Having recently become a Shopware Enterprise Partner Sam and I were really looking forward to this years community day in Ahaus, it certainly didn’t disappoint. We kicked off on Thursday night with pre-event drinks and a chance to make some new friends and catch-up with a few old ones.
The event was held at the incredible Tobit Software event space, this place is super cool and the perfect venue for the 1600 strong Shopware Community Day 2017.
To get a warmed up for the day @DrumCafeDeutschland got everyone fired up with some pretty impressive audience participation.
Shopware’s CEO Stefan Hamann keynote give us a sneek preview of the vision for the future, and what that means for the evolution of Shopware. Everything tied in with the tagline for this event “Hello Human” - putting you (the human) at the centre of the strategy which drives the platform
The Future
- A redesigned admin the “learns” your frequent tasks and promotes them within the menu system to allow quick access to the tasks you do everyday
- An AI bot that will monitor your store and make recommendations on optimising your store
- Confirmed that the entire platform will move to being entirely based on Symphony
These items are all coming in the future, no date was given so likely to be at least 6 months to a year.
Shopware 5.3
Stefan then moved on to whats available in Shopware 5.3 which was released as a release candidate ( on the day, the headline new features are:
- Customer Streams, which allows you deliver tailored product offers to customers on sit and via email (Customer Streams)
- Shopping World Templates, this allows you to define templates for your rich content pages (called Shopping Worlds in Shopware). You 9 great templates out the box, you can add your only customer templates to these,
- Improved category pages, better filtering sort and an improved UX
Read the full introduction to 5.3
Enterprise B2B Suite
A new B2B suite is now available for Enterprise customers, which includes these features:
- Merchant registration and activation
- Individual customer & price groups
- Individual product clearance for each customer group
- Separate sub shops & customised themes for each customer group
- Save and send order lists
- Separate shops for various product characteristics
- Spending limits and approval workflow
Find out more about the Enterprise B2B Suite
3D Product Images
The final announcement was that Shopware now supports 3D product images as part of the community edition. This was an interesting new feature - supporting 3d product images is certainly very cool. You need a 3d camera to do it. I’ll post a more detailed blog post about this at a later date.
UK & Ireland
After a short break Stefan Heyne joint CEO gave the UK & Ireland contingent an overview of Shopware, the history and plans for the UK & Irish markets, we’re excited to be part of the move into the UK.
Stefan’s talk was followed by an in-depth look at the Enterprise Search and B2B suite from Daniel Nogel (Product Owner for these areas), both have some great features and .
We also enjoyed talks from buddist monk Gelong Thubten, Instagram star Luana Theodoro Da Silva and Cirque du Soleil Pickpocket King Christian Lindemann
The day was rounded off with an afterparty at Bamboo beach bar across the road, the Shopware team were the perfect hosts, the whole event had the feel of a company at the start of great journey.
