Sometimes the best conversations happen when nobody is trying to sell anything.
On May 21st in Copenhagen, Shopware United brought together a small group of industry leaders for lunch at La Rocca. Talks, Italian food, and one question on the table: do you know where your data is, who owns it, and what it costs you?
No slides. No product demos. Just people who deal with these challenges every day, sitting across from each other and being honest about it.
The question most businesses skip
It is easy to get caught up in the next feature, the next integration, the next platform migration. But before any of that, there is a more basic question that many businesses never sit down to answer: do we actually have a map of our own data?
Not a dashboard. Not a report someone built for a board meeting. A real understanding of where customer data lives, who controls it, what it costs to access, and what happens to it if you change platforms tomorrow.
That was the starting point of the conversation. And it turned out most people in the room had been thinking about it more than they had been talking about it.
Most of us have had that feeling at some point in the last year. The sense that the platform might be wrong, that AI is moving faster than your setup can handle, that you are paying too much for something you do not fully control. These concerns are real. But they are also hard to think through when the people raising them usually have something to sell you at the end of the sentence.
That is why the format mattered. Guests, no sponsors on stage, no agenda beyond thinking honestly.
Three angles, one theme
Our partners each brought a different lens to the same problem.
Open Commerce started with the compass question. They are an independent ecommerce and platform partner, which means they advise across platforms like Shopify, Shopware, Magento, BigCommerce and others without bias toward any single one. Their point was clear: before you decide where to go, you need to see all the paths available to you. Data ownership, AI readiness, GEO strategy, brand positioning. When the advice you get depends on who is giving it, having someone in the room who has no product to push changes the quality of the conversation entirely.
Custobar brought the customer data reality check. They are a European CDP and marketing automation platform built specifically for retail and ecommerce, trusted by over 300 brands including Intersport, Verkkokauppa.com and The Body Shop. Their message resonated with the room: when your customer relationships live scattered across channels, tools and systems, there is a quiet transfer of value happening that most businesses do not notice until it is too late. Bringing all of that into a single, EU-based profile you actually own and can act on is how you go from reacting to making real decisions.
Hypernode grounded the conversation in infrastructure. With 25 years of managed ecommerce hosting and over 2,500 stores running on their platform, they had real numbers to share. Cloud, dedicated and cluster hosting for Magento, Shopware, WooCommerce and more, with features like horizontal autoscaling and their new Insights dashboard that gives stores full visibility into performance and costs. Their point was practical: you can have the best strategy and the clearest direction, but if your hosting setup is burning budget in the wrong places or scaling when it should not be, you will feel it in the margin before you see it in a report.
Why small rooms matter
There is something that happens when you put the right people around a table instead of five hundred in an auditorium. People stop performing and start thinking out loud.
The conversations between the talks were just as valuable as the talks themselves. Someone shares a problem they have been sitting on for months, and three people at the table have already solved it. That does not happen on a conference stage.
That is what we want Shopware United events to be. Not a platform for announcements, but a room where the hard questions get easier because you are not asking them alone.
What stays with us
If there is one thing the whole table seemed to agree on, it is this: the businesses that will do well in the next few years are the ones that stop and check the map before picking up speed.
Our organizer Alexandra admitted she took the Copenhagen subway in the wrong direction after the event, so absorbed in the conversations that she forgot to look up. She says she will check the map next time. We think that is probably good advice for more than just public transport.
Where is your data right now? Do you know?
We are already planning the next one. If you want to be in the room, stay tuned and follow us on LinkedIn.