On June 10, more than 1,500 people from our community gathered at Confex in Cologne. What we took home, and the questions we are still chewing on.

Key takeaways

  • Shopware built SCD 2026 around agentic commerce and launched four things: Nexus (orchestration and workflow), Copilot (an AI assistant), Payments (native, PayPal-powered), and Experience Studio (a research preview for human-led storefronts).
  • The product news mattered, but the recaps that filled our feeds afterward were mostly about each other.
  • Three honest questions kept coming up: are we ready or is the platform, can European merchants use the agentic features yet, and does any of this move revenue this year.
  • Sander Mangel summed up the first: “An agent can’t clean up what was already a mess”. Roman Zenner flagged the ChatGPT pipeline is US-only for now. Alexander Graf pointed to a merchant clearing 651 million Euros with none of it.
  • The two wins nobody argued with were concrete: Shopware Payments, and the community itself.

Start with the people

If you only read the keynote coverage, you would think SCD 2026 was about products. Spend an hour in our community’s posts and you get a different story. The recaps that traveled furthest were about the room.

Christian Dangl of dasistweb caught it: “Every year talking seems to be longer and longer which means the community is growing”. Laura Kremer of Kandu, who moderated a main-stage leadership panel of four women, called the day the one that carried her entire event week, and promised to bring three more women to the stage in 2027. Carmen Bremen kept the traditional ladies’ restroom photo going.

Before the main event even started, FireGento ran its two-day hackathon. Sander Mangel described it as the place where the actual thinking gets done, over lunch and coffee and looking at someone else’s screen, with several of the tools released as open source. And for the first time Shopware parked a podcast van on site, where eleven episodes were recorded across the day, including a candid conversation with Franzi Kunz.

That is the part the slides never capture, and it is the reason most of us go.

What Shopware put on stage

The headline was agentic commerce. Stefan Hamann opened with the question the whole day circled: “What happens when commerce is no longer built only for humans, but also for AI agents?” Sebastian Hamann’s answer was that commerce is “becoming dual. Agentic & Human-Led”, and four releases carried that idea: Shopware Nexus, an orchestration layer for systems and workflows; Shopware Copilot, an assistant that acts on that context; Shopware Payments, a native product built on PayPal’s infrastructure; and Experience Studio, a research preview for human-led storefronts.

CFOO Joachim Weber added a sober note worth keeping. Growth in e-commerce is intact, he wrote, but “the spread between individual merchants is widening”, and the choices we make now decide which side of that gap we land on.

Then the community started asking questions, and not only in Cologne. The agentic debate followed everyone across a packed June of events.

The first question: are we ready, or is the platform?

This was the one I heard most, and the sharpest version of it was not said in Cologne at all. At a roundtable on agentic commerce at Meet Magento Italy, the Magento community’s Italian event a few days later, Katy Wilson argued that being agent-ready is an organisational change before it is a technical one. Sander Mangel put it more plainly in his recap: “An agent can’t clean up what was already a mess”. Automation needs something to act on, and for most merchants that means the unglamorous work of getting data and processes straight has to come first.

It is a healthy thing for a community to say out loud, because it moves the cost of the agentic era off the keynote slide and onto the work we actually do with clients.

The second question: can we use it here yet?

Roman Zenner, an e-commerce analyst at commercetools and a familiar face around the wider community, gave the most useful technical read. Shopware now ships an “Agentic Commerce” sales channel in the core, speaking the Agentic Commerce Protocol from OpenAI and Stripe. The catch, he noted, is that registration for the ChatGPT marketplace is currently US-only, so European merchants cannot yet use the pipeline that has been built. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, by his account, still lives in the Shopware world only as an experimental plugin. Zenner said the launches did not fully win him over, while adding that it is reassuring to see strong European alternatives taking shape.

For a community that is mostly European, that distance between shipped and usable is a fair thing to flag.

The third question: does it move the number?

The sharpest challenge came from outside our usual circle, and from a different event in the same season. Alexander Graf, co-founder of Spryker and host of the Kassenzone podcast, made his point about Shoptalk Europe in Barcelona. He pointed to the beauty retailer Flaconi, which he said reached 651 million euros in revenue with a “normal” e-commerce model, and argued that the agentic-commerce story promised on the floor below at Shoptalk “plays no role” in that result.

He also says the thing a lot of merchants were quietly thinking: what part of this changes my bottom line this year? A community that only repeats the vendor line is not much use to its members, so the question belongs in the room, even when it is asked at someone else’s conference.

And the human thread

For all the talk of agents, one of the most-shared moments was about feeling. Franzi Kunz, recording in the podcast van, made the case for shopping as an emotional act, the kind of discovery a flea-market find delivers, and thanked Shopware for keeping that side of commerce in the conversation. It is worth noticing that Experience Studio, Shopware’s own preview, is an answer to exactly that worry.

Even Shopware’s marketing chief named the noise. Reflecting on the season, Martin Gaubitz wrote that “everyone is selling a map” while “very few have tested the route”, and warned against “complexity disguised as innovation”. Honest words from a company that had just shipped four products.

Where that leaves us

The agentic era is real, and almost no one in the community argued with the direction. What we are still working out is the order of things. The protocols are ahead of the market. The readiness is ahead of most merchants. And the clearest proof on the day was the payments product that already ships, while the agents are still arriving.

Sebastian Hamann said one thing at the Alliance meetup that should be heard by the entire community: “Agentic Commerce will not be built by a single company. It will be built by an ecosystem”. That is the part I truly believe in. Technology will keep changing. The reason we keep showing up in Cologne will not.

See you at SCD 2027.

FAQ

What did Shopware announce at Shopware Community Day 2026?

Four releases tied to agentic commerce: Shopware Nexus (orchestration and workflow), Shopware Copilot (an AI assistant), Shopware Payments (a native, PayPal-powered payment product), and Experience Studio (a research preview for human-led storefronts).

What is Shopware Payments?

A payment product built into the Shopware platform and powered by PayPal’s infrastructure, bringing PayPal, Venmo and Pay Later into the platform. Shopware presented it as optional and non-exclusive, so merchants keep control of their own payment provider. It launched first in Germany and Austria, with EU and US rollout to follow.

Can European merchants use Shopware’s agentic commerce features now?

Only partly. Analyst Roman Zenner noted that the ChatGPT buying pipeline, based on the Agentic Commerce Protocol, shipped in the Shopware core, but registration for the ChatGPT marketplace is currently US-only, so European merchants cannot use it yet.

What is the Agentic Commerce Alliance?

An industry group Shopware co-founded with 15 partners in July 2025 so merchants can take part in agentic commerce without handing the customer relationship to large AI platforms. Its first in-person gathering, by Shopware’s account, ran the evening before SCD 2026.

When is Shopware Community Day 2027?

June 1, 2027, in Cologne.

 

Article by Alexandra Isbasoiu – board member at Shopware United, managing operations and the community events.

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