We don't build shops. We build systems that generate revenue.

Handelskönig GmbH has been a specialist building-materials retailer since 2009 and runs its online shop at handelskoenig.com alongside its location in Hamburg-Billbrook. The assortment covers the entire construction site: facades and external insulation systems, painting and plastering supplies, machine technology, drywall and interior finishing, tools, and photovoltaics.

The customer base is mixed — and that is precisely where the demand on the platform comes from: painters, plasterers, and drywall contractors buy commercially and in volume, while DIY customers use the classic B2C cart. The shop has to serve both buying patterns: from the single item all the way to a calculated project request for a complete construction site.

The situation before Shopware: The existing JTL-Shop limited growth in three places at once. The frontend could only be adapted to the brand and to the buying patterns of trade customers to a limited degree. Content maintenance — experience pages, category copy, campaign areas — consumed development time instead of sitting with marketing. And every requirement that went beyond the standard ended in a workaround rather than a clean extension. Larger volume and project requests from trade customers ran entirely outside the shop: phone, email, spreadsheet.

The system audit made visible where time and conversion were being lost — and where the technical scaling limits lay. The consequence: the move to Shopware 6 as a planned Shopware migration instead of a risky big bang.

Not "we need a new shop", but measurable goals: a platform that grows with the business, seamless JTL-Wawi integration without data breaks, preservation of the established SEO substance, and a deployment process that enables continuous releases instead of preventing them.

The critical conditions were named before implementation, not discovered during it: JTL-Wawi as the fixed ERP, ongoing business operations without interruption, full migration of customers, orders, and loyalty points with continuous number ranges, plus a URL structure grown over years that could not be allowed to break.

No concept loops, but a production-ready system from our Shopware development:

• Custom theme: Built on the Shopware theme system — header, navigation (desktop & off-canvas mobile), product listing, product detail page, cart, and the Shopware checkout to the client's CI.
• Content without a development ticket: Shopping Experiences with custom CMS elements. The team has maintained landing pages and campaign areas itself ever since.
• JTL-Wawi integration: Sync of products, customers, orders, and stock levels via the JTL-Connector — Shopware as the commerce core, JTL-Wawi as the leading ERP.
• Data migration: Customers, orders, loyalty points, and reviews fully migrated — continued through Shopware number ranges without a gap.
• Plugin stack: Loyalty system, PayPal, Amazon Pay, Trusted Shops, comparison list, and blog — extended by custom plugins built on Shopware standards.
• Automate everything: Stage/production environments with an automated deployment pipeline, monitoring, alerting & logging from day one.

Go-live in October 2024 — on schedule, during live operations. For the budget range a replatforming of this scale moves in, see our pricing page.

Since go-live, the continuous optimization cycle has been running — Shopware support & maintenance with a fixed release rhythm instead of ad-hoc firefighting:

• B2B quote process (since August 2026): Volume and multi-item requests run directly in the shop. Sales calculates with Shopware's pricing logic, the quote PDF is rendered in the Shopware document layout, and acceptance turns into a regular Shopware order — built as a native plugin on the DAL, state machine, and Flow Builder events instead of as a silo.
• 40+ releases through the automated pipeline — planned, tested, documented.
• Shopware 6.6 → 6.7 as a major update without downtime, including theme and plugin adjustments.
• Proactive compliance: GPSR, BFSG preparation, and EEA-compliant conversion tracking — implemented before they became a risk.
• Growth stack: Klaviyo (flows, back-in-stock, product feed), Trusted Shops widgets, server-side tracking.
• Performance & conversion: Image formats, CDN, availability and delivery-time logic, checkout optimization — prioritized by data.

The replatforming is not measured by the launch, but by what has run differently since:

• Release capability: previously manual and ad hoc — today 40+ tested deployments in 24 months through the CI/CD pipeline. On average one release every two and a half weeks, planned and documented.
• Platform upgrades: previously a risk event you postpone — today predictable operations: Shopware 6.6 → 6.7 without downtime, including theme and plugin adjustments.
• Content maintenance: previously one development ticket per landing page — today the Handelskönig team maintains Shopping Experiences and campaign areas itself. Development time goes into features instead of content.
• B2B volume demand: previously phone, email, and spreadsheets entirely outside the shop — today a continuous process from the request through the calculated quote PDF to a regular Shopware order.
• Data continuity: 0 breaks in data, SEO, and operations. Customers, orders, loyalty points, and reviews fully migrated, number ranges continued without a gap, and the URL structure grown over years preserved.
• Go-live: 98% of the planned scope on schedule — without interrupting day-to-day business.
• Operating model: a fixed release cycle continuously since October 2024 instead of ad-hoc firefighting — around 290 work items have gone through the pipeline in a controlled way since then.

Today: The shop runs on Shopware 6.7, self-hosted, with separate stage and production environments and a fixed release cycle through the automated pipeline. The B2B quote process has been live since August 2026, GPSR is implemented, BFSG preparation is under way, and conversion tracking is EEA-compliant.

Next: The quote process is not measured by the number of requests, but by response time, acceptance rate, and the revenue generated from it — those metrics drive the next expansion steps. Added to that are the Digital Product Passport as a mandatory topic, further automation between Shopware and JTL-Wawi, and data-driven conversion work in the checkout. The model stays the same: identify a recurring manual process, turn it into a product feature, roll it out in a controlled way, measure it.