Shopware Answers
Real Shopware 6 questions from merchants and developers, answered by Stagebit engineers who build and maintain Shopware 6 stores. Stagebit is an official Shopware Extension Partner with a European office in Cologne, and this library covers installation and server setup, safe updates, B2B Components, EU VAT and OSS handling, performance tuning, and the errors that come up most often in production. New answers get added as we write them.
Shopware 6 basics
- Shopware 6 is an open source ecommerce platform built on the Symfony PHP framework and Vue.js, released under the MIT license. It runs as an API-first, headless-capable system, meaning the storefront, checkout, and product data are separated so a store can use the standard Twig and Bootstrap frontend or a fully custom headless frontend on the same backend. Merchants manage products, pricing, content, and business rules through the Shopware Administration panel, and a paid Rise or Evolve cloud edition adds hosting, support, and enterprise features on top of the free, self-hosted Community Edition.
- Shopware Cloud is a fully managed SaaS or PaaS plan (Rise, Evolve, Beyond) where Shopware AG handles servers, updates, and scaling, but limits you to the App system instead of classic plugins. Self-hosted Shopware 6 runs on infrastructure you or your agency control, using the free Community Edition or a self-hosted commercial license, with full access to the classic Plugin system and server configuration. Cloud suits teams that want a fast, managed launch with predictable operations. Self-hosted suits teams that need deep customization, full plugin access, or lower long-term costs.
- Shopware Community Edition is a free, MIT-licensed core with products, variants, Shopping Experiences, sales channels, Rule Builder, and the full API and plugin system. The Commercial extension is bundled into the paid Rise, Evolve, and Beyond plans (from €600/month) and adds B2B Components, AI Copilot tools, Advanced Search 2.0, returns management, multi-inventory, subscriptions, and customer-specific pricing depending on tier. Shops with more than roughly €1 million in annual GMV must move to a paid plan under Shopware’s Fair Usage Policy to keep core account and store services.
- Shopware offers four plans: Community Edition (free, self-hosted), Rise (from €600 a month), Evolve (from €2,400 a month), and Beyond (custom pricing, typically quoted from around €6,500 a month). Most single-channel D2C stores under roughly €1 million in annual GMV fit Community Edition or Rise. B2B sellers need Evolve at minimum for B2B Components, and large multi-warehouse or subscription businesses need Beyond for its 24/7, one-hour support SLA.
- Shopware itself does not take a percentage cut of your sales. Licensing runs on four editions: Community (free, MIT licensed, self-hosted) and three paid tiers, Rise from €600 a month, Evolve from €2,400 a month, and Beyond from around €6,500 a month, each priced against your store’s gross merchandise value (GMV). Since March 24, 2025, Shopware’s Fair Usage Policy requires any Community Edition store doing more than €1 million in annual GMV to move to a paid plan. Payment processing fees, charged separately by providers like PayPal, Stripe, or Mollie, go to those providers, not to Shopware.
Migration to Shopware 6
- Migrating from Shopware 5 to Shopware 6 means a fresh Shopware 6 installation, running Shopware’s official Migration Connector and Migration Assistant plugins to move products, customers, and orders across, then rebuilding your theme and replacing every plugin, since neither carries over automatically. Shopware 6 runs on Symfony and Twig instead of Shopware 5’s Smarty templates, so the frontend has to be rebuilt from scratch. Map your existing URLs to 301 redirects before cutover to protect your search rankings, and run the whole migration on staging first. Shopware 5 reached end of life in July 2024, so shops still running it no longer receive security patches.
- The Shopware Migration Assistant automatically transfers products, customers, orders, categories, media, SEO URLs, and most store settings between Shopware 5 and Shopware 6, or between two Shopware 6 shops, and can be re-run to update individual datasets afterward. It does not migrate themes, Flow Builder automations, custom extension database tables, or payment method configurations, and Shopware 5 product streams have to be rebuilt manually. Payment methods are mapped, not copied: you create them in the target shop first, then match old orders to them during migration.
- Every Shopware 5 plugin needs a Shopware 6 replacement, because the old plugin code does not carry over. Export your installed plugin list, drop what you no longer use, and test whether Shopware 6 covers the rest in core. Then ask each vendor about a Shopware 6 version, search the Shopware Store with the Shopware 6 toggle on, and scope a custom build for anything with no match.
- Plan to rebuild all of the theme code. Since Shopware 6.5, the Storefront runs on Twig, SCSS, Bootstrap 5 and vanilla ES6 JavaScript, so no Smarty template, LESS file or jQuery plugin ports over. Brand styling, fonts and images carry over unchanged. Most teams extend the default Shopware 6 theme, so the effort depends on how far the old design departed from it.