ImpressCMS Support

I am now working at https://www.meteor.be and what we do is create e-commerce shops based on Shopware (mostly, we also do shopify, but that's not really relevant for this case as it's PaaS and not open source).

Next to that, I am also on loan to our sister firm PHPro where I manage a fairly large magento2 website.

Both Shopware and Magento2 are monsters : Their codebase is tens of times that of ImpressCMS, and it takes more or less 9-12 months to set up a shop from start to finish with all the customisations that a customer normally requests.

Shopware 6 is the new kid on the block (Shopware 5 still runs a gazillion of sites, but wasn't API-first so it was rewritten from scratch and now SW6 has more or les 25% of the functionalites from its predecessor )

Fun fact : Shopware 5 used Smarty as templating engine.

But even with those gigantic ecosystems, in most cases we go for specialised services like https://www.firmhouse.com to setup subscriptions for recurring revenue.

Most of the large shops that we handle use a PIM, with a very popular one being Akeneo. And anyhow, in most cases we need to do a connection with an ERP that handles product definition, description, pricing, and stock information. That connection is one of the weak spots of any project. Another one is discounts. I couldn't have imagined the creativity of retailers in inventing everytime another complex set of rules for even more discount types. Each with their own exceptions of course. And the cherry on the cake is the payment provider integration. In Europe, Adyen is frequently used, with Mollie also very popular in Belgium-the Netherlands. We've been in dicussion with Adyen for months now because some parts of their Shopware module don't work as expected.

I take it you're not looking at offering a catalog of a few thousand items online, so Magento or Shopware would be overkill. But, I have been thinking of resurrecting the oledrion module based on the knowledge I have gathered until now.

A big weakness in both Magento2 and Shopware, even with hundreds of millions of venture capital behind them : they suck at handling content htat isn't a product or a category description. Shopware has an elasticsearch running, but you can't search for keywords in 'blog' pages. The same with Magento. And several of our clients got the remark from the SEO guys and gals that there simply wasn't enough text on their product pages for Google to index, so their SEO would suffer. So blog content really is important.

So in that respect, ImpressCMS + oledrion would do a much better job