Behind the scenes - what kept us busy in 2021?

Many customers have noticed: a lot has changed at Papier & Stift in the last six months. But why actually? I'll be happy to answer that!

Actually, we wanted to put the finishing touches on our merchandise management system in 2021, which we introduced the year before, and then set out for the big update from Shopware 5 to Shopware 6. Shopware 6 promised more options for integrating different content into the store. And of course, the products should be able to be presented better. Since the beginning of 2020, we were very curious to see what we could present better with it.

On top of that, we had to look for new premises because our retail store had been sold. So it was a very exciting year for us!

In September everything should be ready: the real move to our new offices and the virtual move to Shopware 6 should take place within a single week. A small logistical masterpiece. With a lot of effort, some cursing and a lot of help from friends and acquaintances we made it and we moved into Taunusstrasse 17.

The move also seemed to have worked out virtually. From September 10, 2021 we were online again - now with Shopware 6. But very quickly we discovered that there was a fundamental communication error between our merchandise management system and Shopware 6 and the store was only functioning in a very limited way. In a short crisis meeting, we then had to decide whether we should wait for the technicians to fix this error in the next few weeks or months, or whether we should rather choose a completely different store system.

And we did the latter. We decided to go with Shopify! (Why I'm telling so many details here: the competent technicians among you have already recognized it anyway and to all the others it should be revealed that it's quite easy to find out the technique of online stores... ;-) )

We then set up a Shopify store within 5 weeks, and it really worked. That means the work of 9 months of Shopware development we were allowed to do again in 5 weeks! Therefore, in the beginning, some things looked very improvised. But we hope that it works much better now. And we know what homework we still have to do!

In the next few weeks, we want to add information about the products, the so-called filter features. This includes, for example, the colors of inks, the filling mechanisms and nib characteristics of fountain pens, the paper weight and the rulings of notebooks and other paper products. The aim is that you can then narrow down the selection in the overview precisely according to these criteria. But at the moment we have more than 5000 different articles in our store and it will take some time until we have added this for all articles.

And of course we are open for suggestions from you, how you would like to have the products sorted / found or displayed. Just write us and we will try to consider it!