Why choose a Shopware Webshop?
Last updated on October 9th, 2023 at 01:24 pm
You most likely haven’t heard about Shopware unless you are keeping an eye on the E-commerce market or live in Germany. It’s a German E-commerce platform that has been around for more than 14 years now, but it’s not until recently that people outside of Germany have started to pay attention to this webshop CMS system.
With a Shopware webshop, you get a scalable solution that can be used for everything from small online stores with a few products, to large webshops with thousands of products, multiple languages/currencies, and dynamic product groups. And tons of beautiful web design templates to choose from. Not on the same level as Magento, Shopify, or WooCommerce, but often of a higher quality and less buggy.
Read more about Shopware 6 webshop inspiration
Unlike other webshop systems like WooCommerce or Shopify, Shopware 6 comes with lots of functionality directly integrated into their core system, thus less need for 3rd party plugins and modules.
Since the vast majority of visitors nowadays come from a mobile phone device, it is important that one’s online store functions properly on both computers, tablets, and mobile phones. In Shopware, there are great options to customize for all types of devices and most of the staff are responsive out of the box. Something many shopping systems are still having a hard time with. Many of the WordPress templates I have tried over the last 2 years haven’t been 100% responsive and often required a lot of additional coding to work decently on mobile phones too.
Why choose Shopware over Magento?
By default, Shopware is about 20-25% faster than a similar Magento 2 webshop solution. The system is more intuitive for new users and therefore easier to use. This goes for both you as the owner and your developers. It is a cheaper system that offers much of the functionality you know from Magento.
For many people – a Shopware webshop solution will be a better choice than a Magento 2 webshop. A very large number of Magento 1 customers have also chosen to migrate to Shopware over Magento 2. Both because of the price, but also due to additional functions free of charge and the whole concept. I would guess that more than 50% of Magento 1 customers have moved on to a non-Magento solution after Adobe bought it back in 2018. A lot of web agencies have also dropped Magento in the last few years.
Why choose Shopware over Shopify?
Shopify has become one of the most popular webshop systems here in 2022 and with good reason. It is a fast, secure, and very stable shopping platform with great extensibility options. And it’s pretty cheap to get started with. Having said that, it can in many cases end up being a much more expensive system. Not only do most plugins have a monthly feed, but Shopify also charges a certain percentage of each transaction. Even for their enterprise customers. This can be a huge issue for especially larger companies. Otherwise, Shopify is a pretty good system to use, and a lot of Shopify customers are really happy with this E-commerce platform.
In many cases, a Shopware e-commerce solution will still be the best choice for most people. You have much more freedom in Shopware as it’s not a closed-source system. It’s easier to manage the products in the place, especially if you need extra fields, or other special features, whereas in Shopify you often have to go to another plugin to edit a certain property.
Multiple languages and multiple Webshops in the same backend are also handled much more smartly and efficiently in the Shopware system. The downside here, however, is often the price, as a Shopware webshop can cost a lot more than a Shopify solution.
Why choose Shopware over WooCommerce?
Why choose a more complex open-source system like Shopware over another popular open-source system like WooCommerce? The big problem with many smaller open-source systems is that the bigger and more complex your setup gets, the slower the system gets, both on the front end and also on the back end. For example, if you have a WooCommerce webshop with a few thousand items and lots of variants – you will typically find that systems like WooCommerce start to become quite slow to work with. This is not the case with Shopware, which can easily scale from a few products to several thousand without slowing the system down. I have had Shopware sites with over 20,000 products and it was running blazing fast -both frontend and backend. So if you want a system you can expand and scale, then it’s a good system to have in mind.
Another huge advantage is if you need multiple languages/currencies, this is significantly easier in Shopware, wherein WooCommerce you have to get out various 3rd party plugins like WPML and the like, which are often not the most elegant solution. Talking about performance and security, Shopware is a clear winner here as well.
A future-proof and scalable solution
Shopware is one of the fastest-growing webshop systems right now. For example, it is one of the most used E-commerce systems in Germany and has strong growth in several other European markets. With over 100 permanent developers working constantly on it, the system is continuously updated and further developed, and about every month updates come in the form of better functionality, optimizations, and security updates.
It’s incredibly scalable, meaning that if you need a new language or to add an extra shop to your current backend, it’s something that can be done quite easily. It’s also a shopping system that can easily handle a lot of products without starting to sacrifice performance.
And just as you might know from WooCommerce or Shopify, they have an App store with a huge range of plugins that can extend your system with extra functionality. Most of these apps are one-time payments, instead of a monthly fee as we see it with most Shopify customers.
That’s a bit about Shopware, an E-commerce platform in rapid growth and right now one of the best webshop CMS systems on the market.
