Your store is up and running. Orders are coming in, the ERP is connected - somehow. And yet: it doesn't go any further.
New functions? They take months. Mobile conversion stagnates, even though the traffic is actually there. Product data is often synchronized manually between the store, PIM and ERP by employees who have better things to do. What's more, the developer ecosystem of your store system is shrinking. Updates are becoming rarer. Plugins are less secure.
That sounds specific, but it's not. It's the reality for many medium-sized online retailers who have built on systems such as xt:Commerce, Magento 1 or Shopware 5.
Legacy systems have a treacherous characteristic. They work just well enough to delay the decision to migrate. At the same time, the technical debt grows - with every month, every workaround, every manual data maintenance.
The costs are real. In full-time equivalents for data maintenance that a PIM could automate. In conversions that are lost on the mobile device. In visibility that others build up while your own system delivers static description texts without schema markup.
What many underestimate: A migration can be calculated. Waiting is not.
While competitors play out their product data in a structured way via a PIM - machine-readable for Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity - their own backlog increases with every quarter. Not dramatically. But steadily.
Nik the Greek GmbH, family-run, in business for over 40 years. Mediterranean specialties - olive oil, feta, antipasti. 30,000 customers, almost 7,000 products. Over 19,000 reviews at Trusted Shops, average 4.92 out of 5. A company that its customers trust.
The initial system: xt:Commerce. Functional, but strategically at the end of its development perspective. The data between the store, Pimcore PIM and ERP was managed manually. Mobile performance was weak. And the developer ecosystem behind xt:Commerce was simply no longer being developed.
So the question was not whether to migrate. It was how - without jeopardizing 30,000 established customer relationships.
Blackbit digital Commerce implemented the replatforming of Nik the Greek to Shopware 6 - including Pimcore PIM connection, ERP integration and hosting on European Kubernetes infrastructure.
A detail that is easily overlooked: The tried-and-tested store design was adopted 1:1. No new layout, no new navigation. Nothing has changed for customers - and that was the intention. The breach of trust that many retailers risk with relaunches did not take place here.
A completely new technical basis was created in the background. The Blackbit Shopware-Pimcore Connector connects Shopware 6 and Pimcore PIM fully automatically and bidirectionally - product data, categories, stocks and prices are synchronized without manual intervention. The solution is update-resistant and is being actively developed further.
The go-live itself? Four-hour planned maintenance window. No data loss, no extended downtime.
Nik the Greek migrated 30,000 customers and 6,954 products from xt:Commerce to Shopware 6 with Blackbit - with a four-hour planned maintenance window, fully automated data flow between store, Pimcore PIM and ERP, improved mobile performance and a clean SEO and GEO foundation for AI visibility.
Pimcore serves as a single source of truth for all product data. This means: consistent, fully attributed and machine-readable content - a prerequisite for AI response systems such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT or Perplexity to be able to process and play out this data at all.
The hosting runs on the Blackbit Kubernetes stack at Scaleway - European cloud, no US CLOUD Act, elastically scalable.
If you are currently in a similar situation - the store is up and running, but the platform is slowing you down - then it is worth taking a look at the specific decisions behind this project.
Which architecture was chosen and why. How the automated data flow between Shopware 6, Pimcore and ERP works in detail. What the migration means for SEO and AI visibility. What the TCO calculation between legacy and Shopware 6 looks like.