Shopware opened its virtual doors this week for its global partner network and invited them to dive in and be inspired. The theme of the day was “Let’s Grow Together” and with a budding English community (find out more in our Shopware United post) and keynote speakers like the newest Shopware employee, former Magento evangelist, Ben Marks, the German platform wanted to make all of its partners feel welcome.
The event started with a keynote from Sebastian Hamann, Shopware’s CEO, who took everyone on a trip down memory lane and explained how he and his brother Stefan started developing Shopware. From flying pirate ships and to C64 to their early programming days, Sebastian emphasised that the Hamann brothers wanted to create awesome experiences. He introduced emotions as the central theme for Shopware and he addressed this several times throughout the event because “emotions are what drives us” and thus should be present in the modern shopping experience.
Ben Marks joining to drive the international growth strategy
To grow the business, Sebastian emphasised both open source and globalisation as the key factors for ongoing success. Shopware achieved 12 billion EUR GMV in 2020 and to leverage the momentum, Shopware’s key move was to hire Ben Marks, former Magento evangelist and the informal star of the day. Ben used his keynote to describe his role in helping to bring Shopware’s open commerce approach to the world. He ended with addressing the partner network to feel free to reach out to him with their local needs so he could help support the community. There was also a second speaker discussing the importance of the Shopware community and that was Borys Skraba from Shopware United, who described the role this initiative will play at Shopware. Similarly to Ben, encouraged local interaction and for partners to reach out to Shopware United with any questions or suggestions.
Your freedom to grow - A closer look at Shopware’s roadmap
Having set the scene, we caught a glimpse of what Shopware is developing at the moment. Shopware’s vision is to bring outstanding digital shopping moments into everyone’s life and moving forward, Shopware plans to do so by giving retailers more flexibility and customisable options with the underlying message being that as a merchant you have “your freedom to grow.” Sebastian also showed that Shopware provides a scalable platform for all merchants - be it a startup to enterprise business, and then introduced the three different products that would help retailers achieve the shopping experiences modern customers are looking for: the Shopware Open Source Model, Business Model Composer and Composable Customer Experience.
Open Source Model - focusing on community led growth and composable commerce
- Provides a platform for both “lightspeed” (fast projects) and highly customised big builds.
- Works with a well known technical stack, hosted on GitHub, using PHP, Symfony, Vue, Bootstrap and other web technologies and relies on the growing community with many 3rd party modules.
- Enables “plug and play” ecommerce for both PaaS and on premise commerce sites.
- Offers “composable commerce” with an app system and a flow builder for complex flows
Business Model Composer - understanding customer needs and providing valuable content
- Covers the needs of the consumer beyond just purchasing a certain good or service and helps retailers discover new growth opportunities for their growing business.
- Estimated 5x growth for B2C
- Previously mentioned flow builder can also build out complex flows
Composable Customer Experience Builder - tell a good story with ease by combining content with commerce
- Experience Builder is a tool to create a wide scale visual experience with animations, videos, linking ecommerce elements seamlessly.
Shopware 6 & PWA - the final piece of the puzzle
After the three products for all Shopware merchants were presented, Dominic Klein, the Shopware 6 and PWA expert, discussed the updates for this product.
Shopware 6 will combine content and commerce with the aim of bringing a new experience with PWA involving:
- Interactive Landing Pages
- Product Configurators
- Retail Store UI
- Sales Assistant Tools
- Shoppable Games
To show what this would mean in practice, Dominic gave the example of the first Shopware 6 & PWA store that has gone live: Vintageria, which was built by the agency HCE from Italy. He also presented a sneak preview into “Guided Shopping Experiences”, which is a tool that will create a direct and interactive sales presentation for retailers’ products.
