This review is sponsored by Aimeos. We do not allow our advertisers to influence our reviews, however.
Aimeos is an open-source PHP framework for ecommerce stores. It works for B2C and B2B applications – and can be used to create custom online shops and marketplaces.
Aimeos is an ecommerce extension for Laravel, Symfony, and TYPO3. The software package integrates seamlessly with those three platforms and allows you to customize everything to your needs, making it an ideal choice for both standard and highly customized online stores.
In this Aimeos review, we’ll take a closer look at the scalable ecommerce framework, including technical details, who the ecommerce platform is right for, use cases, features, and more.
What is the Aimeos E-Commerce Framework?
The Aimeos ecommerce platform is a scalable framework that allows you to create ecommerce platforms like Shopify, online marketplaces like Amazon, reseller portals, custom online stores, and more.
Founded in 2015, the company is based in Hamburg, Germany. Aimeos offers support for small businesses as well as enterprise-level companies.
Technical Details
To use Aimeos, you must use Laravel, Symfony, or TYPO3. It works with Linux, Unix, MacOS, and Windows. It’s compatible with Apache, Nginx, and IIS web servers.
It works with a variety of database servers such as MySQL, SQL Server, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL. It supports PHP frameworks 7.1+ and 8.0+.
It supports headless ecommerce solutions built on JSON REST API, and uses HTML on the standard front end.
It supports numerous languages, including English, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, French, and many more.
Who is Aimeos Right For?
Aimeos is best for those with technical skills, or companies with the budget to hire developers, as there is a bit of a learning curve. Though plenty of support documentation is available, this ecommerce system isn’t for beginners. Since it has all the needed functionality to create a SaaS platform like Shopify or BigCommerce, it’s more complex than those systems designed for technical novices.
If you need a platform that makes it easy to incorporate your ecommerce software with your customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and other data sources into your online store or marketplace shop system, then Aimeos could be the solution you’re looking for.
Aimeos Use Cases
Aimeos has all the features you need to create a robust solution for your ecommerce store.
SaaS Platform and Market places
With the Marketplace extension, you can create your own multi-vendor marketplace that allows vendors to create their own storefronts. Customers can use a single basket regardless of which vendors they choose to shop with. Every seller has access to the items customers order, along with the order information and the ability to update order status.
You can create multiple specialized marketplaces to target each segment of your audience while merging all the goods into an overall parent marketplace. You won’t lose any performance. You’ll maintain fine-tuned control over what’s available at each level within the marketplaces.
Dropshipping and Affiliate Marketing
It’s possible to use Add items to inherit properties for dropshipping. You can make these items available to merchants in their shops, where they can then set their own pricing, images, and product descriptions only accessible within their shops.
Use the Sites extension to create reseller/affiliate systems so you can earn more money by letting others promote your products and services.
Complex B2B Applications
Use the TYPO3 content management framework or Laravel to create complex applications. Using the CMS with the Aimeos ecommerce platform makes it possible to build more complex marketplaces, multi-brand portals, and more. International brands can easily build multiple websites for each country they operate in and connect multiple sales channels into a single source.
Aimeos Features
- Multi-channel, multi-language, multi-inventory, multi-currency, and multi-vendor features
- Fully SEO optimized with deep links to all products and categories, product and category names as part of the HTML title, XML sitemap generation, canonical URLs to eliminate duplicate content, and more.
- Choose from over 100 payment gateways, including 2Checkout, Klarna Checkout, Braintree, PayPal, Sage Pay, and Authorize.net
- Host over billion products in multiple product catalogs with the Aimeos #gigacommerce extension.
- Sell product bundles, digital products, configurable products, customizable products, and event products
- Support for a subscription-based revenue model
- Fast server response times, as quick as 20ms
- Aimeos supports more than 10,000 orders a day
- Extensive marketplace with addons and extensions to add more features, such as email marketing, kitting, review management, and more.
- Customizable checkout process
- Use the Aimeos Laravel package to integrate Aimeos directly into your existing application.
Aimeos Integrations and Extensions
The Aimeos Marketplace has a variety of extensions you can use to add more features to your website. These include:
- Omnipay PHP library
- Theme Berlin (a theme from the Aimeos creators) €89.00+ VAT/year
- Market Place and Complex B2B €1,349.00+ VAT/year (discounts available for 2+ years)
- ElasticSearch (required to extend your product library to a billion products) €899.00+ VAT/year (discounts available for 2+ years)
- VAT calculation and ID check €179.00+ VAT/year (discounts available for 2+ years)
- Customer Group Extension
- And more.
Ease of Use
Aimeos won’t be easy to use if you’re not technically savvy. You’ll need a hosting plan that supports Aimeos – and the support forums indicate that it doesn’t work well with shared web hosting solutions. You’ll need a dedicated hosting server with support for PHP.
Once installed, the backend is easily accessible from https://yourdomain.com/admin. You have a ton of configurable options and customization choices, with a series of comprehensive options to make the site your own.
The dashboard makes it easy to add products, integrate product data sources, set pricing, shipping, etc.
The full-featured HTML frontend is easy to use and customize for a user-friendly frontend presentation.
User Support and Customer Service
If you need Aimeos support outside of what’s available in the customer documentation or the dedicated online help forum, Aimeos offers paid support. Users can purchase 2 hours of customer support available in English or German for € 219.00+ VAT. With paid Aimeos support, you get:
- Personal email support
- Direct developer support
- Remove support via SSH or web
You’ll receive a response within 24 business hours. Support is available Monday-Friday from 9-17 UTC. You can contact the Aimeos review team for more information if you require more than two hours of support. Many users report an excellent support response.
Aimeos Alternatives
If the Aimeos framework doesn’t seem right for you, check out these alternatives.
Adobe Commerce (Formerly Magento)
Aimeos rates higher than Adobe Commerce on the Capterra review platform, coming in at 4.8 compared to 4.3. Aimeos is far more resource efficient than Adobe Commerce’s heavy architecture. Adobe Commerce makes it difficult to scale to more than 50,000 products, whereas Aimeos handles 100,000 out of the box and can go to over one billion with the #gigacommerce extension.
Adobe Commerce is a standalone framework, but Aimeos integrates with Laravel, TYPO3, and Symfony. Aimeos also supports more languages than Adobe Commerce. Additional language packs are available from third-party vendors – though they may come at an additional cost.
Both platforms have an extensive library of add-ons that enable nearly unlimited features and customization based on your business needs.
PrestaShop
PrestaShop is highly similar to Aimeos, but is more geared toward freelancers and small businesses. It can handle enterprise sites, but AImeos is better suited to meet the needs of enterprise businesses. Both platforms are open-source, but Prestashop offers a fully hosted and managed solution for those needing a bit more technical help.
Is Aimeos the Right Platform for Your Ecommerce Website?
If you’re looking for a simple ecommerce solution, the Aimeos e-commerce package Aimeos is likely more than you need. The huge system has many benefits for larger projects, including multi site projects, but for a simple store, has more features than you may need.
Many users report a very positive experience with the shop framework, but it’s not for people who don’t know how to code in PHP. If you’re not an experienced developer, other software is more practical.
Leave Your Aimeos Review
Do you use Aimeos, or have you used it in the past? Share your experience with our readers to help them with their decision. Please be sure to mention whether you use Aimeos TYPO3, Laravel, or Symfony.
