At this year’s purely digital Community Day, Shopware announced that a cloud solution has now been added to their product portfolio: the so-called Starter Edition.
With this addition, Shopware aims to support entrepreneurs and start-ups and make the possibilities offered by Shopware 6 more accessible to new market players with innovative ideas. The Starter Edition is the first of many steps in bringing Shopware’s breakthrough technologies to the cloud.
“There are currently various solutions on the market for small, medium, and large merchants. Shop operators are often faced with the problem that, with continued growth, new requirements arise, which the software used up to that point can no longer meet,” Shopware chief executive Sebastian Hamann explained.
“This is often followed by a dip in growth caused by a time-consuming and cost-intensive migration project to a more flexible ecommerce system. That’s where we come in.
“As a cloud solution, the new Shopware Starter Edition enables retailers to follow the entire growth path using just one technology. Following our key principle ‘your freedom to grow’, this technology is the next logical step on the path we started with Shopware 6: We’re taking the benefits of headless commerce and API-first into the cloud, making it possible to implement projects even faster and more cost-effectively with Shopware.
“At the same time, we are offering retailers the security of being able to easily switch to an on-premise version as their success grows, in order to be able to implement even more complex business scenarios thanks to the maximum freedom and flexibility.”
Starter and Professional Edition in the Cloud
The Starter Edition integrates perfectly into the existing product portfolio and addresses new target groups of merchants.
“The Community, Professional and Enterprise editions already meet the majority of retailers’ requirements,” Hamann said.
“However, we’ve previously only offered self-hosted solutions, where the retailers themselves have been responsible for the set-up and operation (on-premise). These types of solutions aren’t exactly ideal for small retailers who have no prior technical knowledge.
“With the Shopware Starter Edition, we are now offering precisely this target group the opportunity to go online with their own shop in a very short space of time, without the need for a complex project.”
Appropriately enough, the so-called freemium model provides retailers with a risk-free entry point, as costs only begin to arise once sales are being generated in the online shop.
While small retailers in particular benefit from this software-as-a-service offer, completely new opportunities are opening up in other areas as well. For instance, medium-sized business can take their first steps in e-commerce quickly and flexibly, while larger companies can easily test new markets or products with an MVP approach using the Shopware Starter Edition. In addition, the popular Shopware Professional Edition is now also available as a cloud-based solution and can be put into operation very easily.
Users Benefit from the Ecosystem
“What makes Shopware so special is its strong partner and developer network. In the cloud, too, users can benefit from this ecosystem and our competent partners,” Hamann explained.#
Initially, Shopware will be working with select companies on the most essential integrations: In Shopware Payments, for example, Shopware and its Dutch partner Mollie have created an integrated payment solution that allows all relevant payment methods to be offered directly with a simple activation. All relevant shipping service providers are directly available via Sendcloud and shipping labels can be generated directly from the admin.
This gives retailers a quick and seamless business-in-the-box solution without them having to deal with other companies and offers. Many more services will be added to create a holistic experience and eliminate the need for the tedious configuration of third-party systems.
At the same time, Shopware will be introducing new extension options: apps & themes.
“We’ve created a completely new app system optimised for the new cloud solution,” Hamann said.
“This will enable us to bring the Shopware ecosystem into the cloud along with thousands of developers and solutions, so that the ecosystem can be gradually expanded to make the full range of features available for the new cloud products.”
“PaaS” Also Announced
In addition to the new software-as-a-service offer, which also includes Shopware Professional Edition, the high-end Enterprise Edition will also find its way into the cloud. To this end, Shopware also announced a platform-as-a-service solution.
“Shopware PaaS” will offer maximum flexibility for complex ecommerce requirements; and a high-performance, scalable cloud infrastructure optimised for and managed by Shopware. A pilot phase has been started together with Shopware partner platform.sh, and the release of Shopware PaaS is planned for 2021.
The Shopware Starter Edition and additional information are available now under the following link: https://www.shopware.com/en/products/shopware-cloud/
Registration for the second day of the Shopware Community Day 2020 is free of charge at scd.shopware.com.
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