Shopware relies on AI: agent-based commerce

A better shopping experience thanks to AI – Shopware also wants to offer its customers this. And that includes both the stores themselves and their end customers. In the future, the German company will bundle its AI functions under the umbrella of Shopware AI. These include integrated text and image processing options as well as functions for optimizing the shopping experience and, of course, a chat-based co-pilot.

The co-pilot is intended to take over routine store management tasks and thus support retailers. They should gain time to take care of customer advice, for example. So much for the typical and vague hopes of what AI can achieve in a company: Making people fundamentally more efficient, as well as freeing them from tedious tasks. But Shopware also offers more specific areas of application.

For example, retailers can use an image editor to automatically crop products. A task that sometimes consumes a lot of capacity. The products can then be immediately integrated into new scenes, Shopware writes. The AI takes care of shadows and reflections. “This creates high-quality campaign images directly in the Shopware Media Manager – without the need for a photo shoot, which saves time and money.”+

Agents go shopping

Shopware understands agentic commerce to mean that purchasing decisions are transferred from people to intelligent agents. This should result in “higher sales, lower integration costs, differentiated shopping experiences and greater monetization”. This may mean that it is easier to convince an agent to make a purchase than a human. Own AI agents are to follow. To this end, the company wants to develop standards with other companies and has founded the Agentic Commerce Alliance, an industry initiative.

Shopware says it has a particularly large number of B2B customers, i.e., other companies whose customers are businesses and not consumers, including Ritter Sport and Toyota, for example. There are new functions for them under the title Complex Commerce. A platform that can be used to set parameters for individual departments or create individual product catalogs, for example.

The Community Hub is a new control center for the exchange of information about Shopware. “The open-source approach has proven to be a strategic advantage: Retailers need flexible, scalable platforms without lock-ins, and that's exactly what Shopware offers,” the press release states.

(emw)