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// Blog

Notes from people who ship this stuff

Shopware, Node.js, React, performance, AI, cloud and the boring B2B details nobody blogs about. No listicles, no reheated vendor marketing — only things we have actually done.

Shopware 8 min

Shopware 6 plugins: when to buy, when to build

Store plugins promise a lot and deliver about 70% of it. Here is the decision framework we use with clients before spending a cent on either option.

02 Jul 2026 Codewerk Team
Node & React 8 min

REST or GraphQL for your commerce API?

GraphQL solves over-fetching. It also hands your clients a loaded gun pointed at your database. When each one is the right call.

13 May 2026 Codewerk Team
Business & Future 11 min

The B2B self-service portal your customers actually want

B2B buyers are not asking for a prettier shop. They are asking to stop phoning your sales rep to find out where their delivery is. What that actually requires, and what to build first.

12 May 2026 Codewerk Team
Security & Compliance 8 min

E-invoicing: your PDF is no longer an invoice

Structured invoicing (ZUGFeRD, XRechnung) is becoming mandatory in B2B. A PDF attached to an email will not satisfy it — and your shop has to change.

28 Mar 2026 Codewerk Team
AI & Automation 9 min

AI in e-commerce: what actually works in 2026

Product descriptions, search, support triage, forecasting. Three of those pay for themselves. We separate the working from the pitching.

25 Mar 2026 Codewerk Team
Shopware 12 min

Shopware 5 at the end: an honest roadmap for whoever is still on it

We used to argue that a profitable SW5 shop could stay. That argument has run out — not because the framework got worse, but because everything around it moved on. What unsupported really costs, and how a very late mover should plan.

24 Mar 2026 Codewerk Team
Business & Future 6 min

Product text that sells to an engineer

Your B2B buyer does not want a story. They want to know whether it fits, when it ships, and what happens if it breaks.

07 Jan 2026 Codewerk Team
Business & Future 8 min

Where B2B commerce is actually heading

Ignore the metaverse. The real shifts are boring, already underway, and they will decide who your customers order from in 2028.

02 Jan 2026 Codewerk Team
Shopware 12 min

The Shopware 6.6 upgrade is a project, not a command

A major Shopware upgrade removes what was deprecated, and your plugins are what break. How to find the wall before you hit it, how to rehearse on staging, and how to plan a weekend that does not become a fortnight.

15 Jul 2025 Codewerk Team
Platform Comparison 12 min

Composable commerce: a reality check for companies that are not Zalando

The MACH pitch sounds like freedom. What a 40-person wholesaler actually buys is five vendors, five contracts and an integration layer nobody put in the budget. When composable wins — and when a monolith with a good API is the adult choice.

21 Jan 2025 Codewerk Team
Performance 10 min

Product images: AVIF, WebP and the bytes that decide your LCP

Format wars are the least interesting part of image performance. Why your thumbnail generator matters more than AVIF, how to do srcset properly, and why lazy-loading the hero image makes everything worse.

23 Jul 2024 Codewerk Team
Platform Comparison 11 min

Headless or not: a decision guide that costs us money to write

Headless is a cost you pay for a freedom most shops never use. Here is when it genuinely pays, when it is an expensive way to rebuild the standard storefront, and the team-size question nobody asks first.

22 Aug 2023 Codewerk Team
AI & Automation 10 min

ChatGPT in the shop: our first honest experiments

Three months of putting a language model to work in real shop projects. What earned its keep, what embarrassed us in front of a customer, and the one rule we now refuse to break.

14 Feb 2023 Codewerk Team
Performance 11 min

What actually falls over at peak — written a week after the peak

It is almost never the web server. It is the database, the ERP sync and the payment provider's rate limit. Written while it is fresh: what to rehearse, what to switch off, and why the fix is capacity you tested in October.

06 Dec 2022 Codewerk Team
Business & Future 9 min

Cart abandonment: stop guessing, instrument the funnel

Most abandonment advice is folklore repeated until it sounds like data. Here is how to find the step people actually leave at — and why the answer is nearly always a surprise cost, a forced account, or a missing payment method.

18 Oct 2022 Codewerk Team
Security & Compliance 10 min

The cookie banner costs you conversions. Here is what it may not cost you.

A legally clean consent banner loses you measurement and some traffic. Dark patterns are illegal and also do not work. What a compliant banner must actually do under DSGVO and TTDSG — and how to run a shop when a large share of visitors say no.

09 Aug 2022 Codewerk Team
SEO & Marketing 10 min

GA4 for shops: the migration everybody is postponing

Universal Analytics stops processing on 1 July 2023 and your history does not come with it. Why running both in parallel now is the whole point, what breaks in e-commerce tracking, and why consent makes this messier in Germany than Google admits.

24 May 2022 Codewerk Team
Business & Future 11 min

From fax and Excel to a B2B portal: the resistance is never technical

Digitalising a mid-size German wholesaler is not a software problem. It is the problem that your best sales rep knows the customer's order by heart, and the portal does not. What to automate first, what to leave alone, and why 'we will digitise everything' fails.

09 Sep 2021 Codewerk Team
SEO & Marketing 10 min

Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor now. Calm down.

Google started rolling out the page experience update this month. It is real, it is measurable, and it is a tiebreaker — not the lever the panic emails are selling you. Here is what genuinely changes for a shop.

22 Jun 2021 Codewerk Team
Shopware 9 min

Shopware 5 in 2021: patch it, extend it, or plan the exit?

Shopware 6 exists and is getting better every release. That is not a reason to move a profitable Shopware 5 shop this year. Here are the three honest paths, what each one costs, and how to tell which one you are actually on.

13 Apr 2021 Codewerk Team

// FAQ

Questions about this blog

The developers who ship the work. They go out under a Codewerk Team byline rather than personal ones, because most of them come out of a project several of us touched. We use AI assistants while writing, the same way we use them while coding, and someone who has actually done the thing signs off on every claim. When an article says we tried something, we tried it.

There is no schedule and we will not pretend there is. Articles appear when a project throws up something worth writing down. Look at the dates on this page and you can see the real rhythm: clusters, then quiet weeks. Client work comes first, always. A blog that ships on a content calendar is a blog written to fill a content calendar, and you can usually tell within two paragraphs.

Yes — send the question you actually have to info@codewerk-it.com. Several pieces here started as a question from someone who was not a client. Two caveats: we do not promise to write it, and we will not write it as a favour to somebody's product. If the answer turns out to be short, you simply get the answer in a reply, which is usually what you wanted in the first place.

We can, but read the piece first. These are written so that a competent in-house developer can do the work without us, and often that is the cheaper answer: the migration checklist and the caching articles are things a decent team can follow on their own. Hire us when the problem is bigger than the article, when the shop is already bleeding, or when nobody in-house has the time to own it.

Have a problem worth writing about?

Most of these articles started as a client's broken shop. Tell us about yours.