Selling across borders — implemented cleanly for tax and operations.

GHS Shop sells central vacuum systems and accessories, while Wäscherutsche offers systems for moving laundry conveniently through the home. Both brands are operated by the same company — with separate product catalogs and distinct storefronts, but on the same Shopware instance, the same ERP, and a shared inventory operation.

The existing Shopware 5 setup was technically outdated and suffered from performance problems. The aging platform made development, automation, and reliably secure operations increasingly difficult. The move to Shopware 6 was therefore planned as a complete Shopware migration: products, customers, orders, media, reviews, SEO URLs, and documents all had to move while business continued.

• Operate two shops efficiently: separate brands and catalogs as two sales channels on one shared technical foundation.
• Process cross-border orders reliably: B2C and B2B sales to Austria, Germany, and Switzerland with robust order and document workflows.
• Represent the physical goods flow: control shipping from the Austrian warehouse and drop shipments through a supplier in Germany within one system.
• Reduce manual work: use Shopware Flows and Rules, integrate Pickware, and automate repeatable processes.
• Build for the future: establish an up-to-date Shopware 6.7 platform with staging, CI/CD, monitoring, logging, and backups.

The defining complexity was not a single VAT rate. It was the interaction of billing and delivery addresses, B2B or B2C status, VAT ID, shipping location, product, and the party arranging the movement of goods.

In a cross-border chain transaction, several successive supplies correspond to just one movement of goods. That movement can be assigned to only one of the supplies for VAT purposes. The Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance explains, among other factors, the relevance of the party arranging transport and the VAT ID used.

The tax assessment itself was supplied by the client and its tax adviser. Our role was to implement the approved requirements unambiguously. When products originate from different shipping locations, the system separates the transaction into independent orders. This keeps the goods flow, order processing, and documents generated in Shopware/Pickware consistent for each delivery.

After roughly eight months, the new platform went live in a big-bang release in 2024. The client supplied the design and category structure; nuonic implemented both storefronts on ThemeWare and owned the technical concept, development, migration, and launch.

• Complete data migration: products, customer data, orders, media, reviews, SEO URLs, and historical documents transferred from Shopware 5 to 6.
• Two sales channels: separate catalogs and storefronts, but one installation, one Pickware system, and a shared operational data set.
• Custom process logic: a custom plugin plus Shopware configuration for order splitting, adapted VAT ID handling, and custom documents.
• Integrated commerce stack: Pickware, product configurator, search, PayPal, DATEV, Sendcloud, and KlickTipp brought together.
• Quality in live operations: business acceptance with the client team and documented edge cases in Confluence.
• Automated operations: staging, CI/CD pipeline, monitoring, logging, and automated backups from go-live.

In 2026, nuonic moved both sales channels to its Shopware hosting platform at mittwald. Shopware, the database, OpenSearch, RabbitMQ, workers, and email hosting now run in an environment operated by nuonic on mittwald's managed platform.

The main trigger was sluggish performance in the Shopware admin. We measured the environment reproducibly before and after the migration with our own benchmarking tool. The results are also documented in the joint mittwald case study:

• Frontend TTFB: down from an average of 177 ms to 56 ms — 68 percent faster.
• Throughput under load: up from around 58 to 176 requests per second — roughly tripled.
• Scaling: linear performance instead of an early plateau.
• Migration: overnight cutover with less than ten minutes of downtime.
• Day-to-day impact: a noticeably faster backend for ongoing shop management.

The platform is kept current on Shopware 6.7.x and developed further as needed. Improved performance also supports the technical SEO foundation, while Flows and Rules make new automations easier than on the former Shopware 5 setup.