Example order, Shopware 6: Dedicated prices for trade customers, from order to go-live

This article describes a fictional but typical order. The company does not exist; the process corresponds to the way the Eywora AI Crew works.

The starting point

A manufacturer of workshop supplies runs a shop on Shopware 6.6. So far it has sold to private customers and businesses at the same prices. Now trade customers should see their own prices after logging in: net, about 20 percent below the consumer price, with tiers from 10 and from 50 units. Private customers should not notice anything. The owner has no developer in house and describes the order in the AI Crew interface in three sentences, the way he would explain it to a colleague.

Step 1: Understand and estimate

The AI team lead breaks the order down and asks two questions that are almost always open in such projects: who decides which customer is a trade customer, and should the trade prices also appear net in the cart and on the invoice? The answer: the owner activates trade customers manually in the admin, and yes, net everywhere. The agent for cost estimates names a rough range for the AI usage of this task up front. Then work on the copy begins.

Step 2: Built-in features first

The agent for integrations and systems first checks what Shopware 6 can do out of the box, because every line of custom code is a line that has to be maintained with later updates. For this order the standard goes surprisingly far: a new customer group "Trade" with net display, a rule in the Rule Builder that targets this customer group, and advanced prices on the products that link this rule to the tier prices. Because the prices apply to several hundred products, the agent does not create them by hand but via the Admin API from a price list the owner supplies as a spreadsheet.

One item remains: in the listing and on the product page, trade customers should see a note "plus VAT, trade price" next to the net price, and a compact table for tier prices instead of the standard display. For that, a small plugin is created that extends the affected Twig templates without copying them. This keeps it update-safe: a Shopware update does not overwrite plugin files.

Step 3: Review

A second agent reviews the plugin code; the agent for security and privacy checks that trade prices are really shown only to logged-in trade customers, including via the Store API and in search results. The automated tests then run through the most important paths: private customer sees gross price, trade customer sees net price, tiers apply from 10 and from 50 units in the cart, the order confirmation states VAT correctly, and the existing checkout runs unchanged. The designer among the agents checks the tier table on a smartphone.

Step 4: Preview and approval

The owner receives the link to the preview of the copy and two test accounts, one as a private customer, one as a trade customer. He clicks through an order, notices that the tier table on the product page sits too far down, and gives that feedback. The agents move the table below the price, the tests run again, the second preview is approved. For an order of this size the rule applies: described in the morning, ready for testing the same day; the feedback round comes on top.

Step 5: Go-live

On the next release day, a Tuesday, the release manager creates a backup and deploys plugin, customer group, rule and prices. The change is documented in the version control system, with the order in the owner's words. Should it turn out that a trade customer still sees gross prices, the signundsinn team rolls the change back; two rollbacks per month are included. In this scenario the go-live stands, and the owner activates the first twelve trade customers the same afternoon.

What this example shows

The real value lies not in the plugin but in the order of steps: understand first, then exhaust the built-in features, then as little custom code as possible, then test, then approve. This order applies to every task, including the small ones for which an agency quote would never have been worthwhile. How the process with copy, backup and rollback works in detail is in the article Copy, approval, backup, rollback; the supported Shopware versions are in the system list.

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