Shopware: channel guide

About this guide

This is a ChannelEngine guide on Shopware as a channel. Here you can find information on how to create a selling account on Shopware, how to configure this channel on ChannelEngine, and what the specific requirements are to get started.

Table of contents

How to request an account

Associated costs

Channel features

Settings and configuration

Channel-specific requirements and exceptions

• Setup
• Product selection
• Mappings

FAQs

About the channel

Shopware 6 is a cloud-based ecommerce solution for B2B and B2C merchants to sell their products and scale their businesses online. ChannelEngine offers both a merchant plugin and a channel plugin for this ecommerce solution. The channel plugin, called Shopware as channel, enables you to list your products on Shopware from ChannelEngine and handle all of your Shopware orders in the merchant system of your choice.

Regardless of which merchant system you use, connect to the Shopware channel to benefit from amplifying your products on the channel that you connect with Shopware.

How to request an account

To start selling via Shopware, visit its website and request a product demo.

Associated costs

The cost associated with selling via Shopware depends on the plan you choose with Shopware. Shopware offers Rise, Evolve, and Beyond plans. You can find the costs on Shopware’s website on its plans and pricing page.

Channel features

Settings and configuration

Setting up each channel on ChannelEngine follows the same flow, though not every channel includes the steps listed below.

1. Go through the Setup.
2. Create a Product selection.
3. Complete the Categorization.
4. Set up the Mappings: content, offers, and carriers.
5. Configure the Pricing: rules and currency conversion.
6. Finish the Activation.
7. Check the Listed products overview.

Channel-specific requirements and exceptions

This section describes extra steps and deviations from the standard steps in the Settings and configuration section that are required to successfully configure the Shopware as channel plugin on ChannelEngine.

Setup

On Shopware

Obtain Shopware 6 API credentials

To establish a successful connection between Shopware 6 and ChannelEngine, you need to obtain your API client ID and Client secret by creating a new integration.

1. Log in to your Shopware 6 account and go to Settings, System, Integrations. 
2. Click Create new integration, give the integration a name (e.g.: ‘ChannelEngine Channel’), and toggle the Administrator option next to the name field to enable administrator permissions. 
3. Click Save integration, and then copy the Access key ID and Secret access key. More information on creating integrations is in the Shopware documentation.

On ChannelEngine

ChannelEngine configures the connection between Shopware and your Shopware as channel plugin on ChannelEngine to consume your product offers and to push orders to you. Therefore, you need to provide your customer success manager or the Support team with the following information:

• Your Shopware shop URL
• The Access key ID that you generated in the previous step
• The Secret access key that you generated in the previous step

Product selection

In the Product selection step, you see two URLs, which are placeholders for two versions of the product feed files for Shopware: CSV and XML. These files are for your reference.

To configure your product selection for the Shopware channel, follow the steps below:

1. Create your product selection for Shopware.
2. If your product data contains custom fields, mark your custom fields as public. See the section below on custom fields.
3. Continue with the rest of the steps in Settings and configuration.
4. Let ChannelEngine run its export task for the first time. This export task runs every 60 minutes.

The content of the feeds is visible after completing the Activation step and after ChannelEngine completes its export task.

Custom fields

To include your custom fields in the generated feeds and, therefore, expose your custom fields to Shopware, mark these custom fields as public on ChannelEngine.

To mark your custom fields as public:

1. Go to Products, Custom fields.
2. Locate the custom field that you want to expose to Shopware.
3. Change the Include in channel product feed status by selecting the pencil icon and setting it to enabled.

For more guidance on custom fields, check out ChannelEngine: custom fields. If the custom field is set to public, it is automatically included in the product feed that is generated for Shopware.

Mappings

Content

There are no content attributes to map to the Shopware channel on ChannelEngine. 

Offer

All products (required)

• Price before (re)price rules - the selling price of the item, before price rules and discounts are applied. Typically, this attribute is mapped to the ChannelEngine Price field. If your tenant uses pricing v2, then this attribute will not appear in Mappings.

• Gross price - the selling price of the item, before taxes are applied.
• Net price - the selling price of the item, after taxes are applied.

Carrier

There is no carrier mapping required on the Shopware channel. 

Pricing

The following offer attributes may appear on this channel, if your tenant uses pricing v2:

• Allow promotion below min price - set it to ‘true’ to allow the promotion price to drop below your product's minimum price. 
• Fee groups - the ID of the fee group you want to assign to this product. To learn more, check out the article ChannelEngine: marketplace fees.

Working with discounts

If your tenant uses pricing v2, the price attributes from Offer mappings are also located in the 
Pricing step, in Price rules and Promotions, and you must also map them there if you want to send a discount to the channel. To learn more about mapping these price attributes using the pricing v2 feature, check out the articles ChannelEngine: price rules v2 and ChannelEngine: promotions.

To set up strikethrough pricing, some channels require you to map a list price/RRP/MSRP in Mappings. If no list price attribute is available for export to the channel, then you still map your selling price in Pricing. Either the list price or the selling price is considered by the channel for the strikethrough. The channel can ultimately decide when to display strikethrough pricing.

Additional information

Orders

When an order is imported to ChannelEngine, ChannelEngine also fetches extra data items related to the order itself. These extra data items are called “custom fields” on Shopware and can contain any data that you have set up on the Shopware platform. ChannelEngine will import your custom fields from Shopware and add them as Extra data on a given order.

FAQs

Why are my shipments stuck as 'Not exported yet'?
The Shopware channel uses ChannelEngine's Channel API, so ChannelEngine does not initiate the import and export of data to and from the marketplace. If your shipments are not exported and not visible on the Shopware channel's backend, something is incorrect with the import of the shipment information to Shopware. Please contact Shopware's customer service to investigate this. You can copy ChannelEngine's Support team in the email, if needed.

If I already use Shopware as my merchant system, can I use the Shopware as channel plugin to connect my storefront?
Yes, you can. However, you must use a separate instance of Shopware to connect to the Shopware as channel plugin. In total, you should have two separate Shopware tenants: one to connect to the Shopware 6 merchant plugin and one to connect to the Shopware as channel plugin. If you use the same Shopware tenant to connect to both plugins, then your order workflows will fall into an infinite loop, and you will not be able to process orders.