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Shelf space in a premium high street store is still amazing marketing for fashion and lifestyle products.
Centra vs Joor vs NuORDER: A comparison of wholesale management platforms for fashion ecommerce
If you're in the market for a new ecommerce platform for your wholesale needs, you’re probably wondering which option is best for your brand. In this comparison, we take a look at three popular digital wholesale management platforms: Centra, Joor and NuORDER.
How do brands score Centra on G2?
See how Centra compares to Joor and Nuorder below.
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| NuORDER | Joor | Centra | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meets Requirements | 8.1 | G2 rating currently not available | 9.1 |
| Ease of Use | 8.3 | G2 rating currently not available | 9.1 |
| Ease of Setup | G2 rating currently not available | G2 rating currently not available | 8.4 |
| Ease of Admin | G2 rating currently not available | G2 rating currently not available | 9.2 |
| Quality of Support | 8.3 | G2 rating currently not available | 9.2 |
| Ease of Doing Business With | G2 rating currently not available | G2 rating currently not available | 9.7 |
| Product Direction | 10 | G2 rating currently not available | 9.6 |
The rise of digital wholesale
Physical trade shows that dominated the fashion landscape for years are increasingly substituted (or supported) by digital wholesale platforms replicating the traditional B2B wholesale experience. Granted, nothing can replace human interaction, but there are creative ways to bring a collection to life for buyers.
Digital marketplaces and wholesale platforms are facilitating wholesale relationships and revitalizing wholesale at large. A growing number of retailers and trade shows are now looking to take their operations online through digital wholesale platforms.
Can DTC and wholesale ecommerce coexist?
Brands and brick-and-mortar stores’ wholesale relationships were affected in the wake of pandemic-induced order cancellations. And while many fashion brands did put their resources into DTC to safeguard against frozen capital and unmovable inventory, wholesale is still an important and relevant channel, especially for growing an audience. There are a couple of reasons for that:
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Growing an audience exclusively via DTC, digital advertising and social media platforms (e.g. Instagram) can be really challenging.
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A spot on the shelf in a good retailer is important for brand visibility.
The growing popularity of ecommerce platforms like Joor, NuORDER and Centra represents a fundamental shift in the fashion wholesale process. They offer brands a digitized wholesale channel that they can run in parallel with their retail operations.
What are the popular ecommerce platforms for fashion wholesale?
Platforms like Joor and NuOrder are the most commonly used wholesale marketplace platforms. However, industry runners-up like Centra offer a fresh perspective and laser focus on fashion ecommerce, catering to the specific needs of fashion brands and solving their challenges.
Although our comparisons and marketing materials traditionally juxtapose ecommerce platforms side-by-side, there are as many differences as similarities between them. To put it another way, there is strong differentiation in the market. Competitors in the space offer varying features and capabilities, and support specific retailer relationships and use cases. For example:
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| Centra | NuORDER | Joor | ORDRE | Le New Black | |
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| Who it's for and what it offers | Centra is known for its fashion-centric approach and seamless integration of DTC and B2B channels. Centra allows brands to create a wholesale experience that mirrors direct‑to‑consumer ecommerce. | NuORDER is an ecommerce platform designed specifically for wholesale businesses. It offers features such as order management, inventory management and product catalogs. NuORDER also offers built-in support for dropshipping. | Joor is a fashion marketplace for wholesale buying, connecting brands and retailers globally. The platform gives retailers and buyers one handy platform to submit orders from multiple brands. It focuses on the B2B side of fashion, offering access to multiple retailers and brands. | ORDRE is known for its 360-degree technology, which allows buyers to see imagery that rotates around the body of a model, and has a partnership with Joor. | Le New Black is popular mainly in the French and European markets and works closely with Paris Fashion Week. |
At a glance
For the purpose of this comparison, we’ll focus only on Centra, NuORDER and Joor, attempting to draw parallels between them and offering a quick overview of their features and benefits for B2B fashion ecommerce.
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Joor
JOOR is a fashion marketplace for wholesale buying, connecting brands and retailers globally. JOOR gives retailers and buyers one handy platform to submit orders from multiple brands.
JOOR focuses on the B2B side of fashion, offering access to one of the largest indexes of retailers and brands. Rather than digging through your emails to find attachments, JOOR lets you conveniently browse the latest line sheets in one place. Once you find a retailer or brand you like, you can request to connect, saving the hassle of searching for contact details. The platform is designed to eliminate the barriers of the wholesale process by enabling brands to work with any retailer they do business with.
JOOR offers specifically designed apps for both brands and retailers:
For retailers
For retailers, JOOR offers the Retail App. By enabling you to take photos and tag products during runway shows and market appointments, the Retail App makes it easier than ever to get organized. Joor is free of charge for retailers, which in turn makes it easier for B2B brands to access retailers.
For brands
JOOR has an Orders App, with a centralized network to showcase and sell your collections. Access to the platform is free for the retailers that partner with brands that are already on JOOR.
JOOR’s Virtual Showrooms provide presentations that allow brands to digitally present their collections to wholesale buyers in immersive detail. JOOR also offers a bespoke virtual showroom service, JOOR Custom, so clients can create white-label standalone digital showrooms that perfectly integrate with JOOR’s back-end functionality.
With all fonts, navigation and art direction fully customized to your brand and hosted on your chosen URL, you can drive brand impact and revolutionize your wholesale B2B business with JOOR Custom. Reduce your time to market, eliminate back-end friction and increase engagement with a personalized bespoke virtual showroom.
Key features
A comprehensive product catalog for brands, allowing them to easily upload and manage products in one central location. This makes it easy for buyers to browse and find the products they're looking for.
White-labeled showrooms for brands
Real-time order management: Joor gives you the ability to track orders in real time, so you can always stay on top of your inventory levels. This feature is especially useful if you sell through multiple channels (e.g., online and brick-and-mortar stores).
On top of being a B2B platform, Joor is also a popular marketplace for retailers.
Joor Orb360° brings collections to life like never before by incorporating 360° images and video into your Virtual Showroom.
Video technology replicates in-person appointments from the comfort of your desk with video technology that’s as dynamic as a model in a showroom.
Virtual appointments allow you to ensure that lines of communication are clear, with easy scheduling tools and embedded commenting functionality.
Analytics allow you to analyze your collections by brand, trend or color, or by creating your own tags.
NuORDER
Nuorder is a wholesale ecommerce platform designed specifically for wholesale businesses, connecting brands with retailers in a single marketplace. It offers features such as order management, inventory management and product catalogs, making it easy to run a wholesale business online. NuORDER also offers built-in support for dropshipping, so you can easily add products to your store and have them shipped directly to your customers.
NuOrder is a B2B ecommerce marketplace platform for fashion providing a great virtual showroom experience and a tool for sales reps.
Key features
Collaborative virtual showroom experience with features like order drafts, notes and a whiteboard to re-create real-world interactions.
Tracking for wholesale shipments
360 imagery and videos to show the products in detail
Compare to Plan, which allows for tracking allocated products by month and door to review inventory totals against plan numbers
Merchandising Stories, which help to align the creative vision across departments with easy-to-build mood boards and visual presentations
Chargeback management
Visual merchandising capabilities, which allow the categorization and visualization of products next to each other before making the purchase
Customizable showroom – NuORDER offers a drag-and-drop page builder to easily add, remove or rearrange the different elements of the virtual showroom. Brands can customize this digital space to work best for your brand or according to the season’s merchandising needs.
User-friendly Excel-like filters supporting product search by colors, sizes, seasons and delivery dates
Support for multiple languages
Offline mode
Dynamic videos with shoppable hotspots for placing orders with one click: showroom tours, runway videos, designer or founder interviews, influencer content, ad campaigns, and more
Linesheets that are personalized for specific stores or buyers
Lookbooks and digital catalogs
Social media features: links or grid previews
Customizable wholesale homepage portal
Filters for colors, sizes, seasons and delivery dates
Key product information: international size charts, fit guides, certifications (such as for sustainability), press releases, editorials and press
Essential products of the season
Mood boards, inspiration, color palettes and collection stories
NuORDER provides brands and retailers with a central hub on which to browse products, access real-time inventory data and place orders online. Unlike JOOR and Centra, which are designed specifically for fashion niches, NuORDER accommodates brands from a wide range of industries.
Centra
What makes Centra stand out from the competition is that it integrates DTC and wholesale channels in one platform.
A Centra showroom example
Key features:
As its main advantage, Centra comes with a headless SaaS direct-to-consumer module and a wholesale module giving original brands the possibility to handle B2B Wholesale, B2C Direct-to-Consumer sales modules in one neat package.
The platform offers all the B2B features most lifestyle brands would be looking for, such as:
The Showroom module for wholesale, which can coexist with the DTC module, allowing brands to sell through both channels
Sales rep login and specific view
Agent login and specific view
Buyer login and specific view
Shoppable lookbooks
Collaborative order sheet co-creation
Individual pricing
Access to file storage area, e.g. for media
Order history
Simultaneous work on multiple order sheets
Advanced search
Advanced filtering
High res pictures
Printable line sheets
Printable stocklist
Printable order summaries
Complex setup for products that makes it possible to cover more edge cases
Prepacks and size distributions
Delivery windows
Time-controlled prices
Customer groups (for sharing of discounts, pricing, restrictions/eligibility, etc)
Price lists (that can be shared or customer-specific)
Tiered pricing/volume pricing (as well as customer-specific adaptations)
Advanced discount management
Credit limits, payment terms, etc.
Customer group and customer-level product availability
Purchasing roles/levels
Quotations
Advanced shipment management and great support for omnichannel commerce with capabilities like buy online and ship from store
Why do brands replatform to Centra?
Centra unlocks marketing opportunities and lets brands leverage the personalized digital marketing techniques known from B2C ecommerce to boost the wholesale channel.
Collaborative digital showroom
Centra makes it easy for brands to digitize their wholesale by offering an out-of-the-box, buyer-friendly and intuitive Showroom module allowing retailers to place preorders, reorders and orders on stock.
Brands can invite retailers globally to visit their beautiful digital showrooms, browse online lookbooks and place orders. With Centra’s real-time, collaborative showroom environment, you can work on multiple orders with multiple buyers simultaneously. Centra’s Showroom supports the business logic of wholesale, personalized pricing, campaigns and more. Brands using Centra’s online showroom typically see an immediate 10-15% increase in in-season reorders.
Efficiency and time saving
Running on Centra saves brands time by moving small international retailers to self-service. You can invite sales reps to visit your fully digital showroom, let them browse lookbooks online and place their orders. Brands that do so see an immediate 10-15% increase in in-season reorders.
Centra's Wholesale module is a user-friendly portal for buyers and sales reps. It supports the business logic for preorders and at-once orders, allowing brands to quickly launch a clean, optimized wholesale store. The module comes at an additional cost, but it can be used independently of Centra’s B2C platform.
Industry-leading handling of product variants
Fashion and lifestyle brands often have more complex, larger catalogs with lots of SKUs for different sizes and colors. Centra offers a bulk uploader, which makes those complicated catalogs a lot simpler. Centra’s multilayer variant handling makes it easy for brands to manage both color variants and sizes, as well as user-defined attributes like in a full-scale PIM.
Lower TCO for brands
With both DTC and B2B modules built in and many features offered out of the box, Centra significantly reduces the long-term cost of maintaining the platform and ensuring its good performance in peak sale periods. Since there are no hidden costs and no third-party integrations needed, Centra is the most affordable ecommerce platform of the three. Read more on TCO in another post on the Centra blog.
Overstock prevention and lower working capital needs
Running on Centra, brands can take orders on incoming stock before it arrives to the warehouse, minimizing working capital needs. Centra helps you remove errors and control all orders on existing and future inventory with corresponding delivery windows. The platform makes it easier to aggregate demand, create forecasts and place orders at suppliers with minimal overstock risk.
Built-in PIM for fashion products
Out of the box, Centra's Wholesale module comes with a lightweight, advanced PIM that's geared to handle complex fashion and lifestyle products – no extra apps and integrations needed.
Centra can also integrate with a 3rd party PIM system, serving as your complete digital wholesale control room.
Freedom to integrate
With all data available in real time, you can use Centra’s APIs to integrate with various third-party BI tools and IT systems, eliminating the manual labor of transferring data between different systems. Centra stores all data in one place, allowing you to create extensive reports or move data into any BI solution of choice. You can use Centra’s back end to integrate with other IT systems, eliminating the manual labor of transferring data between them.
Support for typical fashion sales campaigns and discounts
Centra supports rule-based per-account discounts and campaigns, enabling each wholesale account to buy the right products at the right times.
Base price lists: Standard price list selected for an Account (per delivery window)
Pre-negotiated discounts: Account-specific percentage discounts off the selected price list
Off-price campaigns: Powerful but simple tool for creating campaigns on selected products
Advanced discounts: Rule-based “if-this-then-that” pricing engine to surgically create any other type of pricing logic
Order/item bargaining: Sellers can allow wholesale partners to make offers per item or order and override default pricing
Native support for bundles and discounts
Centra covers all fashion and lifestyle use cases like advanced promotions and discounts with flexibility in terms of pricing, stock, discounts, inheriting of attributes, etc.
Better support for digital marketing
Centra's Wholesale module makes it easier to leverage the personalized digital marketing techniques and merchandising freedom known from B2C ecommerce, further boosting your wholesale channel.
Freedom to use any shipping service provider
Centra supports any number of shipping service providers, allowing brands to offer their buyers the methods they know, trust, and love.
Which wholesale ecommerce platform is right for your fashion brand?
There is healthy competition between the different options, although one hasn’t emerged as the end-all, be-all solution. There are a few key things to consider when choosing an ecommerce platform for wholesale:
Your product
What kind of products do you sell? Are they physical goods, digital products or a mix of both? Are you selling complex fashion products?
Your customers
Who will be buying your products? Do you have B2B or B2C customers, or both?
Your budget
How much can you afford to spend on an ecommerce platform? For a detailed breakdown of TCO across the leading ecommerce platforms, go to another post on our blog.
To determine which is right for them, brands and their showrooms should review the main players and choose one and invest in building it out with visual and informational content, diverting the money they spent setting up appealing physical showrooms.
A fashion brand should think about which platform will be the easiest and most intuitive for its key retailers and which is best for the category or offering – or for a group of showroom brands versus a single label. Nordstrom, for example, uses NuORDER to process its digital wholesale orders, while Neiman Marcus Group and Shopbop use Joor. Paris Fashion Week has linked with Le New Black for its upcoming digital fashion shows, offering the service to emerging brands that are part of its Sphere showroom.
Centra distinguishes itself from the competition by focusing solely on fashion ecommerce and offering both B2C with wholesale modules in one platform. This, combined with the platform’s industry-leading customer support, performance and scalability, makes Centra a strong offering for fashion brands that want to scale their business quickly with minimal time to market.
Summary
Investors’ growing interest in different wholesale ecommerce solutions is an indication that wholesale is here to stay. Digital wholesale platforms enable more streamlined wholesale operations compared to traditional trade shows and a greater scale and volume compared to individual partnerships with retailers.
Traditional marketplaces that catered to wholesale customers now have to update their technology to win over brands and retailers, as well as make conscious efforts to lower their prices and offer retailers and brands more favorable rates.