Balmer Bücherdienst AG

Balmer Bücherdienst AG in Einsiedeln is the classic publisher's distribution centre for the Swiss book trade and supplies retailers with the products of domestic and international partner publishers. A web shop for a distribution centre like this is not an ordinary e-commerce project. The book trade demands fast availability checks, precise search by ISBN and title, reliable order processing through established interfaces, and daily data updates from the publishing systems. All of this on a platform with over 50,000 articles.

The design came from our agency partner PS Werbung AG; technical lead, implementation and ongoing operation are with us. Technologically the shop is built on Shopware 6 with a custom theme developed by us. The theme reflects the specific requirements of a B2B book trade shop: quick-order forms via ISBN, transparent stock display per article, login-protected dealer area with specific conditions and statistics, and a search that can handle the logic of the industry.

For product search we use Doofinder Pro, the professional version of the specialised search engine. It responds to ISBN as well as to titles and author names, and it handles the peculiarities of a large book range: series, editions, translations, hardcover and paperback variants of the same work. Without this specialised search solution, the daily work of booksellers on the platform would be considerably more cumbersome.

The technical heart is the data interfaces. Orders are transferred via the VAS interface (publisher distribution system) from MHS to the back end of Balmer Bücherdienst AG, so manual transfer is no longer necessary. Article master data comes via a flat-file importer from the VAS export, image data via a separate importer from VLB (German books-in-print database) by MVB. Both importers are split and processed via proxy IPs, because a monolithic import would take far too long at this data volume. This approach was a deliberate decision against the obvious "all at once" solution, in favour of stability and maintainability in daily operation.

Where Shopware 6 reached its limits with built-in features, we developed two custom plugins for Balmer. The "Quick Order" plugin allows booksellers to enter bulk orders via ISBN lists directly in the account area, instead of having to add each title individually to the cart. A bookseller can now record a weekly order in minutes rather than hours. The second plugin, "Image Flip", is a CMS element for the team page that presents staff portraits and background information with an animated card mechanic. Both plugins are developed as standalone Shopware 6 packages and are therefore future-proof: they survive shop updates and can be reused in possible follow-up projects.

We have been looking after the shop continuously since launch with maintenance, updates and targeted further development. With a system of this size and interface depth, maintenance is not a side issue but part of the architecture: every plugin update has to be tested against the interfaces, every schema change in the VAS export has to be considered. The project shows how far Shopware 6 reaches when you understand the platform not as a finished product but as an engineering foundation for a specialised industry solution.