VOM FASS on Shopify: a Shopware migration built for franchises, Local SEO and recipes

VOM FASS on Shopify: a Shopware-to-Shopify migration built for franchises

We have just relaunched vomfass.de and vomfass.at on Shopify, a full migration from Shopware, with a third storefront for Switzerland on the way at vomfass.ch. VOM FASS is a franchise that sells oils, vinegars, spirits and wines from the cask, so the project sat right at the intersection of three hard problems: a central brand with many local partners, three country storefronts, and a catalogue that has to follow strict German and European retail rules.

One thing up front, because it matters. Shopware is not a worse shop system than Shopify. For this client, Shopify was simply the better fit, and the reason had little to do with the software and everything to do with the team. A small in-house team could not scale marketing on their previous setup. They needed a platform where launching campaigns, channels and content does not require a developer every time.

Shopify vs Shopware: there is no universally better shop system

Let us be clear before any comparison. There is no objectively best shop system. The right choice depends on your catalogue, your team, your budget and your growth plan. Both platforms are excellent at what they are designed for.

Scale tells part of the story. By third-party trackers, Shopify powers roughly 4.5 to 5 million live stores worldwide and holds around a 19% share of the e-commerce platform market. Shopware runs on an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 live stores, although Shopware reports more than 100,000 merchants in total. Its footprint is concentrated in German-speaking Europe, with about 20,000 stores in Germany alone. Different trackers count differently, so treat these as ranges, not exact figures.

Shopware shines when you need deep customisation, complex B2B logic and full control of an open-source codebase, which is why it is strong among German mid-market and enterprise retailers. Shopify shines when you want a hosted platform, a large app and channel ecosystem, and the ability to ship marketing fast with a lean team. For VOM FASS, that last point decided it.

Choosing an online Shopsystem for franchises

A franchise is not one shop. It is one brand and many independent partners, each with a local catalogue, local opening hours and local customers. Picking an online Shopsystem for franchises means weighing a few things that a single-brand store never has to:

• One consistent brand experience across every storefront and country.
• A way for customers to find their nearest partner and contact them directly.
• Local visibility, so each partner can be found in their own town, not just the national brand.
• Low operational overhead, because head office runs lean and partners are not developers.

Shopify covered these with a hosted core, Shopify Markets for the country storefronts, and apps plus theme work for the partner-facing pieces. That let head office keep control of the brand while partners still get local presence.

Keeping a clean URL structure and existing category pages (collections)

The biggest technical risk in any replatforming is throwing away the SEO equity you already have. VOM FASS had years of ranking category pages in Shopware. In Shopify those become collections, and the URL pattern changes by default. Left alone, that quietly breaks links and rankings.

We mapped every Shopware category to a Shopify collection, kept the URL structure as clean and close to the original as the platform allows, and put 301 redirects in place for everything that had to change. Old product, category and content URLs now point to their correct new home, so link equity and bookmarks survive the move. Clean, stable, human-readable collection URLs are the foundation everything else sits on.

Three storefronts and correct hreflang for de, at and ch

VOM FASS needs three storefronts that look similar but are legally and commercially distinct: vomfass.de, vomfass.at and vomfass.ch. They share a language but not prices, currency, legal text or, in the Swiss case, the same market entirely. Search engines have to understand that these are regional variants, not duplicate content.

In the previous Shopware setup the hreflang tags were buggy, which is a real problem when three German-language sites compete for the same queries. On Shopify we used Markets with one domain per country and clean hreflang annotations for de-DE, de-AT and de-CH. Each storefront now points correctly at its siblings, so Google serves the right country version and the three sites stop cannibalising each other.

A Shopify storelocator for franchise partners

For a franchise, the store finder is not a nice-to-have. It is how a customer gets from the national website to a real shop run by a local partner. We built a Shopify storelocator where every franchise partner has their own entry with address, opening hours, phone and a direct contact, so users actually reach the person who can serve them.

Each partner location is marked up with LocalBusiness structured data, with consistent name, address and phone (NAP) details. That turns the storelocator from a simple map into a machine-readable directory of real outlets, which is exactly what search engines and AI assistants need to recommend a nearby VOM FASS shop.

Shopify Local SEO with Schema.org

Shopify Local SEO is its own discipline. A national Shopify store is not automatically visible in local results, and franchise partners live or die by local visibility. The storelocator and its LocalBusiness markup do double duty here: they help customers find a shop, and they give Google clean signals about where each partner is and what it offers.

• Consistent NAP data for every partner, matching their other listings.
• LocalBusiness schema per location, so each outlet is its own entity.
• Indexable, linkable location pages rather than a JavaScript-only map.
• A clear link path from the brand storefront to each local partner.

The payoff is twofold. Customers searching for a shop in their town can find a partner, and the brand earns local relevance it never had as a single national domain.

A Shopify recipe blog and a recipe-ready theme

VOM FASS sells ingredients, so recipes are not filler content, they are the use case. The Shopify recipe blog lives at pages and articles around rezepte, and it does real commercial work by showing customers what to cook with the oils, vinegars and spirits they are about to buy.

Most off-the-shelf themes do not handle recipes well, so the Shopify recipe theme work mattered. Each recipe page carries Recipe structured data, with ingredients, steps, times and yield. That makes recipes eligible for rich results, and it feeds clean, structured content to AI systems that increasingly answer cooking questions directly. A recipe that an assistant can read and cite is a recipe that keeps sending qualified traffic, and links those ingredients straight back to the shop.

Loyalty and the unglamorous compliance work

Two requirements were small on paper and demanding in practice. The first was the loyalty system, which had to carry existing members across from the old setup and keep rewarding repeat customers without friction. The second was German and European retail compliance, which is non-negotiable when you sell regulated goods online:

• Base-price display (Grundpreis) per litre or kilo under the Preisangabenverordnung, which is essential when you sell oils, vinegars and spirits by volume.
• A compliant Impressum, VAT display, and a clear right of withdrawal (Widerruf).
• Age verification and shipping rules for alcohol, since the catalogue includes spirits and wine.
• Packaging Act registration (VerpackG / LUCID) and GDPR-compliant consent for tracking.

None of this wins awards, but getting it wrong means fines or blocked sales. Building it in from day one is part of why the relaunch was clean.

The outcome

VOM FASS now runs three storefronts on one hosted platform, with clean collection URLs, correct hreflang across de, at and ch, a franchise storelocator backed by LocalBusiness data, a recipe blog marked up for rich results and AI, and the compliance and loyalty pieces handled. Most importantly, the small in-house team can now run marketing on its own, which was the whole reason for the move.

Takeaways for franchises weighing a replatform

1. Pick the platform that fits your team, not the one that wins a feature checklist.
2. Protect your URL structure and redirect everything before launch, not after.
3. Treat hreflang as critical infrastructure when you run multiple country storefronts.
4. Make your storelocator and recipes structured data, so they serve both Local SEO and AI.
5. Plan compliance, base pricing and loyalty early, because they are slow to retrofit.

Sources & further reading

• BuiltWith, Shopify usage and market share
• 6sense, Shopify vs Shopware market share
• StoreLeads, the state of Shopware
• Shopify Help, international SEO for Markets
• Shopify.dev, hreflang tags in your theme
• Schema.org, LocalBusiness
• Schema.org, Recipe
• Preisangabenverordnung (PAngV), base-price rules