Recorded live at Shopware Partner Day in Austin, Texas on April 22, 2026.

Mark Stanley is Shopware's chief product and technology officer, where he looks after all product development. He walks through what is landing this year. Shopware's own native PaaS has just gone GA, highly opinionated and driven from the command line. An intelligence suite is in progress, bringing AI into bulk editing, CMS content generation and store data insights. And Nexus, an orchestration system for connecting Shopware instances to each other and to third party systems, goes GA at Shopware Community Day in Cologne.

His hot take is data sovereignty, and business model sovereignty with it. More SaaS providers want to hoover up as much data as they can get, which suits a merchant who wants one button to push. Merchants thinking further out want to keep control of where the business model lives and where the proprietary data sits. His advice is to work out what you would not want an LLM to be able to copy in two or three years, and protect that. The moats are changing.

On partners, he sees the job shifting away from shipping features and toward delivering outcomes, with tokens becoming the unit of outcome usage. On AI, he is most interested in developer tooling, where the first 80 percent of a build can happen in 20 percent of the time while the last 20 percent stays human work. And he thinks a portion of shopping stays tactile, digitally or physically, the way asking Siri to play something is a different experience from browsing Spotify.

On North America he calls it an underdog story. Shopware is the Linux to the Windows and the Android to the iOS, and the work is the ground game, the same way it was done in Europe fifteen years ago. Bring a case of beer, go on the road, get people to join the ride.

Shopware Community Day runs June 10 in Cologne. Shoptoberfest runs September 14 and 15 in Nashville.

Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.