Hochparterre Bücher

The customer's primary goal was to establish a webshop as the main destination for Swiss architects to discover and purchase books. They aimed to offer a wide-ranging selection, including materials on theory, practice, monographs, landscape, and furniture design. A significant challenge was to present this diverse and extensive collection in a way that was both accurate and visually appealing, in order to enhance the overall user experience.

The previous shop ran on Magento and needed to move — completely and without losing data — to a modern, easier-to-run platform.

We chose Shopify as a stable, low-maintenance foundation and built the theme entirely custom — following Shopify best practices, with a focus on design, performance and ease of use.

For the catalogue we built a custom Shopify app connected to the VLB, the German-language books-in-print directory: the team searches for titles and imports them into the shop with all the relevant data.

We also handled the complete migration of all data from Magento, and implemented the most popular Swiss payment methods.

The result is a fully custom Shopify theme that puts the books centre stage — reduced, fast and made for browsing.

A custom Shopify app connects the shop to the VLB: new titles can be searched and imported with all the relevant data.

A bespoke events module powers readings and book launches — and nothing from the old Magento shop was left behind.

Hochparterre Bücher now presents over 3,000 titles on architecture, landscape and furniture design on a platform the team runs themselves — from VLB book imports to events.

The shop is fast, beautiful and easy to use — for customers and booksellers alike.