Most school practicums end with a report and some observations. This one ended with a working online shop that I built from the server up.
I spent two weeks at a Shopware-focused e-commerce company and used the placement to build a real school online shop rather than shadow someone else's work. The goal was straightforward and ambitious for a student: finish a first functional Shopware 6 shop within two weeks, and learn the full system by actually operating it.
Responsibilities that normally belong to a team
In a real e-commerce company, the work I did would have been split across at least four roles. Server administrators handle installation and configuration. Product managers handle data, categories, and variants. Media designers handle mockups and visual assets. Frontend developers handle theme customization and SCSS. I did all of it, with the company team acting as mentors when I hit a wall.
The first week was infrastructure and data. I installed Shopware 6 on a test server, configured the database and admin accounts, and worked through the full product model: categories, placeholder copy, gross and net pricing, inventory, delivery times, SKUs, and manufacturer fields. Products needed variants for size, cut, sleeve length, and logo position, each with its own preview images. I built a modular size table from hoodie imagery and templates that could adapt to different product types rather than hardcoding a single layout.
The second week was checkout, frontend, and theme. I worked through cart behavior, delivery and pickup options, account creation, delivery addresses, and order-status concepts, without presenting the shop as payment-ready. Then I moved into the theme layer: learning Shopware's file structure, setting up a local development environment in PhpStorm, working with SCSS and Twig, compiling styles through the console, binding SCSS classes to backend configuration, and adding CSS animations to the homepage.
Why it mattered
The practicum report noted that I carried responsibilities normally distributed across backend programming, media design, server administration, product design, planning, and implementation. That breadth was the point. I chose the placement because I wanted to learn e-commerce by building one, not by watching someone else maintain one.
The shop was functional on Shopware 6.5.0 by the end of the two weeks, enough to represent a completed learning and build target. It remained in maintenance mode because legal pages and imprint details were not finished, which is an honest reflection of how real shops launch: the technical system can work while the compliance surface is still incomplete.
What I take from it
This project gave me a mental model for how e-commerce systems actually fit together, from the database and server layer through product modeling and variant logic all the way to compiled SCSS and Twig templates. When I work on web systems now, that full-stack intuition traces directly back to two weeks of refusing to sit on the sidelines.
