Shopware Community Day 2025
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Wow - 25 years, a quarter of a century! Shopware not only hosted a Community Day on September 16, 2025, but also celebrated its 25th anniversary. Around 1,500 guests from the Shopware community, the partner network, developers and industry experts came together in Cologne. The event offered a comprehensive insight into developments and innovations in e-commerce, AI and community strategies. The key points were AI & Agentic Commerce, B2B & Complex Commerce and the opening of the Shopware ecosystem for partners such as PayPal. We were there live for you, soaked up the great atmosphere and followed the exciting presentations.
Overview
More than 50 speakers on three main stages, 12 masterclasses, over 20 specialist presentations and 8 meetups covered a wide range of topics. However, everything was held together by the common thread of the event - AI in e-commerce in general and agentic commerce in particular, which represents the future of digital commerce. New technologies will change the entire ecosystem and make it increasingly complex, especially in the B2B sector. The term "complex commerce" was coined to describe this.
The keynote
Shopware founders and CEOs Stefan and Sebastian Hamann were rightly proud to look back on 25 years of Shopware and made it clear that the "day one spirit" is unbroken. This was also clearly noticeable. They emphasized how important and valuable the community moments are, which offer space for networking and exchange. This is not only a key message, but also a mission: Together we build the most adaptable trading platform in e-commerce!
Sebastian Hamann gave an outlook on the future of Shopware and online retail. This will be increasingly characterized by the use of AI agents and Shopware wants to be a driver of this development. By 2030, industry analysts expect 30% of online retail transactions to be processed via agent-based commerce. A clear paradigm shift is now taking place in e-commerce. The generation of digital natives is already using 50% AI tools for product information and searches.
Conversely, of course, this means that 70% of transactions will still take place via established channels in 2030. Online stores must therefore be set up for both agentic commerce and traditional transactional commerce. Shopware offers its community support to master the parallel and high effort and wants to provide relief through automation. There is no single strategy or playbook for all areas. The requirements for marketplaces, customers, industry and products are too different for that. Every company needs its own individual strategy for Agentic Commerce.
"You have to stand out from the crowd, but you have to be where your customers are. You have to be present in the world of agent-based commerce, but on your own terms and not fall into the dependency trap," explained Sebastian Hamann.
Important strategic announcements
- AI & agentic commerce as a guiding principle
AI & Agentic Commerce are the central strategic pillars and Shopware is consistently driving development in these areas. The vision sees autonomous, AI-supported systems that provide targeted support to online retailers and, above all, reduce their workload. They retain full control over their processes and data. The discussions in the panels also showed that AI is not just a trend, but rather a strategic change - with Shopware as a platform for autonomous but controllable e-commerce processes.
- Integration into the PayPal Commerce Agent Platform
Shopware becomes part of PayPal's new Commerce Agent Platform. This enables online merchants to make products discoverable and purchasable via various AI-driven sales channels - including chatbots, voice assistants and large language models. The platform opens up new cross-channel, automated and AI-driven sales opportunities. Ryan Prichard (Vice President SMB and Financial Services at PayPal) gave a practical example of how the new platform works. Call up the Shopping Agent via the PayPal account and define the search parameters. The personalized results displayed can be refined until the right product is displayed. Select the product, click on the buy button and PayPal retrieves the previously stored payment and shipping information in the background. Just confirm the purchase - that's it. That's how easy shopping is in the era of Agentic Commerce.
- Foundation of the Agentic Commerce Alliance
Together with other leading digital companies, Shopware is committed to new standards in Agentic Commerce. The company is currently developing its own MCP serverwhich is intended to enable the smooth exchange of data between AI systems and online stores.
Product- and technology-Novelties
The product and technology announcements are aimed at strengthening automation, personalization and scalability in store installations. Shopware clearly sees itself as an open-box platform as well as a partner and service provider for its community.
- B2B Features
One focus was on innovations in the B2B sector. Shopware presented new tools and components to provide the community with even better support for complex B2B processes.
With the Advanced Product Catalogs a new feature for better modeling of complex product catalogs and variants was introduced, which is primarily intended for international and B2B use cases.
From the fourth quarter of this year, the new Budget management is available. It is a central, API-based dashboard for the consolidated management of annual and sub-budgets across stores, sales channels and campaigns with real-time tracking, forecasts and the precise assignment of roles and rights.
Another feature for the fourth quarter is Individual Pricing. This allows customer-specific prices to be automatically displayed and updated in the store without manual intervention. This brings enormous efficiency gains, especially with large product range structures.
- Open ecosystem and community involvement
It was clearly emphasized that Shopware is a Open-Box-Platform (between rigid SaaS solutions and highly customized in-house solutions). Openness in architecture and code is a very important building block there.
In 2024 alone, there were over 360,000 active extensions and more than 38,000 contributions on GitHub (public software development platform) from over 800 contributors.
Another milestone is the new Shopware Community Hub is. It is a central place for thousands of members to exchange and learn, for clubs and gamification elements and is used in more than 30 countries. This is exactly the place where the connection between community and developers takes place in order to jointly realize the best platform in e-commerce.
- Shopware Copilot
This is an AI-based chat assistant that is directly integrated into the Shopware administration. It answers questions about functions, settings and best practices, offers problem solutions, product and data analyses as well as recommendations - all context-related to the Shopware version and store data. Plans include independent analyses, intelligent recommendations for action and automation of everyday tasks.
- Nexus platform
The integration and automation platform from Shopware, with which various systems (ERP, CRM, payment providers and others) can be easily connected. Nexus connects different software solutions and automates workflows, allowing processes to be controlled centrally and managed efficiently. Fine-tuning will begin in the fourth quarter of 2025 and the beta phase is scheduled to start in April 2026.
Highlights of the panel discussions
The discussions on the stages offered valuable insights into the future of e-commerce, particularly with regard to branding, community proximity and technological transformation.
In the Lovebrand panel "From Cart to Heart", representatives from MissPompadour, camel active, Kandu and DRYKORNhow they have built strong brands with Shopware. It's not just about good products, but also about authentic stories and digital proximity to the community. Shopware offers the flexibility to technically implement individual brand identities - for example through personalized shopping experiences and content integration. Despite global expansion, proximity to the target group remains central.
Daniel Wolf (CTO of 8mylez) shared optimization tips from ten years of Shopware experience - for example on loading time, server configuration and template performance.
The community is the engine of innovation. As could already be heard in the keynote, many speakers also emphasized that the Shopware community is not only the user base, but above all an active co-designer of the platform.
The presentations and discussions emphasized the importance of openness towards partners, integrators and third-party providers - for example through API-first approaches and modular architecture. All in the spirit of the open ecosystem that Shopware wants to be.
Conclusion
The Shopware Community Day 2025 celebrated Shopware's tradition, innovation and community while looking far into the future. It showed Shopware as a technological leader in e-commerce, with a clear focus on AI & Agentic Commerce, automation and community building. For online retailers, there are concrete opportunities for modernization and growth, but also new tasks in the integration and governance of AI-supported processes. The event provided clear impetus for the entire industry and underlined the importance of innovation, exchange and partnership in digital commerce. Successful e-commerce of the future will be emotional, automated and community-driven.