Bielefeld is the regional centre of East Westphalia and a city of brand manufacturers. Food, machine tools and building components are made here, along with clothing and textiles, a legacy of the old linen town. For online retail, that means two very different worlds: brand manufacturers who want to sell directly to consumers without getting in the way of their retail partners, and industrial companies whose customers order service and spare parts for machines online. Both are Shopware projects, but with completely different pricing logic, permissions and data.
One thing that sets Bielefeld apart is the weight of its social and health sector. Church-affiliated charities, hospitals and disability support services run websites with many locations, job listings, donation pages and content in easy-to-read language. Add the university and universities of applied sciences with their institutes. Sites like these are maintained by many people who are not web professionals, and they have to be accessible. This is where TYPO3 shows its strengths: fine-grained permissions, multiple languages, several websites in one installation, and content maintained centrally and published in several places.
For Bielefeld brand manufacturers we build direct-to-consumer shops with Shopware 6 that take range and prices from the ERP and sit comfortably alongside retail channels. For machine builders we create B2B portals with spare parts catalogues, customer-specific prices and order history. Whatever Shopware lacks, we develop as a Shopware Extension Partner in the form of our own extension, rather than stacking several plugins on top of each other. Once live, the shop remains our responsibility: tested updates, security fixes, monitoring, backups. All of this is governed by a maintenance contract with an SLA and 24, 8, 4 or 2 hours response time; on-call cover outside business hours exists only if the SLA includes it.
Especially at providers with many facilities, the TYPO3 installation has often grown over years, with extensions nobody can place any more. So before we offer an upgrade in Bielefeld, we check every single one: is there a release for v14, is it still needed, does the feature have to be rebuilt? Then it is clear whether an upgrade via v13 to TYPO3 v14 LTS or a rebuild with data migration is more economical — we quote both routes with their effort. In ongoing maintenance we apply security patches after every bulletin and keep minor updates, PHP and the database current.
Bielefeld has a lively digital economy of its own, and no shortage of agencies. If you talk to us anyway, it will be because Shopware and TYPO3 are what we concentrate on, and because build, hosting and support stay with one team. For the kick-off and key workshops we make the trip of about two hours and 15 minutes to Bielefeld by arrangement. Development and ongoing support we handle remotely; we document decisions, access and configuration so that a clean handover is possible at any time. Phone: +49 441 21 21 63 0, Monday to Thursday, 9:00 to 16:00, and Friday, 9:00 to 13:00 CET.