Focus on AI, Spatial and B2B: Shopware presents pioneering new features at Community Day

New York, May 16, 2024 – Shopware, the leading global open-source ecommerce platform, once again made impressive use of its Community Day to present the platform's latest innovative added values and visionary trends that will benefit Shopware merchants and their customers. The focus was on new functions for the use of artificial intelligence (AI), the embedding of 3D visualizations and the spatial experience in the shopping context (Spatial Commerce), which make buying and selling even more efficient and customer-oriented. Shopware also presented many new features for the fast-growing B2B segment.

In his keynote speech, Shopware Co-CEO Sebastian Hamann emphasized the importance of the new strategic product orientation, "In the next five years, Artificial Intelligence and Spatial Commerce will significantly shape and change the market as core technologies. We are already making these technologies accessible today so that our retailers can immediately benefit from the resulting added value and are perfectly positioned for this new era in online retail."

In addition to the strategic roadmap for these developments, Shopware detailed various highlights:

Scene Editor

The new Scene Editor is part of the Spatial Commerce concept, which is natively integrated into Shopware and already provides retailers with many AR, VR and 3D features for comprehensive options for three-dimensional product presentation in the store. The new Scene Editor can be used to create images or backgrounds within which 3D models of products can be placed. Backgrounds, lighting, colors and renderings can be adjusted as desired, resulting in high-quality representations. The intuitive operation saves time and money, and the retailer achieves a significant improvement in the customer experience. Customers can experience products spatially and are much more confident about purchasing them. This has a positive effect on conversion rates while also reducing the return rate.

AI Copilot | Text to Image

With "Text to Image," emotional mood images can be generated quickly and efficiently for the backgrounds of product presentations within the Shopware experience worlds. In this way, store operators can create appealing product images and product worlds much more quickly. As image backgrounds are easy to change, the feature also enables flexible testing and greater personalization of the shopping experience.

Over the past twelve months, Shopware has already provided many AI features for Shopware merchants to gradually turn this major new trend into real added value for everyday use. The addition of 'Text to Image' marks the twelfth enhancement within Shopware's 'AI Copilot' feature set, which is continuously expanding with new functionalities.

Immersive Elements

The integration of "Immersive Elements" is a further commitment by Shopware to improving the customer experience. The solution is an app that was created in collaboration with the company Instorier and can be easily installed via the integrated Shopware App Store. It includes elements for integration into the Shopware experience and serves to improve the visual presentation of products, including 3D spotmarks, parallax effects, augmented and virtual reality and more. This integration of spatial and immersive effects, which can be implemented without technical know-how, significantly improves the customer experience and helps online retailers stand out from the competition through significantly more immersive storytelling.

The cooperation with Instorier is of particular importance to Hamann. "We see ourselves as an incubator for an open developer community. Building on our open source software core, which contains the basic framework for our 3D and AI developments, the collaboration with Instorier has resulted in a solution that enables immersive experiences and the next generation of storytelling on new devices, such as the Apple Vision Pro or the Meta Quest 3.

During the Community Day, Shopware customer "YT Industries" gave the audience a direct insight into the use of Immersive Elements as part of a live demo on stage.

All new functions have a major impact on positive business development and differentiation for all Shopware B2C and B2B merchants.

Sales Agent

Shopware is expanding B2B commerce with the new "Sales Agent" tool. This concentrates all the activities of sales staff in one central location. This includes the user-defined overview and assigned customers, previous interactions, scheduling, creation of orders, offers and order lists for customers. CRM systems or communication tools (e.g., Outlook) that are already connected to the store are not to be replaced. Rather, the aim is to integrate these much more closely into the commerce platform and provide an all-encompassing overview of all data in one place ("single point of truth").

The main advantage of the new Sales Agent, which will be available in the summer, is that it can be individually adapted to each B2B sales department and tailored to the needs of employees and sales processes without them having to familiarize themselves with complex enterprise solutions. This increases the willingness of employees to engage with new software and adapt it to ensure a quick and successful introduction.

Focus on B2B

B2B is one of Shopware's main focus areas, emphasized Sebastian Hamann. The market volume in this business area is set to triple by 2030. "This also applies to Shopware. More than 60 percent of our retailers now either operate a pure B2B business or are active in the B2B and B2C sectors. This includes many hidden champions such as 'Melag' or 'Schwalbe'," says Hamann. In the B2B of the future, however, it is not only quantity that counts but, above all, a "connected B2B sales experience". "One example of this is our Digital Sales Rooms for interaction between retailers and customers. The tool enables video chats in the store for direct sales advice, for example."

Valuable insights

In addition to the Shopware keynote, Community Day, which has been held annually since 2011, offered a very exciting and valuable lineup. Many speakers from Shopware itself and from the ecosystem provided valuable insights into the technology behind the products, the company's strategy and new trends in the industry. External speakers and industry experts such as Michael Schödder (Toyota Germany) and Christian Hackmann (Beijer Ref AB) provided the 1,500 guests with exciting impulses.

In addition to networking and exchanging experiences, the focus of the two-day event was on experiencing and discussing the major changes that online retail is undergoing due to the significant technological upheavals in the field of artificial intelligence and the customer experience.

All information about the SCD, the features presented and news from the Shopware ecosystem are summarized on the event page.