Replacing WooCommerce or Shopware: when switching pays off and how to get it right

Switching shop platforms costs money and ties up your team for months. So do not switch because a system is fashionable, but because your current shop is holding your business back. These warning signs justify a closer look:

Shopware discontinued Shopware 5 after a transition period. Bug fixes were provided until the end of July 2023 and security updates until July 2024. Since then, the vendor has only been developing Shopware 6. According to Shopware, the third-party provider safefive took over commercial security updates after July 2024.

Your Shopware 5 shop keeps running. But newly discovered vulnerabilities are only fixed if you pay for it. That is a bridge, not a solution.

Moving from Shopware 5 to Shopware 6 is also not an update but a migration. Shopware itself calls it a migration and offers a migration assistant for it. In our experience, the theme and extensions have to be rebuilt or replaced. The effort is therefore similar to switching to a different system. So compare the options openly instead of automatically staying with Shopware.

The Community Edition of Shopware 6 remains open source under the MIT licence and is free of charge. Since 24 March 2025, however, a Fair Usage Policy applies: merchants generating more than EUR 1 million in annual revenue through their Shopware shop, calculated net of taxes, need a paid plan (Rise, Evolve or Beyond) to keep using the Shopware Account and Shopware Store. Purchases and updates of extensions run through the Store. Revenue reporting is mandatory for all Community Edition users, even below the threshold. Shopware states that it will talk to the merchant before restricting access.

Then there is the release cycle. Shopware publishes a new major version of Shopware 6 every year. The last version of each cycle receives about two years of updates in total. So budget time and money for a major update every year, including testing all extensions.

WooCommerce itself is free and open source. The costs lie in everything you add: theme, payment methods, shipping, invoices, multiple languages, customer prices. Extensions from the official WooCommerce Marketplace are sold as subscriptions, usually for twelve months. When a subscription expires, the extension stays installed but no longer receives updates or support.

On top of that comes the dependency on WordPress and PHP. The shop, WordPress, the theme and every plugin must be compatible with the PHP version on your server. PHP 8.2 stops receiving security updates on 1 January 2027. In our experience, the move to PHP 8.4 or 8.5 reveals which old plugins can no longer keep up. What to do before the end of 2026 is explained in our guide "PHP 8.2 end of life: what SMEs need to do by the end of 2026".

Often this is a reason to clean up rather than switch: remove unused plugins, review subscriptions, update PHP. Switching only makes sense if the shop still does not fit your business afterwards.

Extremprint, the online print shop of Walz Druck GmbH in eastern Switzerland, previously sold through a shop built on WordPress and WooCommerce. It took five clicks to reach a product, every print run was a separate product, and at the end there was just an upload field for the print file. We rebuilt the shop on an open shop platform without licence fees. Customers now design business cards and flyers directly in the browser, see a print preview before buying, and the print shop receives print-ready files. The launch is being prepared, as of November 2026.

Bandex, a manufacturer of curtain tapes from Vorarlberg, is replacing a B2B shop that is more than ten years old. The PHP application behind it has not received security updates for years. In the new shop, every business customer sees their own prices from SAP, and products and stock levels come automatically from the ERP.

Customer accounts, addresses and order history can be migrated. Your customers will find their previous orders in the new shop if this is part of the plan.

Passwords are trickier. The old shop stores them only in encrypted form, so they cannot simply be read out. Shopify's help centre states that passwords from another shop cannot be imported. Customers then receive an invitation and set a new password. On an open platform, we can usually keep checking the old method, so customers can log in with their existing password.

Announce any required password change before go-live instead of surprising your customers with it at checkout.

The examples assume internal full costs of CHF 70 per hour and maintenance costs of 15 per cent of the project costs per year. Use your own figures and the result will change accordingly.

B2B shop: 400 orders per month are currently transferred to the ERP by hand, five minutes each. That adds up to around 400 hours or CHF 28,000 per year. On top of that, we assume CHF 3,000 per year for plugin subscriptions and emergency fixes that no longer apply. A new shop with ERP integration for CHF 60,000 costs CHF 9,000 a year in maintenance. That leaves around CHF 22,000 in annual savings, so the investment pays for itself in just under three years. Additional orders from a better shop are not included.

Small shop: 60 orders per month with standard products, and orders already flow automatically into the accounting system. A rebuild for CHF 40,000 saves, by our assumption, around 20 hours or CHF 1,400 per year, but maintenance alone costs CHF 6,000 per year. That does not pay off. Here, a clean-up and update or a simple shop on Shopify are the better choice.