Shopware B2C Shop for Pflanzen-Kölle

Pflanzen-Kölle is a medium-sized family business with a legacy of excellence in high-quality plants, garden accessories, and innovative design solutions since its founding in 1818. Headquartered in Heilbronn, Germany, the company made history by opening Europe’s first garden center in 1956. Today, Pflanzen-Kölle offers over 40,000 products through 13 garden centers across Germany and operates two company-owned nurseries. Our collaboration with Pflanzen-Kölle began in 2023, with a mission to enhance and expand their B2C online shop – a cornerstone of the company’s digital growth strategy. The online shop, built on the Shopware 6 Enterprise e-commerce platform, seamlessly integrates existing ERP and PIM systems, ensuring centralized and efficient product data management.

Pflanzen-Kölle primarily sells its premium products at its 13 garden centers. The website is designed to provide customers with an intuitive way to explore the extensive product range and have items conveniently delivered to their doorstep. Given that a significant portion of the products are plants, the systems must be carefully tailored to meet the company’s unique requirements. This includes complex seasonal availability, flexible delivery options, and short delivery cycles to maintain the product freshness. The project presents several key challenges, including managing its inherent complexity, integrating and customizing a delivery date calendar, and orchestrating efficient communication between multiple systems.

Shopware 6 Enterprise Edition

For its online shop, Pflanzen-Kölle leverages the robust Shopware 6 Enterprise platform to address the demanding requirements of modern e-commerce operations. The choice of Shopware 6 was driven by its exceptional flexibility and scalability, enabling seamless integration of custom features and extensions. For a company managing a diverse product portfolio like Pflanzen-Kölle, it is vital that the platform ensures stability and high performance, even during peak traffic periods and across numerous product categories.

With Shopware 6 Enterprise, Pflanzen-Kölle gains access to an array of features tailored specifically to the needs of larger enterprises. Key capabilities include multichannel integration, personalized customer engagement tools, and a comprehensive content management system that supports the creation and maintenance of content. Additionally, advanced analytics and reporting tools empower the company to optimize conversion rates and refine the customer journey.

One of the platform’s standout advantages is its modular architecture. The ability to develop bespoke plug-ins and customizations has enabled Pflanzen-Kölle to tailor its online shop to the needs of its target audience. At the same time, this modularity ensures a future-proof e-commerce solution that evolves alongside the company.

Preferred delivery day calendar

The preferred delivery day calendar at Pflanzen-Kölle is a highly customer-centric feature, allowing customers to select a specific delivery date for their orders. This solution provides a significant level of flexibility and convenience, particularly valuable for seasonal plants such as bouquets, where timely delivery is essential. Implementing the preferred delivery day calendar in the Pflanzen-Kölle online store required addressing several complex requirements:

• Daily product inventories had to be synchronized with the ERP systems.
• Certain days, such as Sundays, holidays, and subsequent working days had to be excluded as delivery options. Additionally, the system needed to ensure the earliest available delivery date maintains a minimum two-day gap from the order date.
• The feature needed to account for products with restricted seasonal availability.
• Orders containing a mix of products with and without preferred delivery dates require a sophisticated delivery logic.

Bundle Feature

The bundle feature on the Pflanzen-Kölle website offers customers the ability to purchase multiple products as a set at a discounted total price. This functionality is especially appealing to customers looking to combine complementary or thematically related items – such as plants, pots, and accessories – in a single purchase. Bundling provides not only a cost-saving advantage, but also the convenience of acquiring all necessary items at once.

The bundle feature is seamlessly integrated into the shopping experience. On relevant product pages, customers are presented with suggested combinations, which they can easily add to their shopping cart. Bundles can be either predefined or customized by the customer, enabling a flexible and personalized shopping experience. Integrating the bundle function posed several challenges. While the foundation was built on a plugin, significant custom programming was required to adapt it to Pflanzen-Kölle’s complex shipping logic and associated costs. One key challenge was distinguishing between bundled products eligible for shipping and those restricted to in-store pickup via Click & Collect.

Shopware PaaS

To host its online shop, Pflanzen-Kölle leverages the Shopware PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) solution, specially designed for demanding e-commerce applications. This platform provides a highly available, scalable hosting environment tailored to the needs of the Shopware Enterprise software. The key advantage of Shopware PaaS lies in its flexibility and fully managed infrastructure, allowing Pflanzen-Kölle to focus on operating and evolving their online shop without allocating resources to server administration and maintenance.

One standout feature of Shopware PaaS is automatic scalability, ensuring the online shop remains stable and performs optimally, even during peak traffic periods such as seasonal campaigns or promotional events. For Pflanzen-Kölle, this is particularly critical during high-demand seasons like spring and summer, where maintaining high availability and fast loading times is essential for delivering a seamless user experience.

Additionally, the platform provides regular security updates and automated backups, managed entirely by the Shopware PaaS infrastructure. This ensures robust operational reliability while minimizing the risk of downtime or data loss. The combination of flexibility, security, and performance makes Shopware PaaS an ideal solution for Pflanzen-Kölle, enabling a future-proof, user-friendly shop.

Our collaboration with Pflanzen-Kölle has been marked by an exceptionally strong and cooperative partnership. The extensive technical solutions, developed, interconnected, and implemented using an agile methodology have turned this ambitious web project into a standout example of digital transformation, seamlessly integrating PoS and online business. From our perspective, the results are highly impressive. We are excited to continue working alongside the Pflanzen-Kölle team to further support this project in the future.

With over 200 years of adaptability and innovation, Pflanzen-Kölle has established itself as a remarkable success story. What began as a commercial and ornamental gardening business in Ulm has evolved into a leading garden center experience. Today, the family-owned company operates 13 garden centers and two in-house nurseries across Germany. The headquarter of Pflanzen-Kölle, a medium-sized enterprise, is located in Heilbronn.