WooCommerce or Shopware for a shop already on WordPress
If your WooCommerce shop is taking orders and the checkout works, the honest starting position is stay. Rebuilding it on Shopware is step 04 work, EUR 3.500 to 7.500 over 6 to 12 weeks, and a B2B catalogue with customer-specific pricing and order approval goes past that into step 05, from EUR 7.500 after discovery.
Much of that work is not design. It is the migration itself: products, variants, customers, order history, URLs, tax rules, the payment provider and every integration your shop quietly depends on. Before you pay for it, be precise about what is actually bothering you.
The case for staying where you are
WooCommerce runs on WordPress, so the shop and the content share one admin, one login and one set of users. Your team already knows it, and another WordPress developer could pick it up. That familiarity has real value, and a replatform spends all of it on day one in exchange for nothing, unless a specific limit is genuinely hurting you.
Three things get blamed on the platform that are not the platform.
- The theme. A general purpose theme with a visual builder layered on top renders product pages the slow way. Replacing the storefront is not the same job as replacing the shop.
- The plugin stack. Every plugin adds queries and assets to every request, including pages with no use for them. A checkout that feels heavy may be carrying code written for a page nobody is on.
- The hosting. Woo is database heavy, and cheap shared hosting will make any shop feel broken.
Fixing those three is a smaller job than a replatform. It gets a fixed quote after scoping, and you keep your URLs, your order history and your standing in Google.
When Shopware is genuinely the right move
Shopware is a commerce platform first with content attached, the exact inverse of WordPress. That inversion is the whole argument, and it pays off in five situations.
- B2B pricing. Prices that differ by customer group or contract, net and gross side by side, quotes, order approval and purchase on account. Woo does this by stacking plugins on plugins. Shopware builds it itself, in its paid editions.
- Rule-based merchandising. Pricing, shipping, availability and promotions that change by customer, country, cart contents or channel, maintained by your team rather than by a developer with a deploy.
- More than one storefront. Several brands, countries, currencies or languages from one admin and one catalogue, rather than one WordPress install per country.
- A catalogue with real structure. Deep variant matrices, property-based filtering and bulk maintenance across the whole range.
- Separation of roles. A team where a merchandiser, a content editor and an administrator should not all hold the same powers.
If you recognised your business in two or three of those five, the move is worth costing properly. If you recognised none, you have a theme and hosting problem wearing a platform costume.
The two side by side
| Concern | WooCommerce today | Shopware after a move |
|---|---|---|
| Where content lives | WordPress, same admin as the shop | Its own CMS. A WordPress blog becomes a second system or moves too |
| Customer-specific pricing | Plugins, stacked | Shopware's own B2B features, in paid editions |
| Extending behaviour | Plugins, quality varies by author | Apps and extensions against a documented API |
| Storefront design | Theme and PHP templates | Twig templates, or a separate front end against the API |
| Cost of the change | Nothing. It already exists | Step 04, EUR 3.500 to 7.500, over 6 to 12 weeks |
What a migration actually involves
The shop front is the visible part. The risk sits here.
- URLs and redirects. Every product, category, filter and blog URL Google already knows needs a destination on the new shop. A replatform that treats this as an afterthought gives away the traffic it had.
- Orders and customers. Orders move as records. Passwords are stored as one-way hashes, so unless the new shop is set up to accept the old format, every customer needs a reset on launch day. Plan that as a campaign, not a surprise.
- Anything recurring. Subscriptions live at the payment provider as much as in the shop, and they are the hardest thing to move without interrupting billing for people currently paying you.
- Tax and invoicing. Rates, VAT treatment, invoice numbering and whatever your accountant depends on at quarter end.
- Integrations. Accounting, shipping labels, stock, email marketing, reviews. Each is a small project of its own with an owner who has to be asked.
That list is why a fixed quote follows scoping rather than preceding it. Anyone who prices your migration from a look at your homepage has priced the easy half.
Process and timeline
Scoping comes first: catalogue size and shape, the integration list, order volume, and which of your plugins are load-bearing. It ends in a fixed quote. Build is the 6 to 12 weeks of step 04, and the week ranges for everything else are on packages. Launch is scheduled rather than brave: content freeze, final data sync, redirects live, then Search Console watched closely.
This is the part that waits on you: product data. Descriptions, images and attributes nobody has tidied since the shop opened have to be cleaned before they can move, and only your team knows which are still true.
When to spend less
Do not move because the shop looks dated. That is a storefront job, not a platform job. Do not move because a developer prefers the other system, and do not move in your busiest quarter.
If the real problem is turnover rather than the platform, there are cheaper places to put the money. SEO foundation is bought once, EUR 450 to 750: Search Console, analytics, indexation, technical hygiene, titles, internal links and a three to six month plan. Separately, Care at EUR 100 to 300 a month keeps the shop you have from decaying, with updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes. Neither puts an order at risk.
There is also a version where the right answer is do not hire us yet. If your catalogue is small, your orders are steady and your complaint is aesthetic, you need a new storefront on the shop you own, or nothing at all this year.
Common questions
Will Shopware rank better than WooCommerce?
No. Platforms do not rank, pages do. A migration is a ranking risk rather than a ranking strategy, because you are moving every URL that currently earns you traffic. If search is the goal, spend the money on the pages and the technical hygiene instead.
Can I keep WordPress for content and run Shopware for the shop?
Yes, with trade-offs. You accept two systems, two logins and two sets of updates, and they have to look like one site to a visitor. It earns its keep when your content is genuinely a publishing operation with an editor behind it. For six pages it is not.
Who owns the shop when it is finished?
You do. The code, the repository and the database are yours. We can host it, agreed per project and written into the quote rather than assumed. You can move it elsewhere without asking permission.
How long will the shop be down?
With a planned cutover, not long. The honest risk is the stretch right after launch, when redirects, tax rules and integrations meet real customers doing unusual things. Budget attention for that stretch, not just for launch day.
Is this step 03 or step 04?
Step 04. A shop takes money, and a new build with payments, a login, a dashboard, an API or a CRM is step 04, EUR 3.500 to 7.500 over 6 to 12 weeks. Step 03, EUR 1.500 to 3.500, is the four to seven page business website with a CMS, service pages and a booking or contact flow. A B2B platform with its own logic is step 05, from EUR 7.500 after discovery. More on that work sits on design and engineering.
Send us the shop URL, your catalogue size and the one thing that is actually bothering you, and we will tell you whether it is a migration or a repair. Start here.
Building something?
JP Studio designs and builds websites, storefronts and product interfaces.