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What Shopify is genuinely brilliant at
Time to first order. Hosting, security, PCI, CDN, checkout conversion and payments are solved and someone else is on call for them at 3 a.m. The app store is enormous, the checkout is among the best-converting on earth, and a small team can run a serious D2C business without a single developer. We say this as a Shopware agency: that is a real achievement and it is not marketing.
Where B2B hits the Shopify wall
Customer-specific price lists synced from an ERP, credit limits, order approvals across a buying team, quantity-break pricing per contract, net/gross switching per customer group — you can approximate all of this, and every approximation is an app, a workaround, or a Shopify Plus conversation. Shopware treats these as core concepts. That is the whole difference.
The cost conversation nobody has upfront
Shopify's price is a subscription plus a percentage of what you sell, plus the apps. At €200k monthly revenue that percentage is a real line item, and it grows precisely as you succeed. Shopware costs a licence plus hosting plus developers — high at the start, flat as you scale. Do the three-year arithmetic at your projected revenue, not today's.
Choose Shopify when… choose Shopware when…
Shopify: your prices are the same for everyone, you want to launch this quarter, you have no in-house tech, and you sell direct to consumers. Shopware: your price depends on who is logged in, an ERP owns your data, you need to change the system's behaviour, or your data must stay in Europe under your control.
| Criterion | Shopware 6 | Shopify / Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Time to launch | Months | Weeks |
| B2B pricing depth | Native | Add-on / limited |
| Source code access | Full | Themes & apps only |
| Transaction fee | None | Yes, % of revenue |
| Hosting & ops | Yours | Included |
| Data location | Your choice | Shopify's cloud |
| Exit cost | Low — you have the code | High — rebuild |
- Shopify buys speed; Shopware buys control. Pick the one you need.
- The revenue percentage grows exactly as you succeed.
- Login-dependent pricing is the line where Shopify stops.
We do this for a living — Shopware, Node.js, React, ERP integration and automation for B2B.
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