Reifen Center Wolf: Shifting into the fast lane with Shopware B2B

For almost 35 years, everything at Reifen Center Wolf has revolved around tyres, rims and complete wheels. The family business, headquartered in Nidderau, employs almost 150 people and supplies tyre dealers, workshops and car dealerships in Germany and beyond. With around 500,000 tyres in stock and, for the first time, more than 100 million euros in revenue in 2025, Reifen Center Wolf is now one of the most established wholesalers in the industry, and the company keeps growing.

Think finding the right mattress for your bed is a headache? Then you've clearly never been sat in front of a screen, trying to order the right tyres for a customer in a B2B store.

According to the big motoring magazines, there are an estimated 50,000 different types of tyre. Add around 20,000 rim variants on top, and on paper you're looking at a cool billion possible combinations. But of course not every tyre fits every rim, not every wheel fits every car, and what on earth is a bolt circle anyway?

Fortunately, there are experts like the team at Reifen Center Wolf. They know that buying tyres can quickly become a real test of patience, even for seasoned dealers, so they set up their new Shopware store accordingly: fast, as user-friendly as possible and packed with smart search functions.

Our case study reveals more about the project. Guiding us through it is Simon Ebert, Head of Purchasing at Reifen Center Wolf.

The starting point: a shop that should have earned its licence long ago

When Reifen Center Wolf launched its first web shop in 1995, e-commerce was still pioneering territory. Even so, the tyre wholesaler's online shop quickly became far more than just another sales channel: over the years it grew into a fixed part of day-to-day business and expanded alongside the company.

But it's in the nature of IT growth that a simple piece of software gradually gathers more and more functions and data. Information that really belonged in the ERP ended up living in the store, and being processed there. The once-stable custom solution mutated over the years into a complex system whose technical foundations struggled more and more to keep pace with the company's needs.

The store was reworked again in 2017, but mainly with the corporate design in mind. The technical basis stayed as it was. By 2024, the problems were impossible to ignore: at times, Reifen Center Wolf couldn't even access its own online shop; for hours on end, the online business stood still.

As a first step, the team gave the store a thorough clear-out. Price lists and other information moved into the ERP, and the shop was relieved of unnecessary ballast. That brought short-term relief, but it didn't change the crucial question: how long can you keep developing a system whose technical foundations are older than the apprentices?

"The old shop was with us for almost 30 years. But at some point we reached the moment where we had to say: if we want to keep growing, we need to rebuild on new technical foundations."

– Simon Ebert, Head of Purchasing at Reifen Center Wolf

For Reifen Center Wolf, that made things clear: if we want to keep growing and build out e-commerce as a sales channel, we need a new foundation. After almost 30 years, the time had come to send the custom-solution store into its well-earned retirement.

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Solution

But when one colleague retires, you hope their successor is already waiting in the wings. In less figurative terms: the e-commerce store shouldn't simply be scrapped, but replaced with a modern model. For that to work, though, you need two things: a shop system that fits the business model, and an agency to deliver the project.

Why the choice fell on Shopware and Strix

The search for the right agency began for Reifen Center Wolf and Simon Ebert in the most classic way possible: with Google. That's how the Head of Purchasing came across Strix. And people still say SEO isn't relevant anymore.

A quick look at our references, and it soon became clear that we not only bring plenty of B2B know-how, but were already working with Interpneu, another well-known name in the tyre industry. A brief exchange with that peer confirmed the positive first impression. Hurdle number one: cleared.

In talking with us, the conversation quickly moved beyond pure IT. Because Reifen Center Wolf wasn't looking for a service provider to blindly work through a list of requirements, but for a partner who understands the business model, thinks along, and occasionally pushes back when a supposedly good idea turns out to be a flop in practice. Those exact qualities are what ultimately convinced Simon Ebert and his team to work with us.

"Strix didn't just say: sure, we'll do it that way. They asked the critical questions too. That's exactly what we were looking for."

– Simon Ebert, Head of Purchasing at Reifen Center Wolf

The decision for Shopware fitted this approach too. The platform offers the flexibility to rebuild a B2B shop within a manageable timeframe, to reflect much of the existing structure, and at the same time to leave room for further development.

Agency found, shop system chosen, the project could begin.

Into delivery

Overall, the project ran remarkably smoothly. No serious problems, no interference, and the launch landed on the planned date. In fact, we could even have gone live three weeks earlier, but as the ERP was being worked on in parallel by another party, there was a small delay. Even that was no problem, though. After all, we work flexibly and with the customer's needs in mind.

So, without further ado, here are the key highlights from the project.

#1: A shop without the frills

When customers order from Reifen Center Wolf, they mainly want one thing: to get to the right product quickly. So the new store wasn't meant to dazzle with spectacular animations or unnecessary extras. The focus was on clear navigation, simple operation and an ordering process that costs as little time as possible.

In B2B commerce in particular, this matters. Anyone ordering tyres for their customers is often under time pressure, because nobody wants to go without their car for more than a day for a set of new tyres. A single order is no big deal on its own, but several dozen orders a day can quickly add up to hours of work. Every minute saved counts here, and a smooth ordering process is worth real money.

But it's not only about ordering as quickly as possible, it's also about needing as little help as possible to do it. The new shop is built so that customers can handle many steps themselves, from searching for a product to completing the order. That takes the pressure off the users, and off the team at Reifen Center Wolf: fewer queries, less manual work and more time for the cases where someone is genuinely needed.

#2: The combination search

Remember: 50,000 types of tyre, 20,000 rim variants, a billion possibilities, most of which don't work anyway. Even the most experienced tyre dealer can't know every valid combination by heart, especially not when a customer rolls up in a lowered special edition and would like rims to match their new hair colour.

That's why the combination search we built is highlight #2: instead of laboriously clicking through the huge range, tyre dealers can search specifically for exactly the products that actually go together. The search also takes criteria such as dimensions, load ratings and speed indices into account, guiding you from the initial question straight to the right product.

"The combination search makes ordering far easier for our customers. We can see that not just in the feedback, but in the revenue too."

– Simon Ebert, Head of Purchasing at Reifen Center Wolf

Less time spent, fewer queries, fewer potential incorrect orders. A complex product selection becomes a manageable process. For Reifen Center Wolf, the combination search is therefore far more than a handy feature: according to Simon Ebert, it's one of the biggest improvements in the new store and is already generating measurable additional revenue. More on that shortly.

#3: Ready for the next stage

Naturally, the new store wasn't only meant to solve the old system's problems, but also to make sure Reifen Center Wolf doesn't find itself in exactly the same situation again in a few years. So we set the shop up to develop flexibly. New filters, reports and functions can be added without immediately requiring the next full relaunch.

The Reifen Center Wolf team can take on much of this itself. After a short training session of around three to four hours, it was mainly about getting to know the backend in practice and trying it out first-hand. Learning by doing. Instead of having to call us for every little change, the team can now develop the shop independently in many areas and adapt it to the demands of daily business.

That may not be quite as spectacular as the new search function, but for a growing company it's at least as important. After all, a modern shop isn't future-proof simply because it works well today, but because it can grow with the company.

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Results

A new shop is one thing; what it actually delivers day to day is another, and usually the more important measure. At Reifen Center Wolf, the success shows less in glossy screenshots than in hard numbers.

#1: And it runs, and runs, and runs: 99.99% uptime

A reminder: in the old setup, a working online shop had at some point stopped being a given. Server outages meant that Reifen Center Wolf occasionally couldn't access its own shop for up to twelve hours. For a central sales channel, that's not just annoying, it's quite literally money going up in smoke.

Today, things look completely different: the new shop achieves uptime of 99.99 per cent. A system where even access could become a problem has become what an online shop should be again: a reliable part of day-to-day business. No drama, no emergency measures, just online when customers want to order.

Admittedly, 99.99 per cent uptime might sound like a number straight out of buzzword bingo. What it means in practice becomes clear with a glance at the clock: in a 30-day month, 0.01 per cent works out to just about 4 minutes and 20 seconds, and that's usually not unwelcome downtime, but planned time for maintenance or updates. Server offline between 2:55 and 3:00 in the morning? Easily done.

#2: In and out: 98% of customers straight back on board

Switching shops is a challenge not only for the operator, but often for the users too. Suddenly everything looks different, processes no longer work the way they used to, "why does it want my password now?"...

So it's good to know that the relaunch was utterly uneventful for customers. 98 per cent of customers logged back in the very day after go-live. There were no notable customer losses at all.

"The fact that 98 per cent of our customers were able to log straight back in the day after go-live showed us just how remarkably smoothly the switch went for our customer base."

– Simon Ebert, Head of Purchasing at Reifen Center Wolf

But perhaps even nicer: the feedback on the new store was positive across the board, and in everyday B2B that's really something. Because when everything works, hardly anyone bothers to write an email to say thank you. In our experience, feedback tends to arrive when something's gone wrong. The fact that Reifen Center Wolf still received plenty of positive responses to the new store shows that everything here was done right.

#3: It pays off: 3–4% more growth

In the end, e-commerce isn't only about whether a shop runs reliably and customers are happy. It also has to contribute to business success. At Reifen Center Wolf, that effect can already be put into numbers: the company attributes around 3 to 4 percentage points of its current revenue growth to the new shop.

That's all the more remarkable given that Reifen Center Wolf is already growing strongly: overall growth in 2026 is around 10 to 13 per cent. So the new shop steps in exactly where the company can draw the maximum benefit from the relaunch: the upward trend is reinforced and driven on further, as if someone had fired up the turbocharger at just the right moment.

What other mid-sized companies can take away from the project

The fact that the old shop did its job (more or less) without complaint at Reifen Center Wolf for almost 30 years is actually a small success story in itself. The key is simply not to miss the right moment to jump. So, to finish, Simon Ebert has three recommendations for companies facing a similar situation:

1. Assess the importance of e-commerce realistically. If the online shop is an important sales channel, that has to be weighted accordingly when deciding on a modernisation. A relaunch is no small investment. Those who go about it wisely and choose the best provider rather than the cheapest set the course for growth.
2. Usability over show. Simple operation and fast order processing are often far more important than an elaborate design. In B2B especially, customers just want to get their work done, not stroll through a digital theme park.
3. Don't cling to the old system for too long. If the existing technology is holding back growth or further development, you shouldn't put off the necessary cut forever. The old Wolf shop served well for almost 30 years and saying goodbye was hard, but at some point the time for its final journey had come all the same.

Ready for the next lap

Above all, the Reifen Center Wolf project shows that an online shop which has grown over time doesn't have to stay complicated. With Shopware and Strix, the company has put its commerce platform on a new, future-proof footing, with a clear focus on simple ordering, scalable technology and the demands of industry-specific B2B business.

If you'd now like to see how other companies use Shopware, take a look at our other Shopware projects and discover the tailored solutions we've delivered together with our customers.

We also support you in developing your digital sales platform holistically, from the first strategic considerations through concept and design to system integration and continuous optimisation. You can find out more in our service profile.

Combine our full range of services, and you might not quite reach a billion variants. But you'll certainly arrive at exactly the solution you need.

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This project is built with our technology partners: