Cost Transparency Extension for Shopware 6

#showdev #shopware #webdev #sustainability

Sustainable shop owners might want to inform customers where their money goes. For example, 50% goes to manufacturers, 20% is for transport, storage, and infrastructure, and another 20% goes to marketing, so there is about a 10% margin left for the merchant to earn money.

Cost transparency bar chart

My Cost Transparency extension for Shopware adds an optional bar chart to indicate the fractions of a product price paid for the material, manufacturers, marketing, distribution, etc. This can be a first step for merchants to inform customers about their supply chains. They will eventually be obliged to do so when the European Act on Supply Chain Due Diligence (Lieferkettengesetz) is ratified. But even without mandatory legislation, customers might prefer merchants who can tell where their money goes.

Introduction
Purpose and use cases
Implementation challenges
Solved, approved, and released
Installed, reviwed and rated

Purpose and use cases

Cost transparency is especially helpful when different third party partners or suppliers are involved. Think of a merchandise shop purchasing clothing or stationery printed on demand. In this case, we have the base product, the third-party service, and an additional shipping from the supplier to the merchant, called logistics in the following example.

Here is a screenshot of a product in my Open Mind Culture merch shop, kind of a live demo for my Shopware 6 theme and plugins.

Additional explanation seemed due: "Purchase prices may vary. The surplus helps run Open Mind Culture free for you."

Not all products have the same pricing components. For example, users can download the shirt design files for free, either directly or as a free download product. The price is zero in that special case, but other download products might include design and server hosting as cost components.

Implementation challenges

As a front-end developer, I didn't find it hard to make the chart responsive, especially since I had already developed something similar for a WooCommerce shop.

Shopware's off-canvas implementation changes

The hardest part was finding out about the mobile off-canvas functionality when Shopware made two breaking changes, one of them so subtle that it was hard to notice (adding a mandatory hyphen to a data attribute), and another one announced for Shopware 6.7 but seemingly already effective in the 6.6.0 release. Validating the code and understanding how merchants are supposed to describe their plugins and format their metadata has not been easy either. I will spare us more details this time, but if you have read my series about learning in public, you know what I mean.

Solved, approved, and released

The cost transparency extension has been approved and released in the Shopware store, and I am featured as an official extension partner again.

https://store.shopware.com/en/ingos57544164693f/cost-transparency.html

My extension code is also 100% public open-source on GitHub:

https://github.com/openmindculture/sw-IngoSCostTransparency

Installed, reviewed and rated

The cost transparency extension can be obtained from the official Shopware extension store or from GitHub and uploaded to a self-hosted shop running Shopware Community Edition without connecting to the marketplace. Actual download and usage numbers might be higher than indicated on the extension page.

Apart from a friendly rating, one merchant left constructive criticism in the form of a GitHub issue, suggesting category-specific customization.

When I reviewed the ratings and the plugin, I had further ideas for improvement, including more straightforward captions in the admin product editor. I will update my Shopware extension eventually.