Admin Panel: the central interface for managing your shop

The admin panel, officially called the “Administration” in Shopware 6, is the interface you use to run your shop: products, orders, customers, content, marketing, settings and extensions, all in one place.

The Shopware 6 Administration is a single page application built on Vue.js, which you reach at https://your-shop.co.uk/admin. It talks to the system exclusively through the Admin API, so every action in the interface is an API call. This has two consequences: anything you can do in the admin panel can also be automated, and extensions can add their own modules to the interface without touching the core.

Unlike Shopware 5, there are no separate backend windows any more; the Administration is one coherent application with unified navigation, search and notifications.

• Dashboard: an overview of revenue, orders and statistics, plus the most recent orders.
• Catalogues: products with variants, categories, properties, manufacturers, dynamic product groups (product streams) and reviews.
• Orders: order overview, order details with line items, payment and delivery status, documents such as invoices and delivery notes, and manually created orders.
• Customers: customer accounts, addresses, customer groups and order history.
• Content: Shopping Experiences, media, navigation, text snippets and themes.
• Marketing: promotions and discounts, newsletter recipients and the Flow Builder for automated processes.
• Settings: shop settings such as payment and shipping methods, tax, currencies, languages, sales channels and the Rule Builder, plus system settings such as users, integrations, caches, logs and updates.
• Extensions: the Store, installed plugins and apps with their configuration.

At the top left you select the sales channel: storefront, headless channels or comparison sites. A lot of content, such as product visibility, payment methods and Shopping Experiences, is assigned per sales channel. UK merchants who also sell into the EU often run a separate sales channel with euro prices and EU shipping rules. Using the language switcher at the top right you maintain translations; fields that have not been translated fall back to the default language. The global search finds products, orders, customers and media across all areas.

Every member of staff gets their own user account with one or more roles. Roles use ACL permissions to define which areas are visible and editable. Enable two factor authentication for every account with write access, give the admin flag to as few people as possible and remove agency access once a project is finished. For systems that access the shop automatically, create dedicated API credentials under Integrations instead of sharing user accounts. Personal accounts also make it easier to show who accessed customer data, which matters under UK GDPR.

Plugins and apps can extend the Administration with their own modules, fields and actions: extra tabs on the product, dedicated lists for returns, buttons for exporting to your ERP. You create additional fields (custom fields) without any programming under Settings; they appear directly in the forms. For deeper customisation we build admin modules as plugins, see Shopware plugin development.

• Save filters: in order and product lists you can save filter combinations, for example “open orders paid by bank transfer”.
• Bulk edit: select several products or orders and change them together instead of opening each one.
• Import and export: under Settings → Shop → Import/Export, create profiles for CSV files to update prices or stock levels in one go.
• Flow Builder instead of manual work: automate recurring steps such as status change emails or tags.
• Clear the cache selectively: after theme or settings changes, under Settings → System → Caches & indexes.
• Read the logs: errors with emails, payments or plugins are listed under Settings → System → Logs.

• Shared admin accounts: no audit trail and a high risk. Every member of staff needs their own account.
• Testing changes on the live system: new plugins and theme changes belong on a staging environment first.
• Overlooking the sales channel: a product has been created but not assigned to the sales channel, so it does not appear in the shop.
• Overlooking the language: texts are maintained in the wrong language and only appear there.

User management, system settings, plugin manager, media manager and Vue.js. You will find every term in our Shopware dictionary.