Shop support for Shopware & Shopify.

In shop support, arboro focuses entirely on the two leading e-commerce platforms: Shopware and Shopify.

Many agencies offer a broad range of systems but often stay on the surface. We deliberately pursue a strict focus: as a Shopware Gold Partner since 2009 and certified Shopify Partner, we concentrate on these two platforms to guarantee deep technical expertise and reliable stability.

Our range of services in platform support:

• Shopware 6 (architecture & further development): As an enterprise and mid-market platform, Shopware 6 requires solid core and API expertise. We take over ongoing support, complex interface integrations (ERP, PIM, CRM), headless setups and targeted conversion optimisation.

• Shopware 5 (full support & plugin development): Many established retailers still use highly customised Shopware 5 instances. We continue to fully secure stable operation, close security gaps, develop custom plugins when needed and only accompany you in a migration when the timing makes economic sense for your company.

• Shopify & Shopify Plus: For fast-growing brands and D2C players, we offer in-depth support for Liquid themes, app development, checkout extensions and clean integration with existing business and logistics processes.

• Enterprise performance, caching & big data (500,000+ products): Large catalogues with over half a million SKUs, variant complexity and high peak traffic require tailored infrastructures. We optimise database indexes, implement multi-level caching architectures (e.g. Redis, Varnish), connect high-performance enterprise search technologies and ensure excellent Core Web Vitals even under full load.

• Modern tracking & marketing infrastructure: Platform-independently, we implement GDPR-compliant server-side tracking, structured data feeds for Google Merchant Center and campaigns, as well as the technical foundation for SEO/GEO and Google Ads.

The result for you:

No general half-knowledge, but specialised senior developers with deep system knowledge – for maximum resilience, lightning-fast load times even with huge product ranges and reliable scaling.

Silent errors (silent killers) are technical or data-related disruptions where the online shop appears fully available from the outside, but in the background unnoticeably burns conversion rate, ad budget and revenue.

Classic system crashes are noticed immediately. Silent errors, on the other hand, generate no error message on the homepage: the shop loads, the cart opens – but at business-critical points, the customer journey breaks off for certain user segments. Since standard server pings only report that the server is "online", such anomalies often remain undetected for weeks or months without deep monitoring.

Typical examples of silent revenue killers:

• Device- or browser-specific checkout abandonment: After a plugin or theme update, PayPal or Apple Pay, for example, fails only on iOS devices or in the Safari browser. Desktop users can still order, while mobile buyers drop off in frustration.

• Disapproved products & faulty Google feeds: Changes to attributes or categories cause bestsellers to be silently disapproved in Google Merchant Center. Campaigns keep running but no longer promote the high-margin items.

• Tracking & attribution loss: A faulty data layer or server-side outages mean conversion data is not transmitted to Google Ads or Meta. Smart bidding algorithms optimise into the void, and advertising efficiency collapses.

• Indexing and SEO losses after deployments: Unnoticed noindex tags, faulty canonical links or canonical loops after a relaunch make purchase-relevant category pages quietly disappear from the Google index.

• Latency peaks in specific API interfaces: A blocking ERP, CRM or payment interface delays the final checkout click by a few seconds – long enough to drive the abandonment rate up significantly.

The result for you:

With multi-level monitoring (shop health, feed validation, e-commerce tracking and transaction alerts), we uncover these blind spots before valuable contribution margin is lost unnoticed.

Detection time (time-to-detect) is the period from the occurrence of an error to the moment it is even identified as a disruption. However, almost all standard SLAs on the market only guarantee the response time – and it only starts after the error has been reported.

The actual total economic damage of a shop outage or a "silent error" is always measured by the entire chain: detection time + response time + resolution time = total revenue downtime.

If an agency's guaranteed response time is an excellent 60 minutes, but a faulty checkout step or a disapproved Google feed is only noticed by chance after three weeks through a customer tip, the advantage of fast response promises almost completely evaporates. The greatest leverage for protecting contribution margin and ad budget therefore lies before the ticket.

The difference in practice:

• The weakness of reactive SLAs: Classic support contracts only react once the support ticket is in the inbox. This means: by the time the shop operator notices irregularities in revenue figures or frustrated customers contact support, the financial damage has usually long been done.

• Proactive detection instead of damage control: At arboro, we tackle detection time directly with continuous, automated monitoring. Transaction flows, server performance, core endpoints and product data feeds are monitored for anomalies around the clock.

• Minimal time-to-detect: If latencies, API failures or missing conversions occur, our monitoring systems raise an automated alarm immediately. Our response time often kicks in before shop operators or end customers even notice the disruption.

The result for you:

Maximum revenue security through an early warning system that nips errors in the bud – instead of mere response times on paper when the damage has already been done.

Support costs at arboro consist of a predictable monthly SLA (service level agreement) for system stability and monitoring, plus minute-accurate billing of custom development work.

With our SLA packages, we secure the technical foundation of your shop – from development and staging environments and professional IT liability and cyber insurance to 24/7 monitoring:

• SLA-1 (€99 / month excl. VAT): Reliable basic protection including shop, server and feed monitoring. For pure Shopify setups, this model is usually entirely sufficient.

• SLA-2 (€500 / month excl. VAT): Our most popular model for Shopware instances. It includes faster guaranteed response times, monthly plugin updates and extended technical monitoring.

• SLA-3 & SLA-4 (individual enterprise models): Tailored support concepts for high-volume platforms – including guaranteed on-call availability and weekend support (in SLA-4).

How is development work billed?

If you need custom adjustments, new interfaces or plugin extensions, we bill them transparently and fairly by the minute according to actual effort. If no development hours are commissioned in a month, there are no costs beyond the SLA fee.

Maximum implementation speed with full cost transparency:

Based on feedback from our clients, we have pragmatically optimised our approval processes in support:

• Direct implementation for tickets under 3 hours: Smaller optimisations, bug fixes or adjustments with an estimated effort of less than 3 hours are implemented directly and quickly without bureaucratic delay. This saves you long waiting times for routine tasks.

• Binding cost estimate from 3 hours: For all larger requirements, the responsible senior developer prepares a well-founded cost estimate in advance. Implementation only starts after your explicit approval.

The result for you:

Full cost transparency and complete budget control – combined with fast, uncomplicated response times for day-to-day shop operations.

A professional collaboration with us is always based at least on the entry model SLA-1 for €99 per month excl. VAT.

We deliberately do not offer pure ad-hoc assignments without an SLA, because serious e-commerce requires a stable, secure and legally clean foundation. The monthly SLA base fee covers essential fixed costs and security structures that we must maintain for every shop we support:

• Dedicated development & staging environments: We never make code changes on live systems. We provide and manage separate development environments where updates, new features and bug fixes are tested risk-free in advance.

• Proactive 24/7 monitoring: Continuous monitoring of shop availability, server performance and product data feeds to catch errors early, before they cost revenue.

• Comprehensive insurance coverage: As an agency, we bear entrepreneurial responsibility. Every client we support benefits from our professional IT liability and cyber insurance, which provides full coverage in an emergency.

How is custom development work billed?

All tasks beyond this – such as implementing new payment methods, ERP interfaces or custom feature extensions – are billed transparently and to the minute according to actual effort. You always receive a well-founded cost estimate in advance based on the specifications of your system.

The result for you:

Maximum transparency on project costs – combined with the security that your shop is supported on a tested test infrastructure and with full insurance coverage.

arboro's monitoring continuously answers three key questions:

1. Can your customer buy?

2. Is measurement correct?

3. Is the shop clean, secure and fast for Google and AI systems?

To answer these questions reliably, a multi-level early warning system monitors your shop around the clock from two perspectives: from the outside like a real customer and from the inside via in-depth API analysis.

The monitoring levels in detail:

• 1. Purchase process & visual integrity (end-to-end user experience):

  • Availability checks: Purchase-critical pages (homepage, categories, product detail pages, checkout) are tested for availability every 5 to 15 minutes.

  • Automated test purchases: Regular simulated test purchases run through the cart and checkout process to the payment step (without a final order) to uncover blocking errors in payment methods or forms immediately.

  • Visual regression screenshots: Automated before-and-after screenshots on desktop and smartphone check whether the frontend remains visually flawless after deployments or updates.

• 2. Data & transaction analysis via read-only API:

  • Via secured read access, we continuously evaluate core KPIs such as order frequency, conversion rates and revenue flows.

  • If the system detects unusual statistical deviations in purchasing behaviour, an automated second check kicks in to rule out false alarms and report real disruptions immediately.

• 3. Tracking, consent & feed validation:

  • Measurement & campaigns: Several daily checks of Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google Ads and consent banners, including server-side tracking, to prevent data loss in smart bidding.

  • Product feeds: Continuous validation of Google Shopping and Merchant Center feeds so that high-margin products are not disapproved unnoticed.

• 4. Technical SEO, GEO & crawlability:

  • Infrastructure check: Permanent monitoring of robots.txt, sitemap.xml, llms.txt, canonical tags and unwanted noindex attributes.

  • Own SEO crawler: Performs more than 140 technical checks per page to uncover indexing problems, broken links and redirect chains.

• 5. Performance, server & system security:

  • Load times & stability: Monitoring of Core Web Vitals, time-to-first-byte (TTFB) and general server load.

  • Security guard: Automated warnings about expiring SSL certificates and domains, plus monitoring of known security vulnerabilities in the shop core.

The result for you:

Maximum transaction security and complete data quality: if an anomaly is confirmed in a second check, the monitoring triggers an alarm immediately – so disruptions are fixed before they cost revenue.

Notification is automated and graded by the urgency (severity level) of the incident. Our principle is: Act first, then inform. We don't burden you with technical alarms you can't help with anyway, but solve problems independently.

We adapt flexibly to your preferred communication channels: notifications are sent, as agreed, via ticket system, email or phone call, or in regular jour fixe meetings.

Our reporting and action chains at a glance:

• Level 1 – Critical disruptions (Prio 1 / emergency):

  • Scenario: Complete checkout failure, central payment methods down, server downtime or blocking interfaces.

  • Internal action & client update: For acute revenue killers, the monitoring immediately raises an internal alarm at arboro. Our on-call team, the technical lead or management are activated instantly. As a rule, we first contact the host or infrastructure provider without delay to fix server and network problems at the source. We inform you by phone or email/ticket as soon as the cause is isolated and the fix is already underway – or if an urgent business decision is needed from you for the next steps.

• Level 2 – Functional impairments (Prio 2 / important):

  • Scenario: Disapproved products in Google Merchant Center, partial tracking failures or display issues on certain devices.

  • Notification: You receive transparent information via ticket or email. We name the cause, the estimated effort and the planned fix, so you are always in the picture.

• Level 3 – Optimisation potential & routine (Prio 3 / standard):

  • Scenario: Minor visual deviations without checkout abandonment, upcoming plugin updates or SEO notices from the regular crawls.

  • Notification: Structured logging in the ticket system – bundled and transparently prepared for your regular jour fixe meetings and the upcoming sprint planning.

The result for you:

Maximum relief in everyday business: in an emergency, the technical rescue chain at arboro starts immediately and resolves disruptions directly with the host. You receive well-founded status updates instead of technical panic – and are only involved when you actually need to make a decision.

That depends on the chosen monitoring scope. Our technical standard monitoring requires no administrative backend access. For extended business, marketing and transaction monitoring, we need strictly read-only access rights only.

You retain full data sovereignty and system control at all times.

The two levels in detail:

• Standard monitoring (no access required):

  • We monitor your shop purely from the outside ("synthetic monitoring").

  • Our systems test the availability of relevant pages, check SSL certificates, measure load times and Core Web Vitals, crawl for technical errors and run automated test purchases through to checkout – exactly like a regular shop visitor.

  • You don't need to set up any credentials, passwords or permissions for us.

• Extended monitoring (read-only rights & API keys only):

  • Shop system (Shopware / Shopify): Via a secured API key with read-only rights, we evaluate aggregated core KPIs such as order frequency, conversion rates and revenue flows. It is technically impossible for our monitoring system to change settings, prices, content or customer data.

  • Marketing, analytics & Google ecosystem: We integrate read access to Google Search Console, Google Merchant Center, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Ads to uncover disapproved feeds, tracking failures, smart bidding anomalies or performance losses in real time.

  • Specialised SEO, GEO & visibility tools: Via read-only interfaces to tools such as Sistrix and other ranking and AI search analysis tools, we monitor visibility trends, keyword rankings and indexing trends to detect algorithmic drops immediately.

The result for you:

Complete 360-degree protection across all critical sales and marketing channels with minimal permissions – transparent, GDPR-compliant and without security or liability risks for your system landscape.

Contractually guaranteed on-call service and fixed response times at weekends are part of our individual enterprise model SLA-4.

For all other SLA levels: our technical monitoring runs around the clock, but weekend interventions follow the best-effort principle.

Weekend support in detail:

• Contractually guaranteed emergency standby (SLA-4):

  • For high-frequency D2C brands and high-revenue enterprise platforms, SLA-4 provides dedicated on-call service on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays.

  • Critical disruptions (Prio 1 emergencies) are taken over and fixed directly by a senior development team within the agreed guaranteed response time.

• 24/7 monitoring & best-effort intervention (SLA-1 to SLA-3):

  • In the entry and standard models, too, our 360-degree monitoring (shop health, checkout checks, tracking) keeps running fully automatically around the clock, 365 days a year.

  • If the system raises an alarm at the weekend, the notification appears immediately in our internal on-call channel.

  • If a senior developer is available, we often step in on our own initiative to prevent consequential damage – but we cannot promise a contractually guaranteed response time outside SLA-4.

• In practice: hosting and infrastructure problems as the main cause:

  • Our experience from more than 15 years of e-commerce shows: the vast majority of sudden weekend outages are not code or shop errors, but infrastructure failures at the provider. Typical examples are hardware defects in the data centre, DDoS and DNS attacks, routing problems, server overloads or database deadlocks.

  • If the problem lies in the host's physical infrastructure, even the best software developer cannot do anything in the shop code. That's why we strongly recommend that our clients use a professional hosting package with genuine 24/7 provider support, so outages are fixed directly at the hardware and network source.

The result for you:

Full transparency instead of false promises: permanent protection through our automated 24/7 monitoring in every model – and guaranteed weekend resources for all retailers whose business model requires seamless 7-day availability.

Wherever complex software is developed and deployed, errors can never be ruled out 100% in advance – what matters is how professionally, transparently and securely they are handled.

In such a case, arboro has a clear reporting and resolution chain, combined with comprehensive insurance coverage:

• Immediate emergency fix with top priority (Prio 1):

  • If a release or code change by our team causes an unexpected disruption in live operation, our monitoring raises an alarm immediately.

  • The development team stops all ongoing tasks and immediately initiates a rollback to the previous state or deploys the appropriate hotfix.

  • Of course, you incur no costs for fixing an error caused by us.

• Comprehensive protection through IT liability & cyber insurance:

  • arboro has commercial IT liability and cyber insurance specifically tailored to software development and enterprise e-commerce.

  • Should demonstrable fault on the part of our team result in actual financial loss or trigger a security incident, the financial consequences for your company are fully and reliably covered.

• Error prevention through staging & the four-eyes principle:

  • To make sure it never gets that far, we always test in advance on separate development and staging environments.

  • No code reaches production systems unchecked: clear approval processes, automated tests and code reviews by senior developers drastically minimise the risk of errors before every deployment.

The result for you:

Maximum legal certainty and business reliability: should an error occur despite all precautions, we stand by it completely, fix it immediately at our own expense and fully cover economic risks through our policies.

Because serious technical errors in the shop often become visible first in marketing and visibility data – long before a server monitor triggers or a customer contacts support.

Anyone who limits monitoring to server availability and load times overlooks the business-critical external interfaces: if tracking breaks, products are blocked in Merchant Center, filter URLs explode or a deployment accidentally blocks crawlers and AI bots, the shop burns ad budget day after day and loses ready-to-buy customers. SEO, generative engine optimisation (GEO for AI search systems) and SEA are indispensable early warning sensors for the economic health of an online shop.

Typical scenarios why this data belongs in monitoring:

• Technical SEO & indexing (crawl budget traps & loss of visibility):

  • The problem: After a plugin update, theme release or shop update, faulty canonical tags, unwanted noindex attributes, redirect loops or blocked paths in robots.txt creep in. Another massive risk is misconfigured filter systems (faceted navigation), which suddenly create millions of uncontrolled filter URLs that Google wants to index.

  • The damage: Either Google drops important category pages from the index completely, or the crawl budget collapses under millions of pointless URLs. Valuable rankings are diluted, new products are no longer indexed and organic traffic drops dramatically.

  • Early detection: Automated crawls, log file analyses and status code checks immediately uncover uncontrolled URL explosions and indexing errors before Google floods the index or rankings are lost.

• SEA & Google Merchant Center (silent loss of ad budget):

  • The problem: After changes to attributes, taxonomies or feed structures, Google Merchant Center suddenly disapproves hundreds of top sellers.

  • The damage: Campaigns keep running but, unnoticed, only advertise low-margin leftover items. If server-side tracking or consent is missing, Google Ads smart bidding algorithms optimise into the void, CPC rises and ROAS plummets.

  • Early detection: Permanent feed and campaign monitoring raises an alarm immediately for disapproved SKUs or sudden drops in conversions.

• GEO & AI visibility (findability in ChatGPT, Perplexity & Google AI Overviews):

  • The problem: Modern buyers increasingly search via AI assistants. If machine-readable structured data (Schema.org via JSON-LD) is missing, the llms.txt is faulty or AI bots are unnoticeably blocked by server firewalls (e.g. Cloudflare or web application firewalls), the shop simply no longer exists for AI systems.

  • The damage: AI engines cannot read product data, availability, prices and brand values and recommend the competition instead.

  • Early detection: Targeted GEO monitoring checks the syntactic correctness of structured data (JSON-LD), validates AI manifests such as llms.txt and ensures that legitimate AI crawlers are not locked out by overly strict server firewalls.

The result for you:

Marketing and performance security from a single source: disruptions, URL explosions and AI blockages are caught exactly where they first become measurable – to fully protect your ad budget, your top organic rankings and your findability in modern AI search engines.

We never carry out plugin, app or theme updates untested in the live shop. Every update goes through a regulated, multi-stage deployment and quality assurance process on a separate staging environment before it is released in a controlled manner and transferred to the production system.

In our SLA models with included updates (from SLA-2), this process takes place on a regular monthly cycle, and of course immediately outside the regular cycle for critical vendor security updates.

Our update process in detail:

• 1. Providing the staging environment:

  • All updates are prepared on an isolated test and staging environment.

  • This means ongoing sales operations are never disrupted, and changes can be tested completely risk-free.

• 2. Compatibility check & installation on staging:

  • We check changelogs, dependencies and compatibility with the current Shopware core or Shopify architecture and existing extensions in advance.

  • Updates for plugins, apps or themes are installed in isolation, database migrations are run and system caches rebuilt.

• 3. Multi-stage quality assurance (functional & visual):

  • Transaction tests: Senior developers check that business-critical core functions (cart, checkout, payment methods, ERP interfaces) run flawlessly.

  • Visual regression: Automated screenshots and visual checks ensure that theme customisations, fonts and frontend layouts remain unaffected on desktop and smartphone.

• 4. Controlled live deployment:

  • Only after successful internal acceptance (and, for larger changes, after your approval) is the update deployed to the production server.

  • This happens at low-traffic times, accompanied by a full system backup, to ensure an immediate rollback in the unlikely event of a problem.

• 5. Post-deployment monitoring:

  • Directly after go-live, our automated monitoring checks transaction flows, status codes and error tolerances to fully confirm stability in live operation.

The result for you:

Maximum system security, up-to-date features and closed security gaps – without the risk of sudden functional failures or costly checkout disruptions during operation.

Yes, in fact this is one of our most common use cases. Many retailers switch to us because their previous agency has reached its capacity limits, doesn't handle complex enterprise architectures cleanly or support is simply too slow – or because they value the enormous benefits of genuine full service with shop support, technical SEO/GEO and SEA from a single source by a permanent senior team.

Our top principle for existing shops is: Stabilise instead of blindly rebuilding. We don't force you into an expensive, risky relaunch, but take over existing Shopware and Shopify systems step by step and without interruption during ongoing operation.

Our structured takeover process:

• 1. Technical audit & code review:

  • Before we start operational development work, our senior developers analyse your existing system landscape.

  • We review source code, plugin architecture, template customisations, database indexes and existing interfaces for legacy issues, security vulnerabilities and performance bottlenecks.

• 2. Transparent status report & risk assessment:

  • You receive an unvarnished, understandable assessment: What runs stably? Where are technical risks or licensing traps lurking? Which areas need to be refactored at short notice to ensure update safety?

• 3. Complete system inventory in our CRM:

  • We record and document every technical feature of your shop in detail in our CRM: from custom code adjustments and workflows to connected marketplaces (e.g. Amazon, Kaufland, OTTO) and all ERP, PIM, CRM and payment interfaces.

  • Your security advantage: In the event of an acute disruption, every responsible senior developer immediately has a complete 360-degree overview of your entire system architecture and can intervene in a targeted manner without time-consuming searching.

• 4. Setting up staging and deployment infrastructure:

  • We set up an isolated test and staging environment and connect modern version control and deployment pipelines. This ensures that from day 1, no unchecked changes are made to the production system.

• 5. Activating 24/7 monitoring:

  • Our multi-level monitoring system is switched on. We monitor availability, checkout processes, Google feeds and tracking to take control of system stability from the very first moment of our collaboration.

• 6. Gradual transition to support & performance growth:

  • After the stabilisation phase, we take over regular shop support, billed by the minute, and seamlessly link it with data-driven SEO/GEO and SEA – so that technology, visibility and campaigns interlock profitably.

The result for you:

A smooth agency switch without revenue interruption: you gain immediate resilience, full transparency about the state of your shop and an experienced senior team that keeps your system landscape documented in every detail.

No. Combining services is never mandatory. You can commission pure shop support as a standalone service – with no obligation to move marketing or advertising budgets to us.

In practice, we very often work hand in hand with our clients' internal marketing departments or external specialist agencies. In such setups, our development team reliably takes on the role of technical implementer: we cleanly implement requirements from external SEO consultants in the code, integrate tracking pixels as specified or optimise load times for existing SEA campaigns.

Maximum flexibility through modular building blocks:

• Standalone shop support: We focus purely on the stability, security, performance and further development of your Shopware or Shopify instance, plus technical 24/7 monitoring.

• Optional extension as needed: If you later need technical SEO/GEO, Google Ads (SEA) or advanced server-side tracking, these services can be added seamlessly and modularly at any time.

• No friction with full service: If clients decide to bundle tech and marketing with us, they benefit from short paths: developers and performance marketers sit at the same table – technical SEO errors or tracking problems are fixed directly without time-consuming coordination loops.

The result for you:

Full entrepreneurial freedom without tied contracts: you decide which services you want to hand over – and retain full flexibility for your existing providers and internal teams.

No, in ongoing shop support we deliberately rely exclusively on permanently employed senior developers in-house.

In many agencies, it is common to pass support tickets to changing external freelancers or offshore resources. For shop operators, this leads to considerable risks: knowledge about your specific customisations is lost after the project ends, the code is maintained inconsistently and the responsible developer is often unavailable in acute emergencies.

Why we secure support purely in-house:

• No single point of failure in staffing: All knowledge about your shop architecture, APIs, ERP interfaces and custom workflows is fully documented in our CRM and project management. If a developer leaves the project or is on holiday, a colleague who is already familiar with it takes over seamlessly.

• Senior level without onboarding losses: Your tickets go directly to experienced developers with many years of Shopware and Shopify expertise. There is no forwarding to inexperienced juniors or external third parties – this saves costly coordination time and guarantees proven solutions.

• Reliable availability & liability: Our team works under uniform code and security standards. As a German company, we take full responsibility for the work performed – covered by our IT liability and cyber insurance.

• Selective network for sparring only: We never use independent specialists for operational support, but only involve them as occasional sparring partners for niche disciplines (such as advanced UX testing or in-depth CRO sparring) – implementation and approval always remain 100% in the hands of our core team.

The result for you:

Continuity, data security and reliable contacts: your shop is supported by a permanent, well-coordinated senior team that knows your system landscape permanently and keeps it stable.