Just outside Stade begins the Altes Land, one of Europe's major fruit-growing regions. Apples, cherries and pears go from here to retailers and processors, and many farms market part of the harvest themselves: in the farm shop, as fruit boxes, as juice, schnapps or gift hampers. Add farm cafés and holiday flats for guests from Hamburg and the surrounding area. For an online shop this means a range that changes with the harvest, collection alongside delivery and demand that picks up markedly in autumn and before Christmas. At harvest time nobody on the farm has time for technology that demands attention.
At the same time Stade is an industrial location. In Bützfleth on the Elbe, chemical and energy companies operate with their own port, and in aviation the town has made a name for itself producing components from carbon-fibre-reinforced plastic. Around these plants, suppliers, maintenance firms and technical service providers have grown up that deliver to corporations with strict purchasing processes. And the Hanseatic town itself — with its old town, Hanseatic harbour and museums — lives on retail, tourism and its role as district town, closely linked to Hamburg via the A26.
For fruit farms and direct marketers in the Altes Land we build Shopware 6 shops that fit everyday farm life: seasonal items that can be shown and hidden according to the harvest, collection slots at the farm shop, shipping rules for juice and gift hampers. For suppliers to Stade's industry we implement B2B shops with customer prices, approval workflows and OCI or punch-out connections to the plants' procurement systems. After go-live we take over support: we test updates of the 6.7 line on staging, keep plugins and interfaces up to date, and a maintenance contract with an SLA sets how quickly we respond — 24, 8, 4 or 2 hours.
For industrial companies with technical documentation, fruit-growing associations, training providers and institutions in Stade we use TYPO3, currently on v14 LTS. Product data and data sheets in several languages, careers pages for skilled staff, editors with separate permissions — TYPO3 handles all of this cleanly in one installation. Existing sites on v12 or older no longer receive free security updates; we plan the route to v14 with an inventory, a test environment and a fixed cut-over date. In maintenance we check security bulletins on the day of publication and apply patches after testing on staging.
From Oldenburg it takes around 1 hour and 45 minutes to reach Stade, and we have no office in the region. Collaboration is therefore organised mostly remotely: video calls, a ticket system and a staging environment on which you check every interim stage. For the kick-off and, where useful, for sign-off we come to Stade by arrangement — to fruit farms preferably outside the harvest. 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, and outside those hours only with agreed on-call cover.