The Story behind VELOX Ecommerce
We have been building and maintaining ecommerce solutions since 1998, handling migrations, consolidations, expansions, and customizations for pretty much every edge case you can think of.
A recurring theme was the limitations of standard solutions: out-of-the-box solutions are complex and database-heavy and designed to store vast amounts of data you may never use. This causes performance issues. And because the systems are designed with a monolithic architecture, they are difficult to scale. They offer many functionalities you don’t need. But they don’t provide the functionalities you actually need.
So they deteriorate performance twice by:
1. running all the functionalities you don’t need and
2. having to add the functionalities you actually need.
After reviewing around 100 standard ecommerce solutions, we found that not one system was capable of doing what we needed efficiently. So we decided to build it ourselves. From the ground up, VELOX was designed with performance and scalability at its core. How did we do this? By reducing complexity.
Standard solutions don’t perform well when you need customization: You’re forced to add layers of extra code, further compromising performance. As if that weren’t bad enough, you’re often locked into outdated architecture and technologies. And let’s not even mention license fees for outdated software that only gets security patch updates.
So we’ve built VELOX as a bridge between what you already have and what you actually need. We don’t get stuck in an outdated technology because we plan ahead and design solutions that remain viable for the next ten years.
Because we support our clients' projects over decades, maintainability is particularly important to us. We’re the ones that have to deal with new challenges. So keeping our solutions up to date is in our own interest as well as our clients’. Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS) is at the heart of everything we do.
Almost every ecommerce solution builds on open source, yet few developers give anything back. It was always clear that VELOX should be different, and fully open source. We do not believe in vendor lock-in as a business model. Locking software behind patents and licenses holds innovation back. Open collaboration builds better solutions.
This means that VELOX comes with no license fees and no lock-in. You have full access to the source code and can adapt it at any time.
Giving something back matters to us. We also want VELOX to be educational: a real, working example of how microservice architecture is applied in live projects. Feel free to explore our source code, use it as-is, adapt it, or take inspiration to build your own solution.
VELOX is built by the team at Sly AG in Zürich. René Hämmerli co-founded it and shaped its direction, drawing on nearly three decades in ecommerce across almost every role. René has worked across the full lifecycle of ecommerce applications: architecture, development, operations and optimization.
VELOX is a team effort: most of the code is written by our developers, with key contributors including Marco Dell'Anna and Cornel Eberle.
Co-Founder
Shaped VELOX's direction, drawing on nearly three decades across the full lifecycle of ecommerce applications.
Senior Software Engineer
Backend architect responsible for VELOX's service layer, where data models and APIs are kept deliberately simple so they last.
Senior Software Engineer
Works across the stack with a focus on the frontend, turning complex commerce requirements into interfaces that stay fast and maintainable.
We share a simple conviction that runs through the whole product: the real craft is making complex requirements simple (KISS). We support our clients' projects over years, so we build VELOX to last, and we keep it open, so others can build on it.
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