B2B Shop Cost: How to Plan a Realistic Budget for 2027

Before a figure goes into the budget, it is worth asking which part of the business the shop should handle in the future. European statistics show how differently electronic ordering channels are used: enterprises in the EU with at least 10 employees generated 19.49 percent of their total turnover from e-sales in 2024 (Eurostat). Of that, 8.39 percent of total turnover came via websites and apps and 11.07 percent via EDI messages, the automated exchange of order data between the systems of buyer and seller (Eurostat).

For a B2B shop, the split within web sales is telling: 4.34 percent of total turnover came from web sales to other enterprises and public authorities, 4.04 percent from web sales to private consumers (Eurostat). Business customers already buy through websites to a meaningful extent, but the larger part of electronic volume runs through system-to-system connections. For the budget this means: a shop that only covers the website reaches part of your customers. Anyone serving key accounts with their own procurement systems should plan punchout or EDI from the start.

A simple calculation with your own figures helps: How much revenue arrives by phone, fax and email today, what share of it should come through the shop in two years, and what does manual entry of one order cost in inside sales? The result is not a shop price, but a frame against which the budget blocks can be measured. This assessment is the first step of our B2B e-commerce consulting, before a single line of code is written.

Few blocks vary as much between two B2B shops as pricing logic. A wholesaler with three customer groups and tiered prices gets far with the built-in tools of the Community Edition: customer groups, advanced prices per rule and quantity tiers on the product are part of the core. A manufacturer with thousands of customer-specific terms, annual rebates and daily surcharges, by contrast, needs a separate price source that the shop queries or imports regularly.

The last point in particular matters for 2027 budget planning because many suppliers adjust their prices at the start of the year. Validity dates on every price are therefore not a convenience but part of the scope. What the Community Edition provides for customer groups, and why company accounts with multi-step approvals need an extension or custom development, is covered in the article on customer groups, roles and permissions; the price models in Shopware are explained in detail in the article on B2B price lists and tier pricing.

For the estimate, a written pricing concept before the quote is the most effective lever: one page with all price levels, their origin and their order of precedence. It costs one workshop and usually saves several correction loops during implementation. Without this document, every provider calculates with a different assumption, and the quotes cannot be compared.

Anyone replacing an existing shop pays not only for the new one but also for the move. Customer accounts, addresses, order history, product data and media have to be transferred, checked and reconciled, plus redirects for every old URL that sits in search engines and bookmarks. The steps of a migration without loss of visibility are covered in the article on Shopware migration without SEO loss.

One item is regularly overlooked in a move: the legacy system itself. Invoices are accounting vouchers, orders and order confirmations usually count as commercial or business letters, and both are subject to retention periods. Accounting vouchers must be retained for eight years, received commercial or business letters and copies of those sent for six years (Section 147(3) German Fiscal Code). The period starts at the end of the calendar year in which the document was created or the letter was received or sent (Section 147(4) German Fiscal Code).

If these records were created with a data processing system, the tax authority may inspect the stored data during a tax audit and have it evaluated electronically (Section 147(6) German Fiscal Code). After a system change, it is sufficient to keep the data only on a machine-readable and machine-evaluable data carrier once the fifth calendar year after the changeover has ended, provided no tax audit has started by then (Section 147(6) German Fiscal Code). Whether the legacy system keeps running for this or a read-only archive takes over the data is a budget decision that has to be made before shutdown and should be agreed with your tax advisor. Which documents must be kept for how long and what an archive in the customer account looks like is covered in the article on where order documents live and how long they stay.

For moving an existing shop to Shopware, our service page on shop migration lists the current starting price. What a B2B migration with customer groups and ERP integration involves in a specific case is determined after an assessment of the legacy system. Ongoing costs for hosting and maintenance are not included and belong in the operations block.

For invoices between domestic businesses, the German VAT Act requires an electronic invoice. This means an invoice that is issued, transmitted and received in a structured electronic format and allows electronic processing (Section 14 German VAT Act). A plain PDF without a structured data set is therefore not an e-invoice but what the Act calls an "other invoice" (Section 14 German VAT Act). Transition rules apply to issuing invoices, and the general one is now running out.

The transition rule allowing invoices to be sent on paper or in another electronic format applies to supplies in 2025 and 2026 whose invoice is transmitted by December 31, 2026 (Section 27(38) German VAT Act). For supplies in 2027, it only applies if the issuing company's total turnover in the previous year did not exceed 800,000 euros (Section 27(38) German VAT Act). A B2B merchant above this threshold therefore issues invoices to domestic business customers as e-invoices for supplies from January 2027, unless it uses the EDI procedure or a statutory exception applies.

What matters for the shop budget is who generates the invoice. If the ERP issues it, the main effort lies there, and the shop only needs to provide the structured version in the customer account. If the shop generates the invoice itself, it needs an output format according to the European standard, a validation before sending, delivery to the address the customer specifies for invoices, and archiving. Add to that master data nobody has maintained so far: routing IDs of public-sector buyers, customer order numbers per line item, the receiving address for e-invoices.

What the obligation requires in detail and how shop and ERP meet it together is covered in the article on the e-invoicing mandate for shop and ERP. We offer the implementation as e-invoicing in the B2B shop. Domestic businesses already have to be able to receive e-invoices today; the obligation to issue them is the part that gets a fixed date in the 2027 budget.

For services bought in 2027, official price statistics provide a reference point. Producer prices for services overall were 3.7 percent higher in Q2 2026 than in the same quarter of the previous year (Destatis). IT-related services rose considerably less, as the table shows.

The figures are price indices, not forecasts, and they describe the average across many providers. For planning, this precision is sufficient: a recurring item without any uplift assumes that your own service providers will not adjust their prices in 2027. A flat uplift at the level of general service inflation, on the other hand, overestimates the IT items. An uplift per block, based on the matching row, makes more sense.

Usually larger than any price index is a different effect: scope missing from the budget. A block that is not in the quote costs more in the project than any price increase. That is why it pays to complete the budget block by block first and add the price trend afterwards.

The services and terms of our packages are listed on the pricing page. For a new B2B shop, we start with the question of which of the six blocks apply and to what extent, and then implement it as Shopware development on the Community Edition. Features the core does not provide are usually built as a custom extension rather than an additional license.