Shopify agency Cologne for retail and food brands in the German market

    Our team in Cologne builds and migrates Shopify stores for consumer brands and retailers that meet German trade buyers at the Cologne fairs and want to sell online to consumers and businesses. We take responsibility for catalog, redirects and sign-off before launch.
    Request a project reviewSee retail cases
    Basket value at Blankroast
    +35%
    Conversion rate at Blankroast
    +22%
    Redirects for Kanela
    147,753
    Published case studies
    12
    Brown leather Groundies Chelsea boots stepping into frame on a concrete floorGlass teapot, a carafe of ice cubes and two glasses of iced tea with mint on a wooden trayFreshly roasted coffee beans being stirred in the cooling tray at the Blankroast roasteryFelia smoothie with blender, bowl, chicken, apple and carrots on a yellow setGrid of Bloomingloft sofas with changing fabrics and background coloursColourful meadow bouquet with sunflower, chamomile and alstroemeria in front of a wooden wallMan in sunglasses wearing a cream polo and shorts sitting on a pebble mosaicThree DoggyBearz snack pouches with chew sticks, cut-out product shotRider on an e-bike crossing an urban intersection, seen from aboveHands holding a green baby journal with animal illustrations titled Dein erstes JahrGravel rider with a handlebar bag riding through tall grassLinen-bound baby album with an embossed animal wreath and the title Mein erstes Jahr on a wooden tableMotocross rider in a red and purple O'Neal jersey on a crest and carving a dusty cornerChild and adult walking an autumn path in Freiluftkind barefoot shoes

    How do food and consumer brands sell online in Germany?

    Cologne hosts Anuga and ISM, the trade fairs where the food and confectionery industries meet German retail buyers. Large retail groups have their headquarters in the city. A brand that exhibits here usually leaves with two tasks: supply the retailers it met, and sell directly to the consumers who now find the product on the shelf and search for it online.

    Blankroast shows how both fit into one store. The coffee roaster from Neustadt an der Weinstraße moved from Magento to Shopify Plus. Product attributes such as origin, roast level and taste arrive as metafields from the ERP weclapp. The store is prepared for business customers and sales representatives, and the roastery has been selling with Shopify POS since December 2025. Since the migration the basket value is 35 percent higher and the conversion rate 22 percent higher. Read the Blankroast case study and the page on Magento to Shopify migration.

    Food products carry mandatory information: ingredients, allergens, net quantity, base price per unit. In Shopify this belongs in structured product fields so that it is shown the same way on every page and in every market. Your legal advisor decides what has to be stated. We build the data model that holds it. Where retailers order online, Shopify B2B provides catalogs and price lists.

    What happens to a large catalog during migration?

    Retailers with thousands of products rarely fail at the import. They fail at categories that are named differently in the new store, at filters without data and at old addresses without a target.

    For Kanela, a Swiss online drugstore, we moved more than 40,000 products from PrestaShop to Shopify Plus, set up 147,753 redirects and connected the marketplaces Zur Rose, Galaxus and Manor. The Kanela case study documents the data model, and the page on Shopify SEO explains how rankings survive a move.

    Is the team on site in Cologne, and do we have clients there?

    Members of our team work in Cologne and join workshops in person. We have not published a project for a client registered in Cologne, and we do not name clients we cannot document. Our nearest clients are in Düsseldorf and Neuss, listed on the page Shopify agency Düsseldorf. The company is registered in Breisach am Rhein near Freiburg.

    Why NICCOS as your Shopify agency in Cologne?

    We cannot show a Cologne client. We can show projects with the tasks retail and food brands bring to us: ERP-driven product data, business customers and large catalogs.

    • Food and beverage projects

      Blankroast, Sirocco and BlumeIdeal are published projects from the industry.

    • Large catalogs

      Kanela runs more than 40,000 products on Shopify Plus, with 147,753 redirects from the old store.

    • Partnerships

      NICCOS has been a Shopify Plus Partner since April 2022 and is an OpenAI partner.

    Which companies are a fit for our Cologne team?

    We fit brands and retailers that sell to consumers and to trade buyers and want to change platform without losing visibility or regular customers.

    • You sell to retail and to consumers

      Both should order in one store with their own prices.

    • Your products need mandatory information

      Ingredients, quantities and base prices should be product data.

    • Your catalog has thousands of products

      Categories, filters and attributes have to be ordered before import.

    • Your demand comes in waves

      Television, season or a fair bring many times the usual visitors on single days.

    When we are probably not the right fit

    • Old addresses will be switched off without redirects.

    • The catalog should be copied unchanged, even where it is wrong today.

    • Launch is planned for the week before your biggest campaign.

    Brands we work for

    • Freshly roasted coffee beans being stirred in the cooling tray at the Blankroast roasteryBlankroast
    • White Sirocco cup with herbal tea bag on a wooden board next to a green Verbena sachet and apple slicesSirocco
    • Woman in a cardigan walking through dune grass by the sea in evening light.Heel

    Which services does our Cologne team provide?

    How does a relaunch with a large catalog run?

    1. Record catalog and addresses

      We export all products, categories and indexed addresses from the old store.

    2. Decide the structure

      Categories, filters and attributes for the new store are decided and matched with the old ones.

    3. Import and redirects

      Data is imported in test runs, and every old address gets a target.

    4. Sign-off in staging

      Search, filters, checkout and redirects are checked with samples from every category.

    5. Launch and monitoring

      After the switch we watch index, error pages and rankings and correct where needed.

    What does a food brand have to prepare for a German store?

    1. Base price

      German law requires the price per kilogram or litre next to the selling price.

    2. Ingredients and allergens

      They are shown before purchase and come from a structured field.

    3. Best-before dates and batches

      The ERP holds them. The store learns in time when a batch is no longer for sale.

    4. Deposit and packaging

      Deposit on bottles and packaging registration are settled before the first order ships.

    5. Subscriptions

      Products that are bought again can be offered as a subscription.

    6. Trade orders

      Retailers from the fair receive a login with their prices.

    Published projects for food brands and large catalogs

    None of these clients is based in Cologne. The projects show tasks that retailers and brands in Cologne face.

    View cases

    Questions from retail and food brands

    Do you have people in Cologne?

    Yes. Part of our team works in Cologne. Workshops and sign-offs take place at your office, and development runs across a distributed team. The company is registered in Breisach am Rhein near Freiburg.

    Do you have clients in Cologne?

    No project for a Cologne client has been published so far. Our nearest clients are in Düsseldorf and Neuss. Ask us in the first call for the project closest to yours.

    Can Shopify show the base price per unit?

    Yes. Shopify has a unit price field per variant. We fill it from the ERP and show it on product page, collection and cart.

    We met retailers at Anuga. Can they order online?

    Yes. Business customers get a company profile with their own prices in Shopify Plus. Blankroast prepared its store for business customers and sales representatives.

    How does the store get product attributes from the ERP?

    Through metafields. At Blankroast, origin, roast level, strength and acidity are product metafields that are mapped from weclapp.

    Will Shopify cope with a television feature?

    Shopify runs the infrastructure. What slows a store down is what the theme loads. We check pages, apps and checkout before a campaign and prepare the campaign page.
    Basket value at Blankroast since the migration
    +35%
    Customer records carried over for Sirocco
    40,000+
    Redirects for Kanela
    147,753
    Marketplaces connected for Kanela
    3

    What our clients say

    • “That was the calmest launch we’ve ever had.”

      Carolin Kampik

      Director Data & Technology, Groundies

    • “I can only recommend NICCOS - highly motivated, extremely fast execution, and customization was never an issue. Thanks to NICCOS we migrated from Shopware smoothly; it was one of the best decisions of the year.”

      Sebastian Braas

      Managing Director, BlumeIdeal

    Let us look at your catalog before you decide on the move

    Send us your store URL and the number of products. We tell you where the risk of the move lies.

    Request a project reviewView cases

    NICCOS

    The page could not be loaded.

    Please reload the page. If an update has just gone live, this will load the latest version.