Office Partner operates two storefronts – office-partner.de and playox.com – serving both B2B and B2C customers across a catalog of 120,000 SKUs. At that scale, product discoverability is not a convenience feature but the core of the business. Shopware, the previous platform, hit its limits on several fronts. It could not support a clean headless architecture across multiple brands without significant complications. The search and recommendation layer was difficult to manage administratively, and the store’s performance dropped under high traffic. Complex algorithms were hard to maintain, and the platform’s lack of adaptability made it impossible to build the kind of fast, personalized customer journey the business required.
The goal was to move away from monolithic constraints toward a headless environment with full control over data, channels, and algorithms, while also eliminating unnecessary platform license costs and improving conversion across both storefronts.
The hardest part was not the migration itself. It was building a search layer capable of intelligently interpreting complex, natural-language queries across 120,000 SKUs without any compromise on speed or relevance – and doing it in a way that could also accommodate marketing logic, manufacturer advertising contributions, and content indexing.
The in-house development team at Office Partner chose Sylius as it provided the lean, scalable foundation needed for a multi-storefront headless setup. The platform gave the team full control over B2B and B2C business logic, clean extensibility, and the ability to integrate specialized third-party systems without being constrained by the framework.
For a data-driven business managing two independent storefronts, that level of control was the deciding factor. Sylius gave the team the architectural freedom to control the storefront, business logic, data flows, and search layer independently. Despite the project’s scope, the entire platform was delivered by Office Partner’s in-house team in approximately six months.
Office Partner cooperated with BatteryIncluded, an AI data discovery framework built for B2B and complex B2C eCommerce. The framework runs entirely server-side, combining hybrid LLM search, AI-powered recommendations, and self-learning merchandising into a single API-first layer. Its native integration with Sylius connects directly to the storefront via API, without adding front-end JavaScript.
eCommerce core – Sylius (catalog management, order processing, etc.)
Managing multiple stores – Sylius Plus Multi-store module
Storefront – Custom headless frontend built in-house
BatteryIncluded – AI data discovery framework integrated via API directly into the Sylius storefront (live demo)
Content search – Indexing of editorial content including blog posts
Payments – Sylius PayPal Plugin
Merchandising – WKZ management tools
The new architecture delivered measurable performance improvements from day one. Response times in the P50 range sit consistently below 50 ms, with P75 requests fully resolved in under 90 ms – despite the high traffic volume.
Beyond raw performance, the project delivered several operational and commercial improvements: both office-partner.de and playox.com now run on a single, consolidated Sylius foundation, and product discovery has improved significantly through first-click suggestions, AI-powered recommendations, and a conversational experience that understands natural language and complex queries.
Quotes
« BatteryIncluded broke through the rigid constraints of conventional search solutions. Combined with the flexibility of Sylius, we now have full control over our data, channels, and algorithms – hybrid, fast, and perfectly integrated. It is the foundation for a shopping experience on office-partner.de and playox.com that already meets tomorrow’s requirements. »
Sylius Plus 
