On being a Shopware Business Partner

I’ll give you the three main reasons. First, Shopware has been in existence for more than twelve years now and it services over fifty thousand online stores, with a considerable number of them operating in Germany. MakoLab has a strong presence in the DACH region, in other words, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. We have an office in Munich and we know that what Shopware offers appeals to that market. Second, Shopware slots in seamlessly with the development of our PHP team, because it’s based on the Symfony framework. Third, for the past three years, Shopware has been becoming steadily more popular as software, while its largest competitor, Magento, is falling in the popularity stakes. By going for Shopware, we’re choosing technology that fits right in with the growing trend for headless commerce. That’s confirmed by the fact that PayPal and Carlyle are currently investing more than a hundred million US dollars in the company.

In brief, we build new stores from A to Z using Shopware. We migrate stores from other platforms to Shareware. And we provide maintenance, development and optimisation services for online stores. At the same time, we take care of quality assurance, or QA, the user experience, aka UX, web analytics, or WA for short, and visibility in organic search engine results… in other words, search engine optimisation, or SEO. Basically, we do everything we can to support our clients in running their ecommerce. With us on their side, they can simply stop worrying about the technology and concentrate on growing their businesses instead.

Shopware is the platform of choice for clients migrating from smaller dedicated installations like WooCommerce or Prestashop and older Magento installations. That makes it an excellent tool for building and developing powerful ecommerce skills at MakoLab with no major risks, because the average time for deploying Shopware is only three to six months.

If you’re looking for a reduction in the deployment time for new functionalities. If the aim is to transfer to a technology stack with wide developer and agency access. If you want to reduce your dependence on suppliers, in other words, avoid or limit vendor lock-in. And/or if your current solution has reached the end of the road in terms of productivity.

Because we take care of the entire migration or build the new shop from start to finish, meaning that the business doesn’t have to deal with coordinating the work of a multitude of issues and staff members and agencies, with UX specialists, with SEO experts, with analytics and with the deployment as a whole. We look after it all, making the workflow smoother and more effective, so the desired results are achieved faster.

Let’s imagine I’m a prospective client. I have an online shop and I’m certainly swayed by the arguments about Shopware’s functionality and the benefits of migrating. Is it a lengthy process, though? Could the deployment have any kind of temporary detrimental effect on the functioning of my store?

Migration can be done in just a few weeks. The point is this; because MakoLab looks after the full process, from analytical support via UX to SEO, the risk of loss on the migration is significantly reduced.

Shopware is many things. One of them is native support for progressive web applications, or PWAs, enabling purchases made via a smartphone screen to be serviced. It’s also headless architecture, which makes it possible to combine various technologies by means of an application programming interface, or API. That means older, monolithic systems can be migrated and, periodically, new functionalities can quickly be added to them, which wouldn’t be possible with a monolith. Shopware is also openness and ease in terms of integrating with the most crucial systems forming the modern ecommerce ecosystem, in other words, the ERP, the CRM, the PIM and marketing automation.

Shopware is technology that equals the quality and standard of much more expensive solutions available on the market, like Magento, for example. The technical bases of the software are capable of processing thousands of products and orders at the same time. It’s a stable solution suited to businesses of every size.
Above all, Shopware is flexible architecture and that’s vital to programmers. The Open Source licence means that once a system’s been deployed, we’re free to develop it by adding new functionalities. We live in an era when the IT environment is changing dynamically and the growing user demand for new solutions is absolutely priceless. 
Flexibility, the capability of adapting to an already functioning environment and the short deployment time are certainly some of Shopware’s key advantages. They fit beautifully with the concept of rapid change management and, after all, isn’t that something we all face up to every day?