one more power player in your team!

Shoplaxy is software development by Netlaxy UG (haftungsbeschränkt).

Netlaxy is a one-man-company, based in Bavaria, Germany. You can find Netlaxy here.

Hi, my name is Sven. Glad you are here!

what "we" do

I create Touch-Points, as some may say – or „your store on the web“, basically - or a whole bunch of stores. Galactic, as in my brand name „Shoplaxy“ – welcome in the „shop(ga)laxy“.

I can advise you in all relevant fields, develop a concept for your web presence as you desire and need. When goals, strategy and concept are set, I design and develop webshops, websites and applications based on standard software as Shopware and WordPress, customizing these as needed to create the required solution and functionality to exactly match your requirements.

I implement tailor-made solutions to create exactly the design and features, the look and feel and the required functionality that makes the difference for your customers and for you. If it doesn't work with standard platforms, I create special extensions (themes and plugins) or completely custom solutions.

Shopware is an extremely powerful, customizable and scalable, modern e-commerce platform enabling to build single or multi shop setups and featuring connectivity options to market places as Amazon or Ebay. Shopware offers a free Community Edition and various paid versions that are based on the same platform. This makes the architecture very flexible and adaptable to suit your exact requirements using project-specific extensions, themes or plugins, and it can grow with the requirements.

WordPress is the probably most popular content-management system used for websites and blogs. With Woo-Commerce, an E-Commerce-Plugin for WordPress, an attractive alternative is available for extending your WordPress-Website into a full-blown shop.

Based on over a decade of experience with these platforms and over 30 years of experience in various challenges of and around software engineering, I am confident to deliver the best possible results to you and your customers.

I am happy about your interest and would be pleased to learn more about you and your team, and your company. I am curious to receive your inquiry, if you like, you could use the contact form below.

website

Your corporate website is the central reference point, your globally reachable presence on the internet and so the main contact point for existing or future customers, partners and employees. searching for you on the web. Any other contact point should lead the flow of interest and search right there.

For these target audiences, it should present your company, your business idea, your criteria of uniqueness, in a convincing manner and so the customer will remember your offering and consider it for her next purchasing decision, or ideally directly executing the purchase while on your site during the current visit.

To create your website, the technical aspects of it is what I can contribute.

I can also assist for the messages that portray your business to the customer, but you need to give me the detail informations and backgrounds.

Normally a corporate website would concentrate on subjects as :

• the offer: products and services,
• the reason to buy: advantages, characteristics, competences, capabilities, technologies, availability, competitiveness, education,
• the transaction: ordering or booking,
• the team to trust: people behind the website and the management team,
• the contact page: how to get in touch,
• the legals: general terms and conditions, privacy, imprint.

In addition to that, it may include a page with references, news, pages for financial or investor information, for trade-shows, exhibitions and events, or it may also include a career page for recruitment purposes and employer-branding.

And it can go into details of the products and services, the technologies, the processes and related information as deep as desired.

The key thing is that it provides the customer with enough information to help encourage her to trust you may be an interesting partner or one having the perfect product. "Call or Buy" should be the only open question and motivate your customer to get in touch, to act, to decide.

Call means she would get in touch with you by phone, email, contact form or visit and this is a great thing, and the beginning of every private or business relationship.

Buy means the direct purchasing decision, and this is what we try to achieve.

But for business the opportunity in the web is even bigger with a…

web-shop

In the real world, sales happen in stores or on market places.

On the web this takes places in form of electronic sales, „E-Commerce“, on webshops or online-market-places.

The interesting thing about the internet is, that at first, nothing is physical.

While in the real world, the resources needed for an extension of your business, by increasing of your product portfolio, or of the sales surface or the expansion into a few other outlets can be capital intense, E-Commerce offers nearly limit-less and, in comparison, cost-favorable possibilities: you can have one shop, or several, as many and with as many products as you can handle. And you can expand across city, region or country borders easily.

Or you can opt to sell on large online aggregator platforms as amazon or ebay. Or all of that. Everything is digital. This means that also transactions and product streams can only happen in digital form. Like in the real world, products or services are exchanged against money in online transactions, but the money flows through online bookings or third party payment systems.

If a customer acquires a right on a digital product, she will be provided access to it directly after the completion of the transaction, via access-codes or download. If a customer acquires a non-digital product in such a transaction, a delivery has to happen in the real world. Then your processes must respect the supply chain, warehousing and logistics for delivery.

I can help you build your web-shop, as the central online store and the adaptation to warehousing-system and enterprise resource planning systems, as well as the connectivity to payment systems. And I can help you with care, maintenance, updating and management, especially to achieve and secure a long-term stability and continuous availabilty of your online offering.

webapps

The term “web-apps” has meanwhile different meanings being assigned to it. .

For some, apps are software that is built for applications or specific purposes and designed to be installed on mobile devices and tablets, available from app-stores.

For others, it is just the website or web-shop made available as installable application on mobile devices, so enabling shorter load and reaction times, as local software and selected contents may be pre-loaded and installed locally on the device. This would be called “progressive web applications” or short “PWA”s.

Finally, for some, it is more a digitalization of entire business processes made accessible over the web.

In any of these cases, I can provide the technology. You just have to say what it is exactly you envision.

new build from scratch

In case you are not yet online with your business, or in case you want to start it all over, when starting from scratch the first key point is to envision the goal as clearly as possible, and to realize exactly what you want to achieve with your online presence ?

Is it more sales, is it more reach for a larger audience, is it to grow a specific area of your business or your business as a whole, is it for providing more information to interested parties, or for comfort for your customers, or transparency to your partners and investors, or is it because your competition is online and you feel you should be too, better, prettier, faster, with esprit, style and elegance – or is it because you want a remake or a relaunch, to keep up with the time or be one step ahead and offer your customers the best available technology, or because you want to secure your conquest of new markets with an expansion online as well ?

The goal of every company is to generate profits for its shareholders: money!

More money can be achieved through more revenues. You can achieve these by turning more visitors of your online presence into customers - to do this you have to increase the "conversion" - i.e. the conversion of visitors into orders and paying customers.

But you can also increase revenues through more visitors, if the number of orders per 100 visitors is constant. In this case, you need to increase “traffic”, that is, the number of visitors. This also increases your sales with the same conversion.

But more sales don't necessarily mean more profits. Because sales can also entail costs. For example, in the case of costs that you have to incur in order to achieve higher sales, or increasing production or operating costs, or e.g. returned products, etc...

The thing is, online is not easy. Not immediate – even though online business shall be as fast as light. And success can not be enforced, potentially is hard to trigger and may be cost intensive. And anyone, who says that it is only pure planning and mathematics is probably not telling the whole story. It is also about good timing, sure. But there is a good part of luck too.

Luck may be influenced and chances maximized by marketing activities – this is what we try to the best possible extent – but some uncertainty remains in every equation. It is a market with billions of participants, actors, reactors, informations, communications, advertisements, inter- and transactions and all this in time units as small as you probably can not imagine. For this reason, as in traditional business, every step needs to be thought through very carefully, risks assessed and mitigated as much as possible, before any decisions are taken and executed.

The more precise the plan is, the less the uncertainties will be. But they will probably never be down to zero. I would suggest to analyze your current business first, in a consulting project. Discovering the reasons for your current success and limitations of this success is key.

Some quick initial questions could help as: What is your product ? What is its purpose ? What makes it strong ? Why would a customer buy it from you ? Is it in some way unique ? Where do you meet your customers today or how do they come to meet you ? How is your sales process or sales cycle ? How is your production or supply process ? What are the payment terms you have agreed with your suppliers ? What are the payment terms of your customers ? Who is competing with you in the market ? How about these competitors ?

Based on the answers to the questions above, I can provide you with a detailed offer for a consulting project.

evolve and optimize

In case you have an existing shop, you may want to continue developing it and fire the next step with Shoplaxy, nearly inter-galactically.

There are several good reasons for doing so and sure, there are several options.

If you feel your shop is not achieving the results in sales you want to achieve, there may be different causes for that: technical or commercial challenges, but there may also be challenges in the strategy, the organization, the processes or in marketing.

Some of those can be easily solved, others possibly not. One approach to understand them is by looking at and analyzing the customer journey to and across all touchpoints until reaching your shop.

First of all: where does it start ? Where does the customer meet your offerings ? Once the user is on your website, how is he guided to your shop – or is your website the shop as well ? And on your shop, how is he guided through the sales process to achieve the deal and obtain the payment ? And after the closing, what is the process to deliver the product ? And after product is delivered, what are the next steps ? How do you deal with claims, default of payments, warranties and returns ? What would make the customer return to your offering ? How and when can you sell more ?

In some of these areas, the simplest solution is to change your processes.

In some others, existing systems and processes can be fine-tuned and optimized.

Then additional functionalities, processes or systems can be improved or extended, and added to your offering.

In some cases, it makes sense to launch additionally specific websites or web-shops, to extend your offering in a targeted manner.

Or for a change of image, a new brand, a new look&feel.

If you need a radically new approach to open new markets, new customer groups or to reach full speed, we can also completely redesign your main-website or main-shop, update it theme-wise and relaunch it fresh&cheeky – (shop(ga)lacticcally self-understood).

Also web technologies evolve. Fast. Superfast. And your shop has to keep up, or it may be outdated by its appearance or by its technology foundation.

Some shop platforms come and go. Some change so considerably it is hard to keep the pace.

For a relaunch it may be sensible to keep several or certain elements of your existing solution, as for example your corporate identity or your design, your product and customer portfolio, your pricing structure and your suppliers, your stories and references.

Often, a relaunch is associated with the wish for a more modern design, and this could be one thing to update, to adapt to the trends or expectations from your customer audience, to give your business a fresh and progressive look. Sometimes it may just be the desire to look more professional or more trustworthy.

A relaunch is also the perfect opportunity to question everything done and accomplished so far, and to try to find weaknesses of current concepts, to improve those for the future.

And a relaunch should also be intended to optimize the existing and make it better. This concerns adding strategies for products, extending the product lines, revisiting the pricing strategies, and adding functionality to support and serve the customer even more conveniently.

For the products, you should decide if the current portfolio is perfect or should be extended to offer a larger choice to your customers. Also economical aspects should be considered. Are there products with very low turnover rate ? Are they strategically important for the product portfolio or can they be removed ? Is the supply for some of the products difficult ? Are there obsolete products or products reaching the end of the product life cycle ? You should either keep your portfolio or adjust it, depending what you believe is more appropriate and more economical – but there may be other applicable decision criteria for as for example sustainability, environmental compatibility, fairness and further ethical and moral reasons.

A relaunch should also be used to check what can be done to make success of your business more secure in the short-, mid- and long-term.

Short-term could be marketing actions for example. Newsletter or mailings or posts on social networks can reactivate existing customer relationships. Paired with coupons, rebates or special offers the margins must be carefully adjusted. Advertisements on social networks are relatively expensive and their efficicency with small budgets could be questioned. But because of the high reach they are an option, if the postings do not achieve the desired distribution and feedback.

Mid-term could be a blog, new product categories. The blog extends your online presence, increases confidence and shows that your company is steadily progressing, „alive and kicking“. And it enables sharing of blog articles in your social networks and so increases – if everything goes fine – your reach and the attention for your offering and your website.

New product categories are recommended, if they improve your offering and provide the customers with a larger choice or, even better, an additional choice. This allows to increase the value of the offering for the customer and the average basket value.

Also technical novelties, as for example in data acquisition and analysis as well as the development of control possibilities, enabling reaction to customer preferences during his visit are possible mid-term developments.

Long-term would be for example the continuous development of suppliers and partners, to secure and develop the product range, but also for the acquisition of new sale channels or for publication of new contents – strategic wise, that could complement your offering with for example tutorials, receipes, manuals or fun-facts, user stories, case studies etc…

move / update

I can migrate your shop system to Shopware 6. Because the announcement of the termination of support by Shopware, the “EOL” (End of Life) of Shopware 5, or simply because Shopware 6 is the cooler and more attractive platform.

Shopware 5 has been declared obsolete, but if „self-hosted“ it remains with you running on your own server and your current shop will not stop functioning and give up just like that. But to stay on the safe side, a migration is probably recommended. We can certainly discuss about the way of enforcing it, but for sure we can only wonder. In the beginning, I was sceptical. And Shopware 6 took a couple of releases to shine. But today it is there. You can risk it. This page is also built on Shopware 6 – in version 6.6.1.0. Practice what I preach ! See how it works !

The biggest challenge for migration is to limit the losses to the minimum possible and maximize the gains to the maximum possible.

My first project to migrate was a shop with over 2.000 articles and 15.000 customers. But every project will have its own challenges.

From my experience, all I can say is that it may not be that easy or straight forward, as you may expect, and there are really different aspects to it:

First there is the data.

Depending on your existing data and their accessibility and availability as one database, distributed databases or in piles of pages, the timeline will be variable. In the ideal case, data is available in one database. Even more ideal would be a fully functioning Shopware 5 install.

Then the question is if your current system is an off-the-shelf system, or if it has been customized. If so, it is essential to understand how much custom data fields have been used and how they can be implemented in the new version.

As Shopware 6 is filling the database in large majority with encrypted data because of security and compliance reasons, the simple copy and paste from Shopware 5 is no longer possible. Shopware’s in-built migration assistant is recommended for migrating the database and proves very powerful. But data fields, that are not contained in the standard, are for example renamed – this the requires to adapt the database or code, potentially of more serious nature, down to the level of backend controllers, and custom specific plugin.

For this reason, I clearly recommend to first migrate your Shopware 5 shop onto a test environment, apply required corrections and adaptations on there, freeze the live shop, and then only do the migration of the live data.

I certainly can offer you my support for that.

Beside data, second is functionality.

This is another challenging area to migrate, as potentially not all functions will be available, as plugins may not be available for the new version. In this case we need to analyze the functions required by your processes and adapt the software of the new system to support those.

For customization, Shopware 6 is basically entirely open. So I can recode whatever part of it is needed to provide you with the perfect solution.

import

If you have suppliers, regularly updating data as for example on product range, availability, stock level, prices and new product introductions, we can provide the tools to perform these updates potentially automatically or semi-automatically.

export

If you are supplier to your customers reselling your products then you may want to update them on product range, availability, stock level, prices and new product introductions.

For this purpose the operation of a sales channel in “headless” mode is possible, as it enables external systems to access the shop over the Shopware API, and we can help you to adapt the corresponding communication processes, data streams and authentication.