6 Reasons Why Ruby on Rails is Best for E-commerce in 2025

The dramatic boom of e-commerce in the recent decade is bigger than ever. The rise of internet penetration and mobile usage nudges today’s customers towards e-commerce platforms for everything from groceries, clothing, medicines, vegetables and what not.

With e-commerce stores offering various benefits for users such as home delivery, multiple payment options, and discounts, it is apparent that the market for e-commerce is only going to keep growing in 2025.

“According to BuiltWith, as of 2025, there are 28 million eCommerce sites worldwide—a 2.9% increase from the previous year. This equates to approximately2,225 new eCommerce websites launched daily between 2024 and 2025.”

It clearly indicates the fierce competition in the eCommerce market and reiterates the importance of trying only the best framework for building e-commerce websites.

Despite being around for nearly two decades, Ruby on Rails continues to be a go-to choice for startups and enterprises alike, powering some of the biggest e-commerce platforms in the world (yes, Shopify, we’re looking at you!).If you’re considering building or upgrading an online store, you are at the right place to understand why RoR can be the right fit for your business—and why so many companies continue to trust it for their e-commerce needs.

Growth in retail eCommerce sales over the years

Top 6 reasons to choose RoR framework for Ecommerce

1. Rapid Development and Easy Coding

Whether it is launching a new ecommerce store or rolling out new features or making an iteration in the checkout flow or discount model or anything else on the platform, speed matters the most in this competitive market. And this is where Ruby on Rails stands out. With its "convention over configuration" approach, it leaves no place for unnecessary setups and endless configurations for developers.

Unlike other frameworks that need manually setting up routing, databases, and structures, RoR comes with smart defaults. Meaning, you can jump straight into coding and get everything set up and running in no time.

Another big advantage of RoR is its clean and organized code structure. It makes programming in Ruby on rails easy for developers to manage and scale your e-commerce platform efficiently, eliminating the need for extensive manual configurations.

While Python and PHP also follow similar conventions, they require additional customization for setting up complex apps, which can slow down development compared to RoR’s streamlined setup process. This makes ROR a smart choice for businesses that want to move quickly without getting bogged down in complex configurations.

2. Flexibility and Customization

Every e-com business is different and has its own unique needs. Be it a custom pricing model, a personalized shopping experience, or an AI-driven recommendation system, flexibility is crucial in adapting your platform to these requirements. Your tech stack needs to adapt, not hold you back.

With RoR’s modular architecture and extensive library of gems, you get all the flexibility to add or tweak components as needed. Whether you want to build a subscription-based checkout flow or hyper-localized product catalog or just to integrate with a third-party system, RoR gives you the freedom to do so with minimal friction, without being locked into cookie-cutter solutions.

Although other frameworks like Django and Laravel are as powerful as ROR, they often require more effort for complex integrations. However, with the vast ecosystem of gems, developers of RoR can easily pull in the right tools and customize or build the functionalities from scratch with a minimal timeframe, allowing your e-commerce businesses to move faster with fewer roadblocks.

3. Scalability

As your e-commerce business scales, the focus will not be just on handling a traffic surge—it’s about keeping operations smooth with your expansion of product catalog, rise of customer orders, and new features roll out. Thus, choosing a framework that scales smoothly is essential for your ecommerce business. If your platform slows down, customers leave, revenue takes a hit.

With Ruby on Rails, your business can scale without unnecessary complexity. For example, Shopify chose RoR at its start and now handles billions in transactions. Despite its massive growth, it still relies on RoR for its robust ecosystem and high-traffic performance.

RoR’s horizontal scalability allows businesses to distribute workloads efficiently. Whether it is order processing, product updates, or payment handling, all can run smoothly even during peak seasons without slowing down the customer experience.

Besides, as RoR is cloud-friendly and works well with containerized deployments, you don’t have to invest in expensive infrastructure upgrades. Instead, you can scale gradually, keeping operational costs in check while expanding your reach.

4. Community Support

With dynamic pricing strategies, headless commerce, and AI-driven recommendations, the e-commerce industry in 2025 is evolving at an impeccable speed. At this point in time, simply having your business on a great platform is no longer enough to stay competitive.

From optimizing checkout flows and integrating new payment gateways to improving site performance, businesses need to adapt and find quick solutions so as to retain customers.

When building a platform with RoR, you can tap into one of the most active and experienced developer communities in the world. With thousands of contributors and a wealth of resources, you’ll always have support.

At RailsFactory, we're proud to be active contributors to this community—and as sponsors of RubyConf for the past three years, we remain committed to supporting and advancing the Rails ecosystem.

Whether it’s debugging a performance issue or implementing a cutting-edge feature, there’s almost always an answer available. The result? You can find solutions faster. It, in turn, translates to reduced development time, lower costs, and faster innovation cycles for businesses—no matter how fast the industry shifts.

5. Security

Trust is everything when it comes to the world of E-com business transactions. It is the primary responsibility of businesses to make customers feel that their personal and payment details are safe.

According to Juniper research, the value of eCommerce fraud will rise to $107 billion in 2029. It clearly implies that with the evolvement of technological advancements, AI-driven attacks and sophisticated phishing schemes are also on the rise. One security breach, and not only do you risk financial loss—you also lose credibility.

A framework like Ruby on Rails (RoR) takes security seriously and comes packed with built-in defenses to keep your business data locked down. From cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery to various other safeguards against SQL injection, Ruby on Rails software ensures that sensitive information of your business stays out of the wrong hands.

Besides, with every new Rails upgrade, RoR team introduces several security enhancements to bolster the framework's robustness against common vulnerabilities. The deployment simplicity and dependency reduction for security features like Active Record Encryption and Built-in Authentication Generator in Rails 8 emphasize it.

6. Rich Ecosystem and Libraries

Nowadays, the e-commerce market is more demanding, and consumer expectations are going sky-high. Everyone wants everything fast and customized. If businesses fail to adapt to new-age customers' expectations, they can easily let potential customers slip through their fingers. (You drop the ball, and your competitors will happily run with it!).

In a world where speed and efficiency matter, Rails framework can help your developers quickly integrate and implement required functionalities without writing everything from scratch with its thousands of pre-built libraries.

Why build complex payment flows when you can use 'stripe' or 'braintree' gems?

Need to manage an extensive product catalog with advanced filtering? ‘Ransack' gem

Want real-time shipping calculations and carrier integration? ‘Active_shipping’ gem

And so on.

In short, by tapping into a vast library of RoR’s high-quality and open-source solutions, you can focus on what really matters instead of spending time on foundational work and will have a massive competitive advantage in the years ahead.

Final Words

E-commerce, a trillion-dollar industry, continues to expand year after year. Whether you're new or already in the game looking to enhance your existing platform, Ruby on Rails is definitely worth considering.

While other frameworks exist, Ruby on rails' future is promising and stands out due to its scalability, robust security, and a rich ecosystem of ready-to-use libraries, making it a go-to choice for both developers and businesses alike.

Ruby on Rails is constantly evolving, ensuring the framework becomes faster, more efficient, and increasingly capable with each new version. By choosing it, you're not just gaining the flexibility, reliability, and community support your business needs—you're also positioning yourself to lead in the competitive e-commerce industry.

When you're ready to take the next step with Ruby on Rails for your e-commerce store, feel free to reach out to our team—we're sure you will love the results!

All the best for your e-commerce venture!