What is Shopware?
Shopware is an opensource ecommerce platform.
Why Shopware?
Shopware has 3 outstanding features:
1. Open Commerce Platform.
2. Business Model Composer.
3. Composable Customer Experience.
Open Commerce Platform:
Shopware is an open source platform which means that you completely own the shop and the source code that comes with it. You can hire your own developers to have customizations done to any level and all of those customizations would be completely yours.
Business Model Composer:
No matter what your business model is, Shopware can build a platform for you. From digital services and product-based shops to highly professional online learning academy, Shopware makes it all possible. This adaptability comes from the platform's open commerce functionality.
Without the need for writing a code, you can get the best storefront and admin panel facilities that suit your business needs.
Composable Customer Experience:
As a user, you would want your shop to maintain your brand identity. It should allow seamless connectivity to all the social media outlets of your brand so that user can have a complete experience of what you are all about. From highly customizable storefront to an easy connectivity with your social media platforms, Shopware allows a user centric platform to give your customer a complete user experience.
You can have your own product showroom, your social media posts displayed, your custom advanced filters for your shop and a complete story telling setup that allows cross selling of products as well.
Do people trust Shopware?
With all the tempting features provided, people who have used Shopware are usually quite satisfied. In one year of my work experience as a shopware developer, I have seen at least three major firms that wanted to shift their ecommerce shop from other platforms to Shopware.
Many major brands such as MnMs. Douglas, Philips, Mars and Discovery Channel have all shifted to Shopware already. Many more are joining now. It is your turn to decide whether you want company-owned ecommerce platforms with limited customization options or do you want to take charge of all that is related to your ecommerce store. The variety in the business model of the aforementioned brands says a lot about the kind of flexibility Shopware provides.
What is Shopware 6?
By now, you have been introduced to the general platform of Shopware. However, the Shopware team works tirelessly to integrate cutting edge technology to ensure that Shopware does not fall behind when it comes to offering the latest features to the users. For this purpose, the team works on developing newer versions of Shopware quite rapidly. In last march, I started with the latest Shopware version that was 6.4.7.0 and in just one year, the latest version has changed to 6.4.10.0. While these versions are mostly related to the bug fixing and security updates, Shopware does not hesitate to make huge changes to itself.
One such change is the shift from Shopware 5 to Shopware 6. In this change, Shopware changed its whole architecture to accommodate latest features. This meant that all the developers were now given a whole new realm to explore and learn. As a shopware developer, your learning never stops. The rapid and sometimes huge changes in shopware means that your client might want to upgrade their shop to the later version or they just might be working o a different version as you. So you have to ensure that you keep yourself up to date on what changes there are in the newer versions. A lot of shops that were made on Shopware 5 wanted migration to Shopware 6. In order to facilitate this, developers had to work on various data migration modules to ensure a smooth transition from one version to another. Going from Shopware 5 to Shopware 6 is not so different from going from one web platform (e.g Magento, to Shopware). As part of my project, I worked on one such migration where the client wanted to transfer their data on a daily basis form their Magento shop to their Shopware shop. This provided me an opportunity to work on my first cross platform coding. So as developer, Shopware will never let you feel like there is nothing left to learn.
What is the tech behind it?
Shopware 6 mainly works in PHP's Symfony framework so you are expected to see a lot of features from that. Personally, most of the errors I encountered were Symfony errors. for displaying your data, it uses twig as a templating engine, allowing you to have more power over the html code you need. For its front-end brain, it uses the vue-js of JavaScript which I believe is one of the easiest and most user friendly frameworks ever gifted to us by the JavaScript. The database is managed with MySQL.
This beautiful blend of technologies are part of the reason why Shopware is so powerful and easy to use.
My Personal Experience:
As a newbie Shopware developer, I have worked on multiple projects in the past year. I started in March 2021 as an intern to learn the concepts and implementation of certain features in shopware. In this year, I have been exposed to platforms where I could see the potential of Shopware. I have worked on core development and extended and overwritten some of the fundamental components and features of Shopware. I have worked on a store that wanted to provide an additional feature of an online learning academy such as Coursera, Udemy etc. At first, I did not even know that it was possible since I always thought of ecommerce platforms to have restricted features like selling products or services (much like a normal store, only online). However, by the end of the task, I was amazed at what you could do with shopware. This gave me a perspective on the true potential of this platform and the limitless add-on functionalities that can be added to it.
Conclusion:
I hope this basic information along with my personal anecdotes would prove to be useful for your Shopware journey. Feel free to reach out to me on hasanhere11@gmail.com for any suggestions, feedback, criticism, collaboration or support. Cheers!!
Note: The content of this post is inspired from the Shopware's official website content and my personal experience with Shopware as a developer.
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