SHOPMACHER is Germany's leading specialist agency for the further development of e-commerce.
Our Services
We are the SHOPMACHER (German for “shop maker”) – of course, we build online shops, product platforms, marketplaces and other transaction-oriented applications! From building a sustainable system architecture to selecting the right shop software to its going live, we cover the entire spectrum of developing e-commerce platforms.
Our real mission, however, is further development. Therefore, our entire service portfolio is designed for the operation and expansion of e-commerce platforms:
An online business that needs to continuous adaption to changing market requirements needs a primarily responsible person with a mission. That is to say, to constantly re-evaluate market requirements from which to derive requirements for the shop, to coordinate these with the shop operator, to prioritize them and to formulate clear requirements for the development team. This is the basis for first-class development quality, and we provide this service in the form of product ownership.
The focus on furthering a platform does not tolerate disruptions by day-to-day business. However, there is day-to-day business. And here we support you with our customer services – e.g. with maintenance and support, application management, hands-on support, editorial support or the coordination of third party providers. We take over all work on the running system, which a customer cannot or does not want to perform himself. If required, also around the clock.
The focus on furthering a platform does not tolerate disruptions by day-to-day business. However, there is day-to-day business. And here we support you with our customer services – e.g. with maintenance and support, application management, hands-on support, editorial support or the coordination of third party providers. We take over all work on the running system, which a customer cannot or does not want to perform himself. If required, also around the clock.
We develop tools for our customers with which they can take over the daily shop management by themselves. This way we reduce dependencies. Our customers can react quickly and directly to current market developments and push sales, while we focus on the further development of the platform.
However, a number of helpful tools do not automatically lead to a progressive shop management on the side of the operator. Shop managers are often not provided with capacities, concepts, workflows or background knowledge to make efficient use of existing editorial resources and by that push their platform forward. Although it would be possible. We have this know-how because we have been managing branches for our customers for more than 10 years. We pass on this experience in the form of shop management consulting.
The effective further development of an e-commerce platform can only take place on the basis of measurements and data. We are happy to take on this task for our customers – also because the results form the ideal basis for our work on the platform. We define KPIs and install tools to monitor the development of the KPIs and draw conclusions for the immediate implementation of optimizations from the results.
On the part of software manufacturers and service providers, the agile software development model has been gaining more and more acceptance over the past years. Retailers and brands are operating particularly efficiently since they have introduced this approach and therefore are on an equal footing with their service providers. This is not the only reason why online retailers are increasingly becoming technology companies in the course of the digital transformation. Proven workflows, roles and tools must be rethought and replaced by new ones.
We are familiar with the challenges posed by change on the operator side from day-to-day cooperation. And of course we know how requirements should be directed to a service provider for a prolific cooperation. Our agile coaches pass on this know-how in the form of consulting services.
We provide concrete support in the form of lectures, workshops and training sessions in the following areas:
- Agile workflows: roles, responsibility and tasks in an agile environment on the side of the operator
- Agile requirements management: efficient control of service providers through intelligent use of backlogs and user stories
- Atlassian Consulting: Working properly with Confluence, Jira & others.
Even outside a commerce platform, the world does not stand still. And often changes here interact with e-commerce at least in the medium term. Regardless of whether you are introducing a new ERP, cash register system or merchandise management system or whether you simply want to reconfigure the displays in the stationary trade: the dependencies to e-commerce should be recognized and included in the planning at an early stage in order to avoid subsequent limitations or even problems. We support you with technical consultants who know overall interrelationships as good as we know current platform architecture.
The further development of a platform often comes to a standstill after some time. For example, because an operator has chosen a partner who has its strength in the initial development of e-commerce platforms but does not have the processes or resources for a purposeful further development. Or because the technical basis is not sufficiently scalable and new workarounds lead to a progressive instability of a system. However, a relaunch is often out of the question, e.g. because the system still is too new.
For these cases we have developed a procedure to take over existing e-commerce platforms and successively develop them further. We proceed purposefully documenting and disassembling an existing system into manageable individual parts, which we optimize or replace step by step.
A number of important questions must be clarified before a reliable technological decision can be made for an upcoming IT project and a concrete process model can be derived from it. For that, we support beginners or conquerors in the field of e-commerce.
Within the framework of our implementation-oriented platform consulting, we clarify various questions concerning interfaces, data models, front-end strategies and system architecture. This is done in workshops involving all relevant players. Our considerations also form the basis for a selection of a shop system that is tailored to your needs.
For us, it is of no importance whether a joint projects follows from that or whether other service providers are commissioned. What matters is that the IT project gets a solid foundation through our considerations in any case.
The development of a new technical basis for an e-commerce platform usually is a complex IT project with corresponding economic risk. At the beginning of a project, it often is not sufficiently clear which solution best fits the requirements. Neither, whether the preferred architecture will efficiently fulfill all essential requirements.
In order to avoid setting an expensive and irreversible technological course too early, the provision of a prototype and by that a proof of concept (PoC), can be a good means.
With the PoC, we link all decisive interfaces of a system on a purely functional level and thus with comparatively little effort – depending on the requirements from merchandise management to the shopping basket. This way, we provide decision-makers with a sound basis for the further definition of the system architecture and minimize the risk of a technological mistake.
