Need shopping cart for social Rails app - Spree vs substruct vs roll my own

Hi all,

I'm building what could best be described as a variant of Threadless.com. Basically, it's a social app that requires some non- trivial social capabilities, combined with a shopping area for making purchases of specific crowd-sourced products. I'd like to make the transition between the two as seamless as possible, to make the user experience consistent. I've been looking at Spree and substruct and have been trying to figure out which, if either, is the best option for this project.

My observation is that Spree is a more advanced solution, but I'm not clear on how easy it is to integrate it with an existing application. For example, I have the social aspect of the site already built, and I already have a Product model. Would I be able to simply add some fields and have Spree extend upon that model? Will customizing the Spree views to be consistent with my existing layout be a hassle?

Is there any reason to use Substruct over Spree in this case?

Should I just roll my own cart? I'm a little leery of reinventing the wheel here; I'd rather finish the prototype and see if the concept yields any revenue before wasting time writing a custom-built cart for all the little features I'd like to have.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated!

I'm guessing your effort would be about the same with integrating either Spree or Substruct.

I'm currently going through Substruct and cleaning up the code base, as I've neglected it for the past couple of years while working on Cashboard. There's a lot of weird code in there that needs to be refactored, but don't hold your breath for it all to get done. Right now it's still just a side project for me :wink:

Regards & good luck with your project...