Coal, steel and beer made Dortmund big; today the city rests on other industries. Around the technical university and the technology park, IT and software companies have emerged, insurers and financial service providers are major employers, and logistics centres stand on former industrial land. For digital projects, that means many Dortmund companies have their own IT team that looks closely. They do not expect colourful mock-ups from an agency but clean architecture, traceable code, deployments via Git and an operation whose configuration their own IT can check at any time.
Dortmund is also a major logistics location, with a canal port, several motorways and large distribution centres in the surrounding area. Anyone selling online here, or shipping for others, judges a shop by how reliably orders reach the warehouse, how quickly stock levels flow back and whether returns are booked correctly. A broken import does not show up in the shop back end; it shows up at the loading bay. For retailers and shippers in the eastern Ruhr, we therefore plan shops from the interfaces outwards: ERP, warehouse management, carriers, payment providers.
With Shopware 6 we build B2C shops for Dortmund retailers that have to stay stable on busy sales days, and B2B shops for business customers ordering under framework agreements. As a Shopware Extension Partner we develop integrations with warehouse management and carriers as our own maintainable extensions. Support follows go-live: we test patch releases of the current Shopware line on staging before they go live, monitor the message queue and imports, and check backups with restore tests. For shops where every hour of downtime costs revenue, we agree the SLA tier with 4 or 2 hours response time in the maintenance contract.
Insurers, university institutes and associations in Dortmund often run TYPO3 as a portal: with protected areas for brokers or members, multi-step forms and connections to legacy systems. Installations like these cannot be updated on the side. The route to TYPO3 v14 LTS we plan with an extension audit, a test instance and an agreed switchover window, so that your IT can follow every step. New portals we build directly on v14. Ongoing maintenance covers assessing every TYPO3 security bulletin, applying patches promptly, minor updates on a fixed schedule, plus updates to PHP and the database.
The Ruhr has agencies of every size, so for Dortmund, Sharpness (Oldenburg) is not the obvious choice but a deliberate one: because of the focus on Shopware and TYPO3, our own servers in Germany, and because development and operation stay with the same team. From Oldenburg to Dortmund it is the A29 and A1, about two and a half hours. We meet on site by arrangement for the kick-off and key workshops; everything else runs remotely — with video calls, documented tasks and handovers your IT can read up on. You can reach us Monday to Thursday, 9:00 to 16:00, and Friday, 9:00 to 13:00 CET, on +49 441 21 21 63 0.