Shopware just repositioned itself as infrastructure for a world where AI agents shop. We asked a developer who has worked across other platforms why he’s still building here.
At Shopware Community Day 2026 in Cologne this June, the company rallied around one idea: open commerce infrastructure for the agentic era. Four products, Nexus, Copilot, Payments and Experience Studio, arrived under that banner, built on the premise that AI agents are entering the purchasing process and merchants now compete on the strength of their own data and business logic. Iulian Beleiu, who has spent more than ten years in PHP and Symfony and most of the last several building on Shopware, watched the keynote the way he watches every keynote: waiting to see what survives contact with a real client project.
Why Shopware, not Shopify
Ask him the question every agency eventually gets, and he refuses to answer it in the abstract. “It depends on the business, not on the name,” he says. A standard shop that needs to launch fast without an ops team is a fine fit for Shopify. The moment a business needs to genuinely change the system, the calculus shifts. Checkout is the clearest case: on Shopware it’s his own code, free to reshape, where Shopify’s is largely locked behind its top plan. B2B is the second, since Shopware ships employee accounts, approval flows, quotes and customer-specific pricing natively, where Shopify leans on third-party apps for most of it. And integrations: he can add his own database tables and sync with an ERP however it actually works, where a Shopify build goes through the platform’s API and apps, rate limits included. “Shopware wins when the business needs custom checkout, real B2B, deep ERP integration and data ownership, as long as you have someone to run it”.
Where it loses is at both edges: a small standard shop, where Shopware is overkill, and a very large, fully headless, multi-brand operation with its own platform team, where commercetools can fit better, though he notes people routinely underestimate how much frontend and plumbing they’ll build themselves on that path.
Open source, tested on a bad day
Shopware’s Community Edition being open source and self-hostable matters to Beleiu for reasons more practical than ideological. “The biggest one is when something breaks right before a release, I can open the core, see exactly what’s happening and fix it, instead of waiting on a support ticket while the shop is down”. It also lets him host wherever a client’s compliance needs require and change core behavior when the business genuinely needs it. He punctures the marketing version just as quickly: paid features like B2B or subscriptions still live in a commercial plugin, and there’s a paid tier past a certain size. The core being open is what saves him on a bad day, and that’s the part he actually leans on.
Data first, agents second
The agentic shift itself, Beleiu argues, is a data problem wearing a marketing label. “The shop isn’t just a storefront for humans anymore, it also has to expose clean product data, prices and stock in a way other systems and AI agents can read and act on”. He’s candid that today this is more positioning than shipped reality. Even inside the Shopware community, people left the Community Day keynote asking who it’s really for right now, since a lot of it is still early or region-locked. His advice is unglamorous: get the data and processes clean first, since that’s what agents actually use, and let the visible layer follow.
Don’t bet on a protocol winner yet
That advice extends to the protocols themselves. Google and Shopify jointly launched the Universal Commerce Protocol, UCP, in January 2026 as a shared standard for how agents discover and transact with merchants, and Shopware says it is UCP-ready. Beleiu’s read is that none of this is settled: “Even the biggest players are still figuring it out”. His example: within months of launching in-chat checkout inside ChatGPT, OpenAI walked the feature back. Keep products and checkout exposed cleanly through an API a business actually owns, he says, since that’s the layer that will get adapted to whichever protocol wins.
Shopware’s own Agentic Commerce sales channel, which lets merchants generate a feed for platforms like ChatGPT to index, is already shipping. But Beleiu is careful about scope: it’s discovery, essentially SEO for ChatGPT, not checkout inside the chat, and the ChatGPT side remains US-only for now. “It’s a low-risk thing to prepare,” he says, and the real prerequisite isn’t the feed, it’s accurate product data, since a bad feed just spreads bad data faster.
When the buyer is a machine
When the buyer is increasingly an agent rather than a person browsing a storefront, the center of gravity moves. The agent never sees a homepage or its copy, it reads price, stock, delivery and returns and decides on those. A stale “in stock” flag no longer just annoys a visitor, it flows straight into a purchase. The human-facing frontend still matters. The marketing polish on a page an agent ignores matters less.
Open versus closed, the honest version
Beleiu doesn’t oversell his own side of this. An open, self-hosted platform keeps the data and logs on the merchant’s own server when an agent acts. What no platform choice fixes is that a purchase completing inside ChatGPT still costs the merchant the direct customer relationship, along with the risk, regardless of what runs underneath. Closed platforms still win on speed for simple cases. For complex commerce he leans open over a multi-year horizon, since control pays off as the space keeps moving. The signal he trusts most is who’s hedging: card networks staying neutral, Amazon committing to no current protocol. When the largest players all decline to pick a winner, nobody has won yet. Open’s price, honestly, is that it demands a good team behind it, or the flexibility just becomes work nobody can handle.
Asked what he’d tell a merchant making a five-year platform bet today, Beleiu doesn’t point to a roadmap slide. “Don’t pick based on the slickest AI demo, those age fast, and even the best-funded ones have already been walked back. Pick based on the boring things: data ownership, your integration needs, and how easily you can adapt when the protocols shift, because they will”.
Territory nobody has mapped yet
What excites Beleiu personally is less a feature than a category of problem he hasn’t seen before. “For the first time in years, the shop isn’t just a website anymore, it’s becoming something machines actually talk to, and nobody has really figured out how to build for that yet”. To a developer arriving from Shopify, Magento or BigCommerce, his pitch is simpler than any protocol comparison: “You get your control back”. The hosting, caching and deployments become the developer’s problem too, and for Beleiu, that’s the whole appeal and the catch at once.
This is part two of a two-part interview with a developer actually building with Shopware today. Part one looked at what the platform’s pace and recent core changes mean day to day. Follow Shopware United for what comes next.