WSM 6.0: A New Foundation for Modern Automotive Ecommerce

What Automotive Ecommerce Demands Today

Automotive ecommerce is fundamentally different from general retail. Product data is complex. Fitment matters. Integrations run deep. And performance is not optional.

These demands are most acute for:

• Automotive manufacturers and distributors with complex catalogs
• Retailers selling fitment-based products, kits, and bundles
• Teams that need performance, SEO, and flexibility without platform lock-in

Web Shop Manager (WSM) 6.0 was built to meet those realities head-on. This release is not an incremental upgrade to the Web Shop Manager platform. It is a complete re-architecture, designed to serve as a long-term foundation for serious automotive ecommerce businesses.

If you are looking for a modern automotive ecommerce platform that can scale, adapt, and perform without constant workarounds, WSM 6.0 was built for that purpose.

Why We Rebuilt the Platform

The WSM 5.x platform carried years of knowledge and success, but it was also built in a different era of ecommerce.

As customer expectations increased and the automotive ecosystem became more interconnected, continuing to extend the legacy architecture would have led to slower innovation, higher risk, and growing technical debt.

Rather than patch around those limitations, we made a deliberate decision to rebuild the platform from the ground up.

WSM 6.0 removes brittle dependencies, simplifies system interactions, and provides a foundation that can support growth over the next decade rather than the next release cycle.

A Headless Architecture Built for Flexibility

At the core of WSM 6.0 is a fully headless architecture.

The front end is intentionally decoupled from the commerce engine, APIs, and data layer. This separation gives businesses far more control over how their sites look, behave, and evolve over time.

What this enables:

• Front-end changes without risking backend stability
• Custom storefronts without platform lock-in
• Faster experimentation and iteration

Customers can work with internal developers, agencies, or freelancers. They can make changes themselves, hire a team from Upwork or Fiverr, or build something entirely custom. The platform stays stable while the experience evolves.

This is how modern ecommerce platforms are built, and it’s essential for automotive businesses that cannot afford downtime or rigid constraints.

Built on a Modern, Proven Technology Stack

WSM 6.0 is built using technologies chosen for reliability, maintainability, and long-term scalability.

• Python powers the backend for flexibility and performance
• GraphQL provides a clean, predictable API layer
• React drives fast, modern front-end experiences

This stack allows faster development, cleaner integrations, and safer releases. It also ensures the platform remains approachable for developers, reducing dependence on any single team or vendor.

The goal is not novelty. The goal is a platform that can evolve continuously without disruptive rebuilds every few years.

An Open App Ecosystem for Customization and Growth

WSM 6.0 introduces an app-based architecture that allows functionality to be added without modifying the core platform.

Customers can:

• Install apps from the WSM app marketplace
• Build private apps for their own workflows
• Develop apps that can be reused across multiple stores
• Publish apps to the broader WSM ecosystem

This keeps the core platform stable while allowing innovation at the edges. Instead of waiting for global feature releases, businesses can move at their own pace and tailor the platform to their needs.

It also creates an ecosystem where developers can build once and deploy across many sites, lowering costs and increasing velocity.

Built-In AI Through Mercedes, Our AI Agent

WSM 6.0 includes native AI capabilities through Mercedes, our built-in AI agent designed specifically for automotive ecommerce operations.

Mercedes is not a generic chatbot layered on top of the platform. It is deeply integrated into WSM and trained around the realities of automotive catalogs, fitment logic, and complex ecommerce workflows.

Mercedes can assist with:

• Navigating and understanding large, complex product catalogs
• Answering operational and platform questions in real time
• Supporting content, merchandising, and administrative workflows
• Augmenting product data and assisting with SEO improvements at scale
• Supporting sales teams during live calls by surfacing relevant product, fitment, and catalog information instantly

Because WSM 6.0 is API-first and modular, AI is not an add-on. It is part of how the platform is designed to be used going forward.

This creates a foundation for increasingly intelligent automation without compromising control or reliability.

Performance and SEO Built In

Performance is not an add-on in WSM 6.0. It is built into the foundation.

Sites on the platform consistently achieve:

• Green Core Web Vitals across all metrics
• Sub one-second page load times
• Clean rendering for search engines and users
• Native structured data and schema markup designed to align product, fitment, and content data with search engines and LLMs

This directly impacts SEO visibility, conversion rates, and advertising efficiency. In competitive automotive categories, speed and technical SEO are no longer advantages. They are requirements.

WSM 6.0 meets those requirements by design.

Designed for Real Automotive eCommerce Complexity

WSM 6.0 is explicitly built for automotive ecommerce, not adapted from general retail assumptions.

The platform supports:

• Extensive and frequently changing product catalogs
• Complex kits and bundles, including shared components, conditional logic, and fitment-aware groupings
• Clean separation of product data, fitment logic, and presentation
• Deep integrations with ERPs, PIMs, marketplaces, and third-party systems
• Advanced search and vehicle fitment experiences powered by PartsLogic Search
• High-volume operations where reliability matters more than novelty

The focus is not on adding features for their own sake. It is about making complex operations more dependable.

Safer Innovation and Faster Time to Value

Because the platform is modular and decoupled, innovation is safer.

New apps, integrations, and front-end changes do not put the entire system at risk. Failures are isolated. Updates are smaller. Rollouts are more controlled.

This results in:

• Faster launches
• Faster fixes
• Fewer all-hands emergencies

For operators who have lived through fragile platforms and costly outages, this difference is significant.

The Foundation for What Comes Next

WSM 6.0 is not a finish line. It is the foundation for everything that comes next at Web Shop Manager.

This architecture allows us to deliver new capabilities faster, integrate more deeply with the automotive ecosystem, and support customers as their businesses grow more complex.

For existing customers, it represents a clear and modern path forward.
For new customers, it offers a premier automotive ecommerce platform built for scale, performance, and control from day one.

We’re excited about what this enables, and we’re just getting started.

WSM 6.0 builds on years of supporting complex automotive ecommerce operations, many of which are showcased in our work. Teams exploring the platform can also request a demo to see WSM 6.0 in action.