Launching a store with Shopware 6 in just four weeks

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A fully operational online shop in just four weeks? It sounds like a solution to many of the problems facing modern eCommerce. Short time to market means you can start selling your products faster and build eCommerce for a fraction of the cost of a traditional online shop. It is possible to achieve with Shopware 6 and Divante and we will show you how.

In this article, you’ll get complete information about Shopware, Shopware PWA, the benefits of both, and why it is worth launching your eCommerce with this modern platform. Most importantly, we’ll also show you how to do it.

What is Shopware?

If you are in eCommerce, you have probably heard of Shopware 6. It is a modern, trendsetting eCommerce platform connecting enterprise-level capabilities with flexibility. 

The German-based platform is designed to fulfill the most ambitious eCommerce projects. It is trusted by over 100,000 companies, including worldwide brands like the Discovery Channel, Philips, and Bethesda. It is a solution for meeting the changing demands of eCommerce. Its goal is to give its merchants the freedom to quickly and easily leverage growth potential and focus on the perfect customer experience. Shopware 6 provides merchants with new sales opportunities and competitive advantages.

Shopware 6 and PWA

Shopware 6 is a complete product, which offers its own storefront. However, if you want even better website performance and a mobile-friendly PWA, you can augment it with the Shopware PWA. This is the only official progressive web app for the platform; it works as an out-of-the-box, easy-to-use plugin.

The benefits of Shopware 6. It’s a real game-changer for your eCommerce 

First of all, Shopware 6 is a new platform built from scratch. It has a modern philosophy and architecture, which gives a lot of unique benefits. Shopware 6 provides many new options to help your eCommerce business grow. 

Shopware 6 is an open-source technology using an MIT license. The community can modify and redistribute the platform with no restrictions.  Such an approach is crucial, as it speeds up the platform’s development as community members consistently create new plugins and develop existing ones.

Shopware 6 is a fully customizable and extremely flexible product that can be adapted to meet your requirements. The platform is also suitable for small and medium online companies allowing them to implement a shop in a short time based on out-of-the-box features and ready-to-use plugins. On the other hand, the frontend and backend of the application are independent, making upgrades quicker and allowing for the application to be deployed as a headless eCommerce.

Shopware 6 gives you new sales channels. The platform can be a hub for all retail operations: social media, regional websites, headless applications, POS, or Amazon, and eBay. Thanks to its API-first approach, Shopware easily integrates with the existing ecosystem of ERP, PIM, CMS, PWA, or any other component.

Shopware 6 is equipped with tools dedicated to merging commerce and content due to the creation of memorable and emotional product presentations. Last but not least, it offers an easy-to-use interface, with an intuitive admin panel, easy-to-create commerce, content pages, and various content display options adjusted to your sales channels.

You can also choose Shopware PWA, which offers a lot of additional advantages. This modern platform fully utilizes the best features of modern browsers with the benefits of native mobile applications. 

It increases your site speed and decreases bounce rate. Performance is ranked highly by Google, which has a direct impact on the positioning of mobile-first sites. Shopware PWA is based on Storefront UI, a 100% customizable design system, made by Divante. It enables users to browse the product catalog offline without an internet connection. What is more, PWA reduces user acquisition cost as it can be downloaded directly from your website.

The percentage of mobile traffic over desktops has been growing very fast recently, to the level of around 70-80 percent in most cases. The problem is that the conversion on mobile is, on average, half as much as on desktops. Increasing mobile traffic means less conversion, which leads to less income. Shopware PWA is the solution to this problem.

Time is money. Why is it essential to launch Shopware in just four weeks?

There are plenty of reasons why launching Shopware in just four weeks can make good business sense. 

First of all, a four-week project means a short time to market so that you can start selling your products faster. It’s a great solution in response to the COVID-19 crisis when some customers need to switch from offline to online operations in a flash to save or maintain a business. Other businesses are already online but decide to put much more emphasis on online sales in uncertain times for high street stores.

Shopware 6 in its default configuration gives you all the necessary features in place. Thanks to the customized UI, you do not buy a shop that looks like hundreds of others. We also deliver a PoC after just a week to train your team before the shop is live. We can use PWA, a mobile-first solution which helps you to communicate with clients anywhere. What’s more, Shopware 6 is a boxed solution, so there is a low risk of exceeding your designated budget. In fact, you can cut the cost because, in software development, longer implementations generally come at a higher overall development cost. With Shopware 6, you can get a fully operational shop for a fraction of the cost of a traditional, custom eCommerce development. On top of that, your shop can still be customized further if you want. 

Shopware 6 in four weeks: Three steps to a quick start

The implementation process consists of three main steps: 

  • Discovery and PoC (Week 1), 
  • Dedicated Design UX/UI (Week 2),
  •  Customizations (Weeks 3 and 4). 

Discovery and PoC | Week 1

In order to make the implementation swift and efficient in the following stages, we start with a Discovery phase, during which we map project requirements to a scoping document. Mapping takes place on three levels.

  1. Business level. This represents the specific environment your business operates in—markets, currencies, delivery options, payment options, and more. With this knowledge, we’re ready to configure the platform in reference to your business goals.
  2. Design level. The information we collect during Discovery becomes guidelines for our product designers who prepare a dedicated design in the next step.
  3. Data level. Finally, we discuss possible options of data migration from the existing platform to Shopware 6. 

Along with the scoping document, we deliver a cost estimation sheet and project implementation schedule.

Dedicated Design UX/UI | Week 2

Dedicated Design is a phase that starts right after Discovery and aims to design the user interface of the most important pages of the shop. The design process begins with preparing the UI Kit, which is a style guide for the entire shop interface. Once accepted, we design the details of each page. Then we hand the designs over to the Frontend Developer for implementation. 

Customizations | Weeks 3 and 4

In the Customizations Phase, we prepare custom platform configuration based on Shopware 6 solution and work on page customization.  Developers, a Product Designer, and a Quality Assurance Specialist work in a close collaboration to implement and test consecutive shop pages. Once it’s done, we migrate the data so your shop is complete. 


The wrap up

At Divante, we understand that time is money. Our Shopware development team is prepared to launch an online store, in its basic form, in only four weeks, enabling you to start selling your products almost immediately. As you start generating revenue, we can work together on further customization, scaling, and optimization in an agile way.

Sounds interesting? Let’s discuss possible solutions and timelines.

Contact us 

There are many reasons to work with Divante on any eCommerce project, but with Shopware we are really a go-to team for ambitious builders. We are an official partner of Shopware and a part of the Shopware PWA core team. We know to the solution inside out.  

Published August 11, 2020