In almost two decades of work in eCommerce I’ve met thousands of people whose lives were transformed by open source. They’re a small sample of the developers who became founders, the entrepreneurs who built entire service verticals, and of course the merchants who thrived thanks in large part to the freedom to discover and build the best solutions for engaging their customers.
But the conditions for success are vastly different now. The ease of eCommerce’s open source gold rush has ended. Multinational marketplaces and ridiculous SaaS platform valuations fuel hype and hyperactivity, taking much of the oxygen and opportunity from the landscape, even as legacy platforms go further upmarket, leaving a huge gap.
Despite these conditions, the fundamentals are still the same: innovation is what shapes the future of eCommerce, and nothing fosters innovation better than open source. Shopware is a company and a community committed to open source – not just to the code, but to the culture of collaborating in the open. I hope to help expand participation in this openness, in the interest of creating a bright open source eCommerce future which would otherwise be rendered boring and homogeneous by the default march of SaaS platforms. I seek the expansion of eCommerce opportunities rather than a consolidation. I see “future-proof” as “inventing the future” – and I believe Shopware is poised to do this the world over.
Let’s lead the change!
This is awesome! I’d love to see Shopware make more of a headway into the US market, and you seem like a great person to make that happen. Having a modern open source platform option other than Magento 2 will be great for merchants.