How to select the right Shopware Partner

Shopware is an innovative web platform which is growing in popularity not only in Germany, where it was founded, but all over the world, as well. The number of markets using it is increasing with every year. The Shopware Partner programme is for companies with the high level of technological know-how and indispensable experience in the sector necessary to provide internet shop owners with comprehensive support at every stage.

Every company, regardless of the country it is based in, has to meet the same standards of quality in order to receive a Shopware Partner Agency certificate. The data concerning each organisation is checked, as are the technical skills it offers. A certified partner therefore has documented experience in working with Shopware. This means that, if you are looking for a tried and tested service provider to carry out your Shopware-based project successfully, then a certified Partner will be the best ‘right hand’ you could have.

In a nutshell, we forged our collaboration with Shopware in order to provide our clients with flexible, state-of-the-art ecommerce solutions. With the increasing popularity the platform has won in recent years, it has grown into a strongly competitive presence on the open source market and a serious alternative to Magento. The platform is grounded in tried and tested, stable, cutting-edge technology such as the Symfony PHP and Vue.js frameworks. This, in turn, means that MakoLab’s team of developers is ideally qualified to work with it.

When it comes to choosing the best ecommerce services, you will obviously be looking for a provider who will not only produce solutions which will meet your business needs, but will also help you to clarify any areas of uncertainty by identifying aims and prioritising your list of requirements.
Regardless of whether you are planning to set up a platform from scratch or need to improve your current operational model, when you outsource the entire undertaking to one supplier, in other words, to one agency or software house, what you are looking for is a collaborative business partner to run and oversee the process from A to Z, from the initial audit, via the development, to ongoing support with promoting your website. Your input will be monitoring your provider’s work, providing feedback on it and signing off on it. When you decide to outsource the work to a single company specialising in the field, you save yourself and your company time and, in the long term, money.

In our work in the ecommerce sector, our focus goes beyond matters of technical functioning. We have a wide range of other skills in areas which often prove decisive when it comes to the success of an online store.
As a certified Shopware Partner, we offer:

• a comprehensive service building new stores using Shopware;
• migration to the Shopware platform from other systems;
• the maintenance, development and optimisation of your e-shop.

Our work begins with conducting the necessary analyses. We go on to design the shop and build it, a stage which includes integration. After we have deployed it, we move on to its maintenance and further development. At the same time, we take care of the quality assurance (QA), the user experience (UX), user interface (UI), web analytics (WA) and visibility in organic search engine results (SEO).
Basically, we do everything we can to support our clients in running their ecommerce operation. With us on their side, they can simply stop worrying about the technology and concentrate on growing their businesses instead. We provide comprehensive services for online shops, whether they are involved in B2C or B2B sales, and the aspects we take responsibility for include optimisation and technological development, as well as deploying solutions and services which make it possible to achieve strategic and commercial goals.

Using effective promotional solutions, including Google Ads, we will look after the positioning of your shop and its optimisation in terms of SEO and UX. Depending on your requirements, we can also employ tools such as remarketing, which enables us to salvage discarded shopping carts and reach out to customers who, for a variety of reasons, fail to complete the buying process. Our unique experience means that we know for certain what works for ecommerce.
When you turn to our ecommerce audit services, the benefit will be our analysis of the current state of your website. The audit is designed to do more than simply highlight the areas that need improving. First and foremost, it serves as an inspiration for further development, pointing the way to new solutions which will increase your sales and the quality of the service you offer your users.

• web analytics; in other words, an analysis of the completeness of the currently installed analytics and a quantitative analysis of the data with the Google ecommerce module;
• search engine optimisation; in brief, identifying an online shop’s/website’s visibility in the Google search engine;
• user experience; MakoLab’s experts ensure that your website is designed to provide maximum user comfort and effectiveness.

At a time when the competition is growing, winning traffic for a website is an increasingly costly exercise. This is where conversion rate optimisation (CRO) plays a vital role. It is an indispensable part of Internet marketing and we use it to persuade potential clients and customers to follow up on what you have to offer.
Identifying various traffic channels, along with analysing and interpreting data, shows us how to work on optimising the conversion path in your ecommerce operations. Thanks to CRO, we make the very most of your website’s potential, generating increased sales from the traffic you already have.

If you aim to reduce the time it will take to complete your project or want to implement changes as soon as possible, then you need a skilled and trusted ecommerce partner. Why? Because they will guide you, helping you move around confidently between more than two hundred built-in design and programming functions in order to provide your customers with a far more appealing online environment. An ever-growing number of areas demand a professional approach, so it is worth considering outsourcing the job to a company which provides the services of in-house experts with the wide range of requisite skills.
As an official Shopware Partner, we will deal with the deployment of your store from scratch, ensuring compliance with best practices and standards during the programming work. We see to it that the solutions are properly tested and transferred to the production server. If defining the scope of your Shopware 6 store’s functionalities is still a work in progress, you can count on us to help you construct the ideal plan for your purposes.
You can also count on us if you intend to migrate your store from other technology to Shopware 6. We will take care of both transferring your content and reproducing the functionalities that featured on your previous ecommerce platform.
Another role we are ready to fill as a certified Shopware Partner is looking after your Shopware 6 platform, regardless of whether or not we were responsible for developing it. We turn our hand to fixing errors and development work alike.

If you want to build a new store and outsource the project to us, we will provide you with comprehensive support from the initial concept to the up-and-running shop. You can forget your concerns about finding competent technology experts and project managers and bringing them on board. We will supply the entire team and organise the work efficiently, so much so that your new store could be ready in just three months.
Perhaps you already have an online store? You can turn to us and we will migrate it from your current platform, such as Shoplo, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Magneto or Shopware 5, for instance, to Shopware 6. One important aspect of our support is that we keep SEO to the fore during the migration. This way, we ensure that once your new website is launched, it maintains your previous search engine visibility. We handle the data migration and provide a smooth transfer to your new system, which will be operationally integrated with other systems, like your CRM and ERM, for example.
If you are searching for a company to outsource the maintenance, development and optimisation of your existing Shopware installation to, we will be happy to take on that challenge. We begin by studying and reviewing your installation and familiarising ourselves with its current solutions. Then, working together with you, we compile a list of optimisation tasks. On the basis of that, week by week, we will remove errors, implement corrections and develop your store.
We see to it that our clients’ websites operate efficiently and quickly and, if the need arises, we improve them, monitoring the efficacy of the methods being used. We also focus on achieving high visibility for their online stores in organic search engine results and on ensuring that they are rooted in the latest technologies, allowing their dormant potential to be utilised to the full.

Put your trust in our knowledge and skills and outsource the fulfilment of your ecommerce ambitions to MakoLab. We will create a Shopware 6 store for you which will give you sales that outstrip the competition.

We operate comprehensively. That means we analyse not only your operations, but also your competition’s, formulate a strategy, design your UX and UI, deploy your ecommerce software and whatever tools are needed, plan your communications, create your content and run the performance marketing that leads to sales. We develop full strategies for online stores, designing them to increase both the quantity and the value of transactions.
We custom design B2B and B2C ecommerce platforms for clients in a wide range of sectors. Whether your plans are focused on development or replatforming, our QA, UX, UI, SEO and WA skills mean that we will always have your back. With MakoLab, the broadest of new ecommerce vistas await you!

Translated from the Polish by Caryl Swift.