Simplifying Complexity: How Shopware 6 Provides the Perfect Solution

What is Shopware?  

Shopware filling.

Community Edition vs Enterprise Edition vs Professional Edition comparison.

Findings and Final words.

What is Shopware?

Developed in 2014, Shopware is an open-source PHP-based e-commerce platform for creating professional online shops and support them at all stages of progression. The main office is located in Schöppingen, Germany.

The latest version is Shopware 6. It was released in September 2020 but is in constant improvement and development to provide users with excellent technologies. 

In comparison with previous versions, Shopware 6 became a more complex but better-controlled program. The design became more intuitive and minimalistic thanks to a redesigned administration interface based on the JavaScript framework Vue.js.

The significant difference is noticeable and valuable. Upgraded Shopware 6 SEO function provides a new Shopping Experience option for creating and adapting content pages to fast-changing demands centrally. The enhanced Social Shopping option helps to increase brand recognition and determine new customer engagement tools.

 All these impressive features are presented in 3 main Shopware 6 editions:

• Community Edition

Price: Free

It consists of a standard set of features for e-commerce.

• Professional Edition

Price: €199.00 per month or buy once for €2,495.00.

More suitable for unique brand and service implementation. It has additional e-commerce tools like Social Shopping, Custom Products, and CMS Extensions.

• Enterprise Edition

Price: On request. 

It consists of opportunities directed at the complex B2B and B2C business processes handling in one system solution.

Shopware Filling

Shopware’s main features are divided into 6 main groups related to e-commerce management optimisation.

Product management

• Creation of products and categories.
• An infinite number of products.
• Import and export of products.
• Product types and characteristics.
• Tagging system.
• Creation and management of text fields.
• Variant capability and filtering of item variants.
• Creation and sale of virtual products.
• Product ratings and cross-selling function.

Customers & prices

• Rule-based prices.
• Customer group-specific prices.
• Currencies and tax rates.
• Customer groups and profiles.
• Shopping basket and checkout processes.
• Optional guest ordering without registration.
• Multichannel capability – B2B and B2C.
• Customer and order management.
• Automatic document generation.

Shop configuration

• User guidance. 
• Multichannel capability.
• Any number of sales channels, shops, links.
• Language packs are available.
• Creation and integration of forms.
• Configuration of shipping and payment option.
• Risk management.
• Filtering options.
• User management. 
• Central media management.
• Search in the backend.
• Tagging function for grouping customers, products.

Design

• Online shop & templates design. 
• Display that is optimised for all end devices.
• Content management system (CMS).
• Drag & drop editor for creating pages such a landing pages.
• Storytelling / Section-by-section scrolling. 
• Social Shopping.
• Catalogue listings and filter functions.
• Configurable HTML and text emails.

Marketing

• Vouchers and discount codes.
• Product exports for price search engines and affiliate platforms.
• Product catalogues with filter criteria.
• Promotional functions such as time-controlled discounts.
• SEO functionality. 
• Optimised for mobile-first indexing.
• Comprehensive statistics including bounce analysis.

Technology

• Open-source, available on GitHub.
• Operated with the latest PHP 8. 
• SSL capable.
• Data protection and Cookie-consent-tool.
• API-first - every single “component” of the shop system has its API interface. 
• Elasticsearch integration.
• Administration interface based on the JavaScript framework Vue.js (ensures a faster and more flexible integration of personal administration modules).
• Bootstrap as the CSS framework, Twig as the template engine. 
• Blue-green deployment. 
• Composer integration.
• Migration assistant for a simple switchover from Shopware 5 to 6 or from other systems like Magento.
• Caching layer (HTTP, entities, search indexing).

Community Edition vs Enterprise Edition vs Professional Edition Comparison

It is worth noting that Community Edition is free while the Professional and Enterprise Editions are not, hence the question of their difference. 

Findings and Final Words

The table presents a difference between 3 editions: 

Community Edition provides basic features to start and set up the e-commerce project in a hosting environment. Providing free presets, customer, and product streams to filter and determine the desires of the buyer.

Professional Edition aims to customise, promote and develop the business as an individual brand. Customisable Products and CMS Extensions helps to create a user-friendly environment to increase sales.

Social Shopping - Instagram, Pinterest & Facebook

An option allows fast presenting of the product on social shopping channels, managing them from one system and defining the target audience with the appropriate channel to meet the users’ needs.

CMS Extensions

Provides extended functions for the shopping experiences like Quick view of products directly in the listing, Scroll-Navigation to set navigation points in a shopping experience, simple CMS pages designing with defining visibility of individual blocks, forms and fields specifying.

Custom Products

An opportunity to customise products with user-friendly step-by-step mode. Use a variety of configuration options like check box, date field, text area, text field, number field etc. Define prices and surcharges/discounts for each option.

Enterprise Edition is presented as a complex system for implementing classic e-commerce requirements and specific sales solutions. The system is also targeted at managing B2B and B2C business processes to meet the demands of manufacturers, distributors, or target the end-users. Enterprise Edition proposes:

Order reference number / Delivery date

The ability to assign an internal number when placing an order or specify the desired delivery date from the personal account (frontend).

Offers

The ability to offer a price for an order with a discount (reject, change, agree on an offer), communication is implemented in a chat format.

Assign B2B roles

Sales representative. In the personal account (in a separate interface on the frontend) assigned clients are displayed for the "Sales representatives" role; clients are assigned through the backend. "Sales representatives" can log into the customer's account, which allows using the same functions as the customer (access to statistical information, orders, offers).

Plugin Enterprise Search Configuration

Allows managing and customising the search based on Elasticsearch. Configurable separately for each sales channel. Parameters are set for a quick search and search results page. Preview of the settings results on the "Preview" page. "Boosting" page - performing settings for product promotion.

Each edition has different ranges of tools and implies different development strategies. The user who wants to choose one from the presented editions firstly should determine the aims and desirable abilities of business management. Of course, if systems raise some doubts, there are available demo versions to try.