A Complete Guide To Shopware Migration

Shopware ecommerce is a PHP-based ecommerce platform that was developed in Germany more than 18 years ago. It is quite renowned for having the most live stores in Germany with a good presence in the UK market also. It has empowered many of the largest ecommerce stores in the market. Currently, it is growing in the European markets as well.

Shopware open source has a vast community of developers and users who regularly provide contributions, input, and feedback for refining it. The modular architecture of Shopware empowers the Shopware store for a quick launch. It is highly scalable and fully customized giving your business flexibility for adapting the software to meet business-specific requirements. A Shopware app has a high level of scalability by its features like varnish cache, built-in usage of Apache JMeter, Clustering tools & the on-going platform support. Shopware also has the ability to add servers for specific tasks, which allows for further scale and better response times.

Shopware has four editions to suit businesses of all sizes:

Shopware comes up with many suitable solutions for retailers at every step of the way. It supports your business model growing in the highly dynamic world of ecommerce. You should first examine which Shopware license would be able to meet your requirement for your needs, the cost of Shopware and edition depends on it. There are 4 different versions of Shopware which are open source with which you can setup up an Online Shopware Shop. Let’s go through them one by one:

1. Shopware Community Edition:

The Shopware CE is available for free of charge. It contains all the essential functions which are needed for running a Shopware Community Store. Payment methods like PayPal, Sofortüberweisung or BillPay come with the Shopware CE as a free plugin extension. Apart from this, the Shopware CE already have a mobile shop version, which is best for the new shop operators. In this version, you have the premium plugin “Merhfachänderungen” in Shopware 4, which is also available for free.

2. Shopware Professional Edition:

In Shopware Professional Edition, you will get all the features of the community edition including the Product & Customer Streams, Shopping Worlds presets features and many exclusive services that can take your business to another shore. There is also a very captivating storytelling function, which opens many marketing opportunities. Shopware Professional Edition is best for small, and medium scale businesses. This edition of Shopware is packed with native features that can help your company to claim and build a successful online business. Shopware Professional Edition costs 1295€.

3. Shopware Professional Plus Edition:

With Shopware Professional Plus Edition, you will not only get all the basic functions along with the storytelling function but also get all 12 Shopware premium plugins. These Shopware Premium Plugins can cost you alone nearly 499€. However, you need to analyze while opting for a Shopware license whether you require all the Shopware Premium Plugins. If you find that there is a need for at least 6-7 premium plugins then you must opt for the Shopware Professional Plus Edition.

4. Shopware Enterprise Version:

Shopware Enterprise is the most powerful among all the Shopware Editions. This edition is best for both B2B and B2C business models. There is no official price by Shopware for this edition, but as per our estimation, it can costs you about 30,000€ along with maintenance fees of 500€ per month. Obviously, this edition comes up with all the features of the Shopware professional as well as the Shopware Professional Plus edition and has many required sub-shops and an individual B2B solution. This edition is focused on large retailers having many multilingual stores, international corporations.

Shopware Versions:

Shopware has always come with its new editions, introducing new features and fixing bugs with each release. The best Shopware versions till now are Shopware 5 and Shopware 6. Although both these have their own updates, we are covering the major features of each version.

1. Shopware 5:

Probably, Shopware 5 is the most used platform among all Shopware versions. It is a very stable and feature-rich platform, currently being used by more than 80,000 online merchants. Shopware has announced that they will provide support & continuous development in Shopware 5 even after the release of Shopware 6, for an additional 5 years. Henceforth, you will get regular releases until the 2021 mid, bug and security fixes till 2023, and security updates till 2024. Shopware is providing additional 5-year support, regular functional releases, and security updates to Shopware 5 and all their premium plugins.

2. Shopware 6:

As the technology is continuously evolving, Shopware is also at the forefront in this race by providing continuous updates in its versions. Shopware 6 comes up with more flexibility, less complexity, and is best for meeting the challenges of tomorrow’s technical world.

The flexibility of Shopware 6 can tie-up with the pace of changing behaviour, expectations, and requirements of people. There are APIs to connect individual components like storefront or administration or 3rd Party solution providers like ERP, CRM, or PIM within a single central system. Whether you are a quite small startup or a big retailer, Shopware 6 has features for all.

Changelog Shopware 5 to Shopware 6:

After releasing Shopware 5, many changes were introduced into it including the bug and security fixes, new functionality enhancements, and others. Some of these are:

• Fixing hidden buttons in the backend modules
• ElasticSearch Support, media manager, assigning multiple categories to one shopping world
• Pseudo price snippets, REST-API manufacturer resource, Stream filter
• Connect button in the menu, cron job configuration, Inline editing of pseudo variants, new product layout, HTML emails by order status change
• Rotational product slider, custom maintenance pages, attributes for partner, etc.

If you want to know in detail, about the changes, go through this link: www.shopware.com/en/changelog-sw5/

Benefits of Shopware 6 Migration:

Shopware 6 has become a trending ecommerce platform for developing highly responsive and lucrative online stores. The Shopware b2b stores are best for medium to small scale businesses. Some of the reasons why you should migrate to Shopware 6 are:

Easy to Use Admin Panel:

The admin panel of Shopware B2B is highly user-friendly with drag & drop design for editing content, banner, and products.

3rd Party Integrations:

On Shopware 6, there is centralized access to the inventory, stock, supplier, and purchase management. It also allows purchasing on a marketplace with an increasing number of sales channels and income.

Technical Support:

Shopware is damn good in providing support through phone or e-mail, so whatever or whenever you face the issue, it will get resolve in real-time.

Cost-Effective:

The cost of setting up your business on Shopware is quite less in comparison to the other ecommerce platforms. The Shopware CE is free to download and its general site can cost for 2-3 thousand Euros. In a similar manner, the cost rises as you opt for better packs. The costing can also vary as per your custom requirements but whatever the requirements are, many find the Shopware costing in their budget while others seem expensive.

SEO Shopware:

A major advantage of Shopware is the SEO possibilities for producer sites. If you have many items from a specific producer, you should think about optimizing the relevant producer site.

The other reasons are:

• Numerous built-in features for selling products online
• Configurable HTML and text emails to the users
• Excellent support to the users
• One page checkout and guest checkout
• Abandon cart recovery tool, and in-built data security plugin
• High level of security
• Design customization
• Less complex and more flexible

After the completion of Shopware 6 migration, you will find numerous results like an increase in conversion ratio, better customer retention, and cost-effectiveness.

Also Read: How to Develop eCommerce Website – Complete Guide

Why Migrate to Shopware 6?

Migration to Shopware simply means to change your current ecommerce platform. You can migrate your current ecommerce store to the Shopware regardless of whether it is built-in Magento, Woocommerce, Shopify, Prestashop, or Shopware 5. Let’s know the mechanism of each Shopware migration…

1. Shopware Magento Migration

For migrating from Magento to Shopware, many extensions can be used for migration. Such extensions are capable of moving your Magento data, such as products, customers, and other related data types to your fresh Shopware store. Firstly, you need to do the local Magento installation, thereafter the Plugin installation. Then you need to set up the shipping & payment methods, and then establish a connection. After the connection is set up and modified as per your requirements, you need to modify the metadata. Check the migration of data in the migration overview. You can select what data you want to migrate from your connection to the Shopware 6 shop. After selecting the data, click on the Start Migration within 4 steps: Review, Read, Write, and Media Download.

Now there would be a checking to identify whether the data from the old shop can be assigned to the new shop. Data like payment methods, shipping methods, or tax rates are not transferred automatically. If data in your Magento Shop still change after your migration, you can repeat the migration process at any time. Simply select the data you want to migrate again under Data selection and then click on Start migration again in the upper left corner.

The data which can be migrated from Magento to Shopware is Products, Products Categories, Manufacturers, Taxes, Customers, Orders, Reviews, Multistore, Multiple languages, CMS Pages. So, Shopware Magento migration is a straightforward process.

2. Shopware Woocommerce Migration/ Shopware PrestaShop Migration:

For migration of other platforms to Shopware like WooCommerce to Shopware or PrestaShop to Shopware, you can follow the same procedure. Firstly you need to install the Migration plugin from the community store and then install it by Plugin Manager.

However, before beginning the Shopware migration, check these points:

• In the backend, check to see if all the system requirements have been fulfilled, else you will face errors. Go Configurations > System info
• You must have access to a database that should be locally present in Shopware.
• Create a standard manufacturer.
• The shared property field from your old system should already be created in your Shopware installation as a property groupset.
• Language sub shops must be activated in advance so that they can be mapped later on.

After the migration, check whether the number ranges are continuous and adjust if required.

Before beginning the Shopware migration you need to create a new file and database backup of your Shopware installation, after this start building links to the shop system. When you set up the links, you need to import all-important shop settings. You can choose what setting you require for the migration. When creating a new item, the manufacturer field is required and so a manufacturer must be selected from the list.

Some tips for Shopware Migration:

• Optimize the MySQL server
• Optimize the migrated database
• In Prestashop, items should be correctly into configurators, and the passwords can be migrated if the salt is entered.
• In WooCommerce, the payment means can’t be imported, the default supplier would be used, and WooCommerce also doesn’t support graduated prices hence only the first price would import.

3. Shopify to Shopware Migration:

There isn’t a ready plugin by Shopware from Shopify to Shopware migration. However, for migrating from Shopify to Shopware 6 you can firstly take the complete back up of your complete Shopify store, most importantly its database. Then you need to hire a Shopware developer who will set up the Shopware store and will migrate the database, set up the design, and important functionalities that you require in your store. During migration, the developer will also firstly analyze your Shopify store to check whether the current features & functionalities of your Shopify store are compatible with the Shopware or not.

4. Shopware 5 to Shopware 6 Migration:

For upgrading from Shopware 5 to Shopware 6, firstly you need to install the Shopware 6 plugin. After installation, create the connection to your existing Shopware 5 shop and after connection creation, edit the connection.

During migration, some metadata will be truncated hence you need to modify metadata. Thereafter, take an overview of the migration. You can select the data which you want to migrate from your connection to the Shopware 6 shop. The list also shows you whether it is shop data or plug-in data and how many data sets are migrated. Now you can begin the migration. In the migration, firstly there would be a data check for identifying whether the data from the old shop can be migrated to the new shop. Then, there would be a data read, all data from the source shop that is to be migrated is read. Now, the migrated data would be written in Shopware 6. When the data got written, the media files from the old Shopware 5 installation are downloaded and loaded into Shopware 6 Media Management.

Also Read: Ecommerce Mobile App Development Guide – Cost and Features

Conclusion:

Shopware is a trending platform with all the essential features you may require on your Ecommerce platform. It can be easily optimized for SEO. It makes automatically most of the basic search engine optimization settings. You only need to re-adjust them manually, if needed. At Emizentech, we are having the best Shopware developers who can develop you a fully-responsive and secured Shopware store or you can also hire a dedicated Shopware developer. We hope this guide helped you understand ecommerce replatforming.