Shopware is a German, open source E-Commerce platform that, especially in this last period, is gaining more and more market shares in Europe.
But why is Shopware so popular for E-Commerce?
What is Shopware?
First, let’s discover this platform in detail.
Shopware, as I told you, is a German open source platform founded in 2000 and which currently boasts more than 80,000 satisfied customers.
The interesting thing about Shopware is that the software is developed by the very people who use it. For this reason, the software has therefore been designed precisely on the needs of those who use it, both in terms of design and technology.
With the release of Shopware 5.5, the German platform wants to offer merchants the possibility of having an optimal user experience that can satisfy even the customer who visits the site in terms of design in front of competitors.
Shopware is available in the following editions:
- Community edition
- Professional edition
- Professional Plus Edition
- Enterprise Edition
Now let’s see what are the advantages and disadvantages of this Ecommerce platform, to understand if it is actually valid or not.
What are the advantages of Shopware?
The great success of Shopware is linked to the numerous advantages offered by the platform. Shopware comes standard with some specific features, which we are going to see in detail now.
Content Management (CMS)
The Shopware CMS is called “Shopping Worlds” and with this, you can create content / pages in a very simple way, without having knowledge or technical support.
In fact, the backend is very intuitive and allows you to respond to all the emotional aspects of shopping.
Drag & Drop design
This Drag & Drop feature is very interesting because it allows you to easily set up and manage complex components such as products, banners, content and product blocks and much more.
Scalable
With built-in tools, it’s easy for developers to increase performance and scalability.
In this way you will be able to easily customize your store and make it perfectly tailored to your needs.
Extensive marketing features
However, we can create a perfect, functional E-Commerce, but if we don’t convince the public to buy, we will never be successful.
For this reason it is important to have effective marketing tools. There are many additional marketing features in Shopware.
For example, there is an option to segment customers based on their interests or the shopping behavior shown above.
You can also create beautiful banners which you can provide with buttons and text for the call to action.
Another nice marketing tool is the loyalty program. Thanks to this, customers can accumulate points with each purchase and take advantage of special rewards or discounts. This is definitely an element that builds customer loyalty and brings them back to buy in your store.
Shopware is also multi-store
We already know Magento, which with its great potential also offers the possibility of having more shops “under one roof”. The same thing is offered by Shopware.
The management of the product and the catalog is very simple.
The fact that you can create so-called product flows is also a nice feature. Product flows respond to the visitor’s shopping behavior and provide a personalized experience.
You can create product groups by filtering by brand, price, manufacturer and reviews. When visitors select the right filters, they can see a customized product flow.
SEO optimization
Shopware is SEO optimized and offers a whole host of possibilities to make your site SEO friendly. For example, it allows you to create SEO-friendly URLs, adapt meta titles and descriptions, use Rich Snippet, has a built-in sitemap, and you can easily work with redirects and canonicals.
What are the disadvantages of Shopware?
So far we’ve seen the benefits of Shopware, but each platform has both pros and cons. So let’s see now the disadvantages.
Long development times
The development of a Shopware store takes much longer than, for example, a WooCommerce store. This is because Shopware is much more extensive and therefore involves greater complexity in the configuration phase.
Limitations for the international market
For such an important player and in the current moment in which more and more online stores are going international, it is surprising that Shopware still does not have everything in order. In fact, this platform does not yet have ready-made settings for these rules and indeed you have to configure them yourself.
The main competitor Magento, for example, did a lot better in this regard.
High server requirements
Thanks to Shopware’s flexibility and high performance, you will need more than just a hosting plan. Shopware requires serious server power, and you need to keep in mind that this is an investment too.
Limited offer of plugins / extensions
Although Shopware offers enough ready-to-use features, Magento has multiple plugins available. This therefore has a very strong impact on what can be the customizations and functionalities of an E-Commerce, created with this platform.
As always, also in this case, the competitor Magento, offers instead a rather wide choice in this sense. Even if this can affect development costs.
How much does Shopware cost?
Shopware is free to download. The license costs depend on the chosen edition.
- Community Edition – Free
- Professional – € 1,295.00
- Professional Plus – € 5,995.00
- Enterprise – On request
In addition to these fixed costs, you also have to contend with Shopware hosting costs, but also, for example, the costs of additional plugins.
But also keep in mind the following:
The costs of developing a good Shopware online store. This is undoubtedly the largest cost item.
So as you see, this is a platform that has advantages and disadvantages. You will therefore have to understand if its characteristics are close to your business idea or not.
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