Sylius, Akeneo — do these words sound familiar? Do you use these solutions within your company? If so, you will be delighted to hear the news: an alliance between two different e-commerce tools that is going to help you a great deal.
Let’s quickly sum up Sylius
In this section, we are not going to go into the details of Sylius. Several articles on the subject have been written on our blog:
- Sylius: a PHP e-commerce framework based on Symfony
- Sylius Plus, the e-commerce framework’s enterprise offering and a marketplace bundle
If you haven’t seen them yet, we invite you to read them before continuing with this article (unless, of course, you are already a Sylius expert).
To be brief, Sylius is an open-source e-commerce framework — but not only that, it is also headless. Of course, here we are not talking about heads but about front ends. Yes, Sylius is an e-commerce framework that focuses essentially on the back end. But why that choice? It’s very simple: by handling the back-end part, Sylius leaves companies free to customise their front end easily and to make it unique, without constraints or rules. This is possible thanks to a REST API that makes it possible to connect any JS library. Finally, Sylius has always offered numerous access points for connecting ERPs, CRMs, email-sending services, and so on.
So what is new at Sylius? Before answering that, we are going to talk about Akeneo.
A few words about Akeneo
Akeneo is a PIM (Product Information Management) that allows companies to save a huge amount of time, that reduces the number of errors and that makes updates easier.
Indeed, the PIM solution is a genuine improvement in e-commerce. It allows companies to centralise and manage all their product data in one single place.
That way, everyone involved in creating product pages, such as the photographer or the copywriter, can add their information directly in the right place without having to search through a multitude of files.
But that’s not all: thanks to Akeneo PIM, it is possible to keep up to date all the media used by the company to promote its products. Here we are talking about omnichannel, or an omnichannel solution. When a change is saved in Akeneo, these data are exported to the various IS (Information System) platforms and, following on from that, to customers’ various devices, automatically updating the products concerned. A real time-saver!
So we have, on the one hand, an e-commerce framework that makes it possible to manage the back-end part and, on the other, a PIM that makes it possible to manage the multitude of product data. What if these two solutions could be connected in order to make better use of them and to make the process of putting products online and managing them even easier?
A perfect connection
It’s done! Sylius and Akeneo have joined forces and have developed an extension making it possible to connect Sylius’s e-commerce shop with Akeneo PIM’s product catalogue.
Thanks to this extension, you no longer need to re-enter your product descriptions, nor to update your product pages. As soon as you create a new one or make a change in Akeneo, Akeneo will take care of automatically sending the information to your Sylius e-commerce framework. Simple, quick and effective — no more headaches and no more wasted time.
This extension also includes other advantages. Once the link has been established between the two solutions, you will be able to export the attributes, the attribute options and also the categories you have created in Akeneo to Sylius. You will also be able to carry out a mapping of attributes, of their options and finally of images.
This new extension is very useful for all users of the Akeneo or Sylius systems. Indeed, by linking these two very powerful e-marketing tools, it is possible to gain time and efficiency.
However, Sylius is not the only one to have this Akeneo connector. The e-commerce framework is coming to compete with other CMSs. Indeed, it has already been more than a year since the e-commerce platform Magento 2 gained the Akeneo connector. What do you think of this new extension?
For more articles, head over to our Numendo blog!
