Why Shopware 6 Is Gaining Popularity Among eCommerce Platforms?

Made in Germany, and after gaining huge popularity in the UK, Irish, and US ecommerce market, Shopware is on a huge rise with every upcoming version. It is giving an edge-to-edge competition to every other ecommerce development platform. The Shopware platform becomes completely open-source since 2016, and since then its active installations have been increased rapidly. The company has recently released its latest version i.e. Shopware 6. The platform has grown up quite fast as an ecommerce solution, factoring everything necessary for any online business. In this article, we will be discussing all the different aspects of Shopware 6.

Shopware 6 eCommerce Platform

Shopware is a German ecommerce development platform, open-source in nature, and highly focused on improving customer experience. The company was established in 2000, and now they have more nearly 80,000 happy clients. The company has been consistent in upgrading its platforms and now its latest version is Shopware 6. The earlier version was Shopware 5, but it was quite far from it. Shopware 6, and especially Shopware 6.4. It comes with new capabilities and fulfilling new goals. It has a flexible API approach by which it can handle multiple ecommerce advances. The businesses are loving it as they can customize the storefront as per their industry niche and standards. You can sell any product using Shopware 6. There are social media broadcast options and you can also sell products on other ecommerce platforms like Amazon.

It is a community-driven platform in which the plugins will be automatically updated and new ones will come up as per the new demands in the market. The API-focused platform lets you choose a sales channel or a customer-favored device. It has excellent integration options to integrate any ERP or CRM. It also facilitates decoupling of frontend and backend i.e. headless commerce.

Popular Brands Using Shopware For Their eCommerce Strategy

Shopware has been used by many highly popular brands of many different industries. Here is the list of those brands:

Fashion Brand Using Shopware

• Ben Sherman Deutschland
• Escada
• Hasenfarm
• Jacques Lemans
• Ortovox
• Tigha

Lifestyle & Home Brands Using Shopware

• Barefoot Living
• Brita Yource
• Discovery Channel EU Store
• DMAX
• Durmeister
• E-Milers
• Euronish
• Lufthansa Cocktail
• MAN Diesel
• Mercedes Benz Classic Store
• Oktoberfest
• Stabilo
• Tonino
• Zeit Shop

Food Brands Using Shopware

• Art of Chocolate
• Brands of Soul
• Haribo
• M&Ms
• Melitta
• Uncle Ben’s

Cosmetics & Wellbeing Brands Using Shopware

• Sebamed
• WellVille

Shopware Editions

Shopware offers 3 different editions among which you can use the edition as per your requirement. These 3 editions are:

• Starter Edition
• Professional Edition
• Enterprise Edition

Let’s learn in brief about these editions:

1. Starter Edition

This is the basic edition of Shopware which is free of cost. It will be hosted on the cloud and its hosting will be managed by the Shopware team. Some popular features of the Starter Edition are:

• No minimum contract period without any initial setup costs.
• You can upgrade to better editions as your business grows.
• Use your existing domain else it has a unique shop URL.
• Free SSL certificate
• GDPR compliant
• Automatic updates & maintenance
• Easy integration with popular payment gateways and shipping methods.

2. Professional Edition

Professional edition is the mid-range edition of Shopware. It costs € 199 per month or you can buy it once at € 2,495. This edition gives you the flexibility to choose between self-hosting or hosting on the Shopware cloud.

The other features are:

• Includes all features of the Starter Edition.
• Additional sales channels, marketplaces, and social shopping
• Multiple languages and multi-currency support
• Customize your shop, landing pages, category pages, and other CMS pages
• Expand functionality using 6,000 available extensions.
• Manage multiple shops from one admin
• Technical support from Shopware

3. Enterprise Edition

The most advanced edition of Shopware is its Enterprise edition. It is self-hosted for complete control and customization through your existing IT infrastructure. You have to contact their sales team for the cost. The major features are:

• Includes all the features of the Professional Edition.
• B2B & B2C functionality
• Additional sales channels, marketplaces, and social shopping
• Unlimited Staging environments
• Elasticsearch for search functionality
• Prioritize 24 x 7 support

Shopware Features

Here are some of the next-level features of Shopware which makes it the first choice for e-commerce retailers:

1. Rule Builder

Cross-selling is one of the greatest tactics for sales. Rule Builder is an optimal tool for cross-selling abilities of particular product lines. It can pull products off and, on the shelf, on the basis of selling policy. Setup the rules and easy-to-understand structure which managers can use for setting up the rules for product visibility and price management.

2. Shopping Experiences

Shopware 6 comes with a great balance of content & commerce. All the content, text, media is organized properly on product pages, categories & CMS pages to see the updated content on a customized layout. Shopping experiences are awesome for mobile commerce as they support PWAs.

3. Sales Channels

The customer’s perspective is what sales agents value and create for a proper customer profile. In Shopware 6 you can control all business operations from one central place. The location of customers and preferred devices have been considered in the platform’s framework. The phrase ‘Shop anywhere’ is deeply embedded in the Sales Channels plugin.

4. Shopware 6 Extensions

As we mentioned above, there are hundreds of extensions available on the Shopware official website. If you want to enhance the feature or functionality of an ecommerce store then you can find several extensions for that purpose.

5. Integration Of Paypal Payment Gateway

Despite the availability of numerous payment gateways, Paypal is still dominating the industry. It has been the most preferred choice of payment gateway for retailers due to its numerous features and support for more than a hundred currencies. There will be hardly any country that Paypal doesn’t cover. Thus, Shopware adopted Paypal because of its all-recognized functions and easy integration with an existing e-commerce store.

6. Autosales

Autosales plugin allows you to have items with a discounted price enter a common digital category. It will be used later for better management and displayed on particular pages or sections. If you are having a huge inventory then this will be highly required for your store.

7. Recommended Products

Related product recommendations have been a great cross-selling strategy in the e-commerce industry. It is much more important than upselling strategy as clients are more willing to buy the necessarily related products by spending a little extra. This plugin captures the opportunities of connecting products with customers.

8. DHL Shipping

DHL is a very popular and reliable shipping method, used by a lot of businesses for their delivery operations. Shopware 6 comes with a DHL extension which you can use for connection with your DHL portal and manage the shipping operations directly from the backend of your site. You can easily synchronize the tracking code info with your main DHL account.

9. Google Shopping

Google Shopping was earlier known as Product Search or Froogle. It helps online retailers to have their products being discovered by the users. It is not different from the normal Google search but it is dedicated to brands and products. Google Shopping will let you highlight the advantages over your competitors.

Advantages Of Using Shopware For Your eCommerce Store

1. Extensive CMS

The CMS of Shopware is called “Shopping Worlds” as it is very flexible for creating CMS pages without requiring any technical support. You have very unique freedom in the backend of Shopware. With expressive images and relevant content, you give your customers a professional store experience that can meet their needs.

2. Drag & Drop Designs

You can drag elements such as products, banners, content, product blocks, and rich media for creating customized layouts. The drag & drop functionality will be used for creating pages in the Shopping world.

3. Multi-Store

Just like its biggest competitor Magento, Shopware will let you manage multiple stores under one roof. It is super easy to manage products and catalogs due to the extensive and flexible tools. The fact that you can create so-called product streams is also a nice feature. You can create product groups with filters such as brand, price range, manufacturer, reviews, etc.

4. Marketing Abilities

Apart from product streams, you can find many marketing functionalities on Shopware. Like you can segment customers through Customer Streams on the basis of interests or previously shown shopping behavior.

You can create beautiful banners with buttons & text using Digital Publishing. A loyalty program is another nice marketing method in which the users will get points on every purchase. These points can be redeemed on later purchases or for promo codes.

5. Integrated ERP Solution

In the Professional and Enterprise editions, Shopware has an integration with Pickware which is an ERP solution. It can connect your checkout system and warehouse management.

6. Search Engine Friendly

SEO optimization has become the utmost requirement in a CMS, and Shopware doesn’t disappoint you in this as well. You can create SEO-friendly URLs, meta titles, meta descriptions, Rich Snippets, and an inbuilt sitemap. Also, you can easily work with redirects and canonicals.

How To Migrate Your Existing Store To Shopware?

By knowing so many features and advantages of Shopware, you must be wondering whether you can migrate from your existing CMS to Shopware. Well! It is completely possible. Shopware allows you to migrate from any CMS to its CMS. However, you will require a Shopware development company like us in the whole process. There are two different approaches for this:

a. Manual

Here the development team will create a new store on the Shopware latest version and will import all the data using CSV or XML files.

b. Using The Shopware Store Import Plugin

Shopware’s advanced feature “Import/Export” is a valuable extension to the default Import/Export module: it allows you to define CSV and XML formats and export your data as such. Furthermore, you can import existing formats (i.e. from your manufacturer) following a one-time configuration.

How Much Does It Cost To Develop A Shopware Store?

There is no right figure for this. It will depend on many different factors such as:

• Edition You Choose: As you know the basic edition is free of cost while the professional and enterprise editions are costly.
• Features & Functionalities: It is obvious that the complex features will require more time to implement and this, in turn, will increase the cost. The vice versa is also true.
• Location Of The Development Team: It may sound strange, but hiring developers from the US, UK, or Europe will cost you much more in comparison to Asian countries such as India, Malaysia, etc. Don’t worry about the capabilities of developers from different regions are not highly different in regards to skills but the working cost differs a lot.
• Hosting: If you choose self-hosting then hosting cost also needs to consider.

Apart from these, if the site requires additional extensions then costs need to include that as well.

Wrapping Up

At Emizentech, the best Shopware development company in India, we will first give you a proper quote of the development cost and proper consultation, that too free of cost. We are having highly experienced Shopware developers who can either develop the Shopware store from scratch or can migrate your existing store from any CMS to Shopware. Let us know your requirements.