension through its Context Merging process that empowers the firms to override any default configurations and add new data entities. Such flexibility of the framework encourages the organizations to mould every element of the framework according to their requirements.

Besides flexibility, the framework also supports the management of customers, orders, products and content for the eCommerce sites. By incorporating all the essential rudiments that online retailers might need, the framework includes the ability to manage the cart, catalog, checkout process, marketing and merchandising promotions. “The knack of our Broadleaf’s framework to handle multitude of tasks facilitates organizations to focus on other business development initiatives without paying much attention towards site maintenance,” expresses Polster. In addition to the basic management of products and catalog information, Broadleaf provides a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to manage items such as blogs and other pre-defined content pages. The content pages can be further processed to ensure forwarding the right content to the right audience.

Assisting the online retailers in similar ways, the company focuses on expanding the scope and scale of their framework by offering improved services for the enterprises. The company’s broad range of services—Developer Team Training, Customization Services, Quick start, Proof of Concept, Integration Services—helps developers to save time and dramatically improve their performance. “Our experts provide interactive, hands-on-training for organizations to embrace the best practices of open source framework,” proclaims Polster.

Moving forward, Broadleaf Commerce is intent on making enterprises successful with regards to their goals around eCommerce. The company will work towards expanding and developing their framework’s functionality to suit the needs of modern websites based on Java.