Centra vs Shopify Plus vs Magento: A side‑by‑side comparison

Ecommerce has evolved. Gone are the days when a single platform could be good for everything. Modern original brands need agility, design freedom, and scale to grow and reach their customers internationally.

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How do brands score Centra on G2?

See how Centra compares to Shopify Plus and Magento 2, below.

Read the full G2 comparison

	Shopify Plus	Magento 2	Centra
Meets Requirements	8.6	8.4	9.1
Ease of Use	9.0	7.1	9.0
Ease of Setup	8.6	6.2	8.3
Ease of Admin	8.7	7.3	9.1
Quality of Support	8.5	7.0	9.1
Ease of Doing Business With	8.6	7.5	9.7
Product Direction	8.8	6.9	9.5

The evolution of commerce platforms

Past

Legacy platforms

Magento

redEcommerce business logic coupled with CMS and frontend website

redBusiness logic and website customized by integrating directly with the platform’s source code

redDifficult to upgrade due to version and vendor lock-in. Significant cost to keep an installation running

Present

Monolithic SaaS platforms

Shopify Plus

yellowEcommerce business logic coupled with CMS and frontend on limited APIs

yellowLimited possibilities to extend the built-in business logic and functionality through apps

yellowLimited flexibility prevents rapid online business development and makes it hard to meet enterprise needs

Future

Composable SaaS platforms

greenPresentation layer fully decoupled from the ecommerce engine

greenOpen architecture, with data accessible through well-defined APIs

greenAPI “technical contract” between platform and implementation enables rapid low-cost development

Running a fashion brand? Pick the right tool for the trade!

If you’re doing fashion and lifestyle on a monolithic ecommerce platform, you’re very likely limiting the growth potential of your brand. Today’s leading monolithic SaaS platforms don’t support the business logic and complexity of modern lifestyle commerce. They may be good for everything, but they fail to meet the needs of modern, dynamic fashion brands.

At a glance

While there are many ecommerce platforms on the market, Shopify Plus and Magento are often mentioned as the top ones. However, when you look at how both platforms were built, which industries they serve best, and how they support growth, their shortcomings start to emerge – especially in how they solve the challenges of modern, global fashion ecommerce.

To scale fast, brands that grow the fastest right now are the ones that are adapting to new conditions very quickly. The high pace of business development is key for growth. Dynamic fashion brands need a solution that enables such growth without imposing limitations in terms of design and development.

	Shopify Plus	Magento	Centra
Built for...	Built for entry-level retailers that want an easy-to-get-started webshop. Many third-party apps are needed to get the core commerce features like variant handling, campaign features and international sales.	Magento is a generic retailer-focused ecommerce product. Industry-specific adaptation needs to be added through customization, driving cost and complexity.	Built for both established or aspiring brands that need a platform to strengthen their imprint.
Powerful vs. ease of use	Built to be easy to learn. Shopify’s ambition is to enable aspiring online retailers to open up a simple online store with a few easy clicks.	Powerful but complex. Requires specific Magento programming skills to customize and maintain. Most programmers have difficulty learning Magento.	Centra is an advanced ecommerce system built for power users.
Wholesale vs. direct-to- consumer	Shopify Plus offers a bad wholesale experience. Also, Shopify’s wholesale is not natively built-in and as robust in terms of price and vendor control. It still needs a separate store to run a full Wholesale Site which means more money spent.	B2C only platform – Magento B2B is only B2C-style ecommerce for business customers, not wholesale.	Wholesale and direct-to-consumer With Centra, you can handle all channels from one platform — both Wholesale B2B and Direct-to-Consumer B2C.
Single vs. multi-market	Separate storefronts are needed per each market. Shopify Markets helps with basic internationalization, however this does not allow for proper local catalog management, assigning of multiple warehouses per market, local bank accounts, base currencies, payouts etc.	Multiple markets is possible. However, administration is quite flawed and not built to scale on product nor content level.	Multiple markets Centra is one system to rule them all – markets, currencies, languages, and price. Serve all markets from one system.
Custom design/dev vs. closed templates	Template-based design system Generic look and feel based on templates. A good choice for businesses that cannot afford to invest in on-brand design	Integrated solution Legacy platform that combines backend architecture with ecommerce, CMS and front end in a monolith, leading to cumbersome and slow development.	“Headless” design system Build your site with complete freedom of design. Use any CMS. Front end fully separated from back end, enables agile development and choice of technology.
Payment options	Few fixed payment options with focus on Shopify payments, which is tailored for the North American market. Extra fees and complexity when using other PSPs.	Multiple payment options available	Flexible payment options Centra offers 200+ leading payment methods through multiple PSPs, empowering brands to sell globally.
Hosting	Cloud-based infrastructure	Self-hosted product Hosting is integrated. A hosting provider needs to be contracted separately from the platform and typically does not give an end-to-end availability guarantee.	Hassle-free SaaS solution Centra always works. Operated in the cloud, Centra guarantees 99.9% availability - even during peak sale periods such as Black Friday.
Automatic updates vs versions	Automatic platform updates	Versioned software Software needs to be manually updated to the latest version, driving cost, risk and creating plug-in compatibility issues.	Always up-to-date Centra is always running on the best and latest version with automatic updates fortnightly
Licensing fees	A monthly licensing fee includes: hosting, maintenance, version upgrades, native multi-store capabilities, Shopify’s POS solution, and account management. However, the service in this package is very limited and not very personal.	High total cost of ownership Fees for licenses, customization, hosting, updates and upgrades come on top of website development, creating a high and difficult to forecast total cost of ownership.	Cost-efficient modern solution Centra’s license fee covers everything needed, including support. The only cost on top is the design and development of a custom-built, on-brand website.

The 11 challenges of fashion commerce

To scale fast and grow internationally, dynamic fashion brands need a solution that enables it without imposing limitations in terms of design and development. These challenges include scalability, complexity, design freedom, internationalization and suitability for selling fashion and lifestyle products.

Let’s have a closer look at how popular platforms solve these challenges, and how they stack up against Centra’s headless, fashion-centric approach to fashion ecommerce.

Challenge #1

Lack of design freedom and flexibility

In terms of website design, the fashion industry has very unique needs. Ambitious brands need the agility and design freedom to build brand-authentic, pixel perfect sites – without compromises or design limitations.

Design freedom means empowering editors with a full-scale modular CMS mixing content marketing and shop capabilities. Most popular ecommerce platforms don’t enable full freedom, limiting brands’ growth and flexibility.

Shopify Plus

Limited front end design freedom

Designed to work with a built-in basic CMS and templating system.

Limited checkout design

Very difficult to change the checkout experience.

Limited API flexibility

Limited API flexibility prevents custom customer journeys, even with own website design.

Advanced features cost extra

It's quick to set up but a number of the advanced features needed for modern ecommerce are only available through third-party plugins that vary greatly in quality and manageability.

Spotty support for themes

A large majority of the website themes are developed and overseen by third parties. Shopify does this to offer more options to their customers in terms of website design, there are no standards as to how customer service is to be delivered.

Poor API coverage and documentation

Shopify’s API is notoriously weak and badly undocumented, making building custom solutions on top of Shopify cumbersome. For example, there is bad API support for discount codes and no way to add to a user's cart via API.

Magento

Front end design

Designed to work with a built-in basic CMS and templating system. By default, Magento is a template-based platform but can be turned headless with some custom (and expensive development). In this instance, you are using Magento as a backend and applying some custom Storefront, ie. React or Vue.

Magento development is costly

Maintaining and customizing Magento to your specific needs requires experienced developers and is costly long-term.

Custom design is challenging

It is hard to make a site look good with Magento. It requires much work, and there's not an easy way to view the front end without going live.

Steep learning curve

Most programmers have a difficult time learning Magento. If going with this product you will either want a certified Magento developer on hand or hire an implementation partner.

Cumbersome platform upgrades

New versions tend to be rather large, code-breaking upgrades. When upgrading, it is necessary to retest lots of features and can require several code updates.

Support for custom marketing and campaign efforts

Marketing and campaign efforts are tempered by the cost of developer input required to take these campaigns live.

Why brands migrate to Centra

You can build a headless store on top of a monolithic commerce platform but you’ll miss out on the tooling that made you choose the platform in the first place. At the same time, you will also lose most of the benefits generally associated with headless like low price and minimal developer support. You will basically end up paying as much or more than a true headless ecommerce setup – while not getting all the benefits.

Fully headless, composable and API-first architecture offers some performance and growth benefits that are impossible to achieve with a monolithic platform like Shopify Plus or Magento.

Centra

Site speed

If your store runs slow, it is a telling sign to upgrade your setup to Centra – a future-proof headless platform built for speed and growth.

Access most of your data through APIs

All data accessible using powerful and flexible APIs. Replace components in an agile. Endless extensibility with no technology vendor lock-in.

Scalable hosting

Centra comes with hosting included, scalable global performance guaranteed with SLA.

Versionless

Features launched automatically with no costs.

Frontend design

Centra is built to work with a bespoke frontend and an external, “real”, CMS. API-first design, no cookie-cutter integrations. Design flexibility with GraphQL API access to all data in Centra enables fast integration of anything. Centra offers direct API access rather than relying on cookie-cutter standard integrations. If our APIs are missing something, let us know and we’ll take action..

Checkout design

Complete freedom of UX/UI design, also in checkout.

Frameworks developers love

Common front-end technologies used alongside Centra include Vue.js and react.js.

Built-in features

Centra’s rich library covers 90-100% of the features you need to launch your store – out of the box. Still, you can easily extend the functionalities using your own microservice APIs if needed.

Think out of the template

Centra’s robust headless architecture allows for better design and localized brand-authentic content marketing. Centra gives brands full control over the feel and look of the website – from the landing page to the checkout. There are no cookie-cutter templates or design restrictions. Build truly memorable brand-authentic experiences. Use the CMS of your choice to develop pixel-perfect content fast on Centra’s clever APIs.

Any CMS

Contentful, Storyblok, Prismic – use a CMS that you prefer. Craft your online experience with a best-of-breed CMS, rather than using same-looking templates baked into an ecommerce platform. Develop pixel-perfect content faster using Centra’s clever APIs.

Any agency

Work with the web agency of your choice or an in-house team, to quickly build your perfect site on top of our APIs.

Iterate faster

Launch new features in days with Centra’s decoupled architecture that developers love. Add fixes in days, not months. Release new versions of your site fortnightly, weekly, or more often, independent of any backend changes.

Develop and debug quickly

A lightweight flexible frontend, fully decoupled from the backend, enables the best possible developer experience.

Centra’s API-first approach caters to the needs of ambitious fashion brands. Many of Centra’s clients choose to work with a headless CMS as part of their front-end stack for a perfect mix of content marketing and advanced shop functionalities. The platform’s API coverage allows brands to elevate their front-end experiences without having to worry about the restrictions commonly associated with popular monolithic ecommerce platforms.

Challenge #2

Multi‑store and internationalization

Localization is key to driving sales internationally. Different markets accept different price points, and prefer different languages and payment methods. They follow different influencers, and their different climate zones impact seasonal sales. They want different payment options and localized checkout. However, traditional monolithic commerce platforms complicate localization, badly impacting SEO (especially for fashion ecommerce). They require one storefront per each localized market.

Offering a localized website and local payment methods can increase conversion rates by over 10%, and local shipping options can add another 10% to that figure.

Shopify Plus

Multi-store

Shopify still doesn’t have a multi-store architecture. As a workaround, most large brands or retailers end up with multiple instances of Shopify. Shopify has recently launched Markets, which help with basic internationalization. Price books are now native and used by lots of brands. Also, multi-language is now also possible. However this still doesn’t allow for proper local catalog management, assigning of multiple warehouses (per market), local bank accounts, base currencies, payouts etc. Markets will definitely improve, and various features have already been added since it was introduced last year.

Additional fees

One of the common complaints about doing ecommerce on Shopify is that the platform penalizes sellers for not using its native Shopify Payments gateway.

Multiple front ends sharing a singlew backend database with

Sharing a backend database, like a product catalog? No way on Shopify.

Limited multi-currency

No possibility to use multi-currency if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments.

Checkout localization

Not possible to localize the checkout with local payment methods, price lists, currencies et cetera without multiple storefronts.

Automated tax compliance

Extra fee for Avalara if doing automated tax compliance for charging US sales tax.

Size chart localization

Hacky and difficult to offer localized size charts.

Limited global ecommerce

Selling limited to 54 countries and poor support for multi-warehouse.

Complex allocation rules

There's a big limitation for multichannel retailers who want to ship from multiple warehouses for a single order, enable click and collect or shipping from store. Shopify can not handle these things natively.

Magento

Localization

Need to maintain multiple storefronts for each market to enable meaningful localization.

Size chart localization

Hacky and difficult to offer localized size charts.

Multi-store

Magento allows users to manage multiple storefronts from a single back end, allowing for things like multi-currency, multi-language (and multi-brand etc). Multi-store capabilities of Magento allow for complex international requirements, such as local product management, local catalog visibility, localized pricing, localized shipping, sharing Magento is a proven solution with international stores, which is one area where it really stands out, however, Shopify Plus are making big moves to change this.

Why brands migrate to Centra

Centra’s native multi-store architecture allows for full management of core data locally and globally across different stores, supporting brands with global reach or aspirations to enter new markets.

Centra allows admin users to manage product management at a store level, a language level, or globally. Descriptions can be different for stores based on languages, while the same images can be used globally. The same principle applies across things like category management, promotions, customer management, etc.

Centra

Multi-store

Centra offers native multi-store architecture, allowing for full management of core data locally and globally across different stores. This is a big selling point for brands with a global reach or aspirations to enter new markets as they grow.

Gradual localization

Centra’s clever filtering approach to gradual localization and global by default.

Support for multi-warehouse

Strong support for multi-warehouse with intelligent allocation rules.

Checkout localization

Possible to localize the checkout with local payment methods, price lists, currencies et cetera without multiple storefronts.

Unlimited market segmentation

Serve 100+ countries globally with one single site tailored for every market. Optimize profit everywhere, by offering different products and prices in different regions, independently of language and currency settings.

Robust localization

Multi-language by design, Centra allows any information to be translated, and uses the best-converting payment options everywhere. Centra supports any number of markets, languages, currencies, price lists, warehouses and users, allowing you to capture your global long-tail potential to the fullest. Local products, pricing, campaigns, warehouses, taxes, payments - without a lot of admin work or need of multiple storefronts.

Launching on new markets

Centra serves global sales with unlimited currencies, price lists and warehouses, international tax and customs rules, and global shipping and options. Sell more with one single site tailored for every market: • Tailored product mix based on location and user. • Tailored content based on location and user • Language based on location and selection • Inventory levels based on ship-to location • Pricing and taxes based on ship-to location • Global, local and user-specific campaigns

Advanced multi-market features

Keep all stock and order information for multiple countries and platforms in one backend and pull data that is filtered by country. Run multiple stores from one backend with the possibility to filter out data per market. All markets can have different content etc.

Price lists

Separate price lists per territory or currency, support businesses with international wholesale relationships.

Native support for tax compliance

No extra fee when doing automated tax compliance for charging US sales tax with Avalara.

Route to the best PSP

Route payments based on location to optimize conversion. Use local PSP agreements for the best auth rates and lowest costs.

The payment methods your clients love

Combine payment methods like PayPal, Stripe, Adyen, Klarna and Qliro to offer the best converting payment method on every market. No extra commissions, no hidden fees.

Fallbacks

Add fallbacks for when one payment service goes down, or allow your customer to choose payment methods from different PSPs.

Challenge #3

Wholesale & B2B capabilities

Wholesale experience is a new competitive frontier for fashion brands. Shopify offers a product called wholesale, but it comes with fewer features than the B2B ordering apps that have been around for the past 10 years. If you want to move ahead with a wholesale strategy, it is a clear tell that you’ve outgrown your monolithic ecommerce platform.

Magento

Shopify Plus

Suitability for fashion products

Shopify Plus is a general B2B solution that is not geared for the business logic of fashion wholesale. It lacks support for project-like logic of a fashion business – seasonal collections, pre order, reorders etc.

Wholesale

Shopify Plus offers a bad wholesale experience. It only allows for wholesale pricing at a consistent and specific discount. No customization in pricing. Wholesale is not natively supported and limited in terms of price and vendor control. It still needs a separate store to run a full Wholesale Site which means more money spent.

Why brands migrate to Centra

With Centra, you also gain a fully digital wholesale platform out of the box to help your brand stand out from the competition. The built-in B2B portal for buyers, sales reps and agents, supports the full wholesale business logic for preorders and at-once orders.

Centra

B2C and B2B in one package

Centra addresses all the commerce needs of original brands, unlocking the full potential of B2B Wholesale, B2C Direct‑to‑Consumer and Marketplace sales in a one neat package. With Centra, you can build a wholesale process that mirrors your B2C sales. Centra offers all the B2B features most lifestyle brands would be looking for, such as: • 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

Digital showroom

Centra allows brands to digitize their wholesale with its out‑of‑the‑box digital, advanced, buyer-friendly Showroom where retailers can place pre‑orders, re‑orders, and orders on incoming stock. Centra’s digital showroom supports business logic for the wholesale business model, including pre-orders, re-orders, personalized pricing, campaigns and more.

Challenge #4

Native features vs plugins

Plugins and extensions offer a convenient way of expanding the functionality of your ecommerce platform, but native integrations are cheaper in the long run.

If you do not have a dedicated developer, be prepared to pay extra to hire developers working on your site 24/7. If you only need a simple site, this won't apply to you, but then you also have no reason to use Magento when simpler, more stable products are available.

	Shopify Plus	Magento	Centra
Features for fashion	Through apps/extensions	Through apps/extensions and native integrations (limited)	Native

There are four big problems with the app-based approach to achieving the basic functionality that all fashion brands need:

Apps or plugins are not equal to native functionality
There are things that simply can’t be achieved by Shopify’s apps – they can’t access specific data. Business logic that needs to be interconnected is turned into silos – the app needed for managing the product catalog doesn’t speak to the app used to manage inventory.
With Centra, fashion brands get a highly integrated feature set that covers all core needs, out of the box.
Apps raise security and stability concerns
Each app is basically another website inside the Shopify admin, which means you depend on many third-party developers to keep their sites up and running well, and keep the data secure.
Apps cost extra
Monolithic platforms might look cheap to start with, but with all the apps, payment transaction fees, FX markups, and costs per storefront, the cost can go very high.
Apps lead to a cumbersome user interface
Because the apps are siloed, non-native extensions, they are managed from different parts of the user interface. Simple processes that are achieved with a few simple clicks in Centra need multiple steps in multiple apps with Shopify.

Monolithic platforms like Shopify Plus or Magento direct you to apps in their marketplace even when it should be something natively offered by the platform.

Magento

Shopify Plus

Apps

Shopify allows merchants to extend the functionality of the store through apps. A typical fashion brand needs 30-60 apps, if the needs are complex, this number goes over 100. For someone not used to working in Shopify, this might sound like a good solution for adding core functionalities. Those familiar with the system know it is not – it costs extra, leads to clunky interface and raises security concerns.

Removing apps leads to messy code

Even if you deactivate and remove an app, the code is still present in your code base. If you don't have a strict way of removing code manually (which few have the competence to do) it will get messy after only a few apps are tested. To avoid it, it's best to start from scratch with a new Shopify setup if it's gone too far.

Slow improvements to core functionalities

Shopify is notoriously slow to make improvements to its core functionalities like Discounts, Customer Communication, Upsells etc. There are some limitations on promos and discounts. There is no way to use more than one discount code at a time.

Why brands migrate to Centra

Launching on Centra, original fashion brands get all the features they need, integrated in a tight package.

Centra

Challenge #5

Performance, scalability and stability impact on SEO and conversion

In terms of website design, the fashion industry has very unique needs. Ambitious brands need design freedom to build brand-authentic, pixel-perfect sites – without compromises or design limitations.

Magento

Speed

Magento is slow due to its outdated database architecture, and it usually takes more time to customize category and product description pages. Even with expensive best-in-class hardware, the platform performance can be an issue. Even with caching ebabled, poor coding can lead to unacceptable performance and user experiences. Merchants on Magento report poor performance and stability of the platform and various trading implications. These issues have impacted the reputation of the platform.

Mobile performance

Magento’s mobile performance is bad unless you go headless and turn in to AMP or PWA

Various stability issues

Magento had a really poor start due to a huge amount of bugs and stability issues. Today, the platform is far more stable, but there are still some common issues with the system, including countless version upgrades, huge expense in development costs, poor performance and stability and various trading implications.

SEO

Although there’s a lot of work that needs to be done from the out-of-the-box setup, Magento provides some flexibility from an SEO perspective.

Shopify Plus

It is worth noting that you do have full control over the URLs If you use Shopify in a headless manner, as the platform isn’t powering the front end. It also gives you access to the server so you can implement things like visual merchandising solutions without just relying on JavaScript for the product grid.

Why brands migrate to Centra

If your store runs slow, it is a telling sign to upgrade your setup to Centra – a future-proof headless platform built for speed and growth.

Centra

Fast everywhere

Centra’s distributed model and NOSQL databases ensure fast site load times, globally, wherever your customers are located. Deploy your site to the edge to give your customers the same super-fast experience globally, no exceptions.

Scalable

Faster sites convert better. Centra comes with a 99.9% availability guarantee, without caveats. This covers new collection release days, Black Friday and flash sales. You can use static page generators like Netlify or Gatsby.js to achieve the fastest possible time to first byte.

Headless out of the box

Centra does not hamstring your SEO efforts as the back end is independent of the front end. It’s headless out of the box so you can apply mobile-friendly SEO technologies like AMP and PWA from the get-go.

Unlimited site visitors and order volumes

Centra is engineered from the ground up for high site loads, driven by bots during a limited edition drop or flash sale.

Proven stability

Centra is monitored 24/7 to deliver 99.9%+ uptime – also during peak seasons and flash sales.

Regular updates

Every day we improve functionality and performance, and you get the latest version of Centra Commerce every second week.

Truly SaaS

Centra Commerce is “Software-as-a-Service”, delivered from the cloud, and Centra makes sure everything is running smoothly.

Challenge #6

Support

Fast and responsive support is, apart from the features and capabilities, an important factor impacting how fast brands can get their stores up and running.

Magento

Support

Customer Support is not as fast or responsive as one might hope especially considering the amounts the clients are paying. There is no easy way to contact Magento to get support. Magento Commerce clients get only developer support, which doesn’t have the best reputation on the market. You can choose to work with the Magento Enterprise Consulting Group (ECG), however, this comes with a big price tag.

Community

Magento has strong community support.

Shopify Plus

Support

Shopify Plus offers support via phone, email or live chat, reducing the on-going support costs with your agency. For the $2k per month license fee, merchants get access to a dedicated 24/7 account management function. The team helps handle technical issues, general platform-related questions, fix bugs, provide guidance around marketing and conversion rate optimization and pretty much anything else. Although you’ll still need developers to implement changes and for front-end work, the support would cover what a merchant would usually pay for from a development support / SLA perspective. It’s advised that you still have a development team, there is no overhead around a support retainer that you would with Magento.

Apps and themes have limited support

Many themes and plugins are offered by third parties who are under no obligation to release timely updates for the themes or plugins you use. This is part of the compromise you make when deciding to launch on Shopify. Unless the budget is exceptionally tight, it is often better to get a website developed properly from the get-go.

Support scales badly

Very limited service and lacking personal touch.

Centra

Challenge #7

Cost of ownership

The combined cost of frontend and backend development and maintenance, as well as hosting and other fees (like payment processing) may exceed the initially projected cost of launching on a legacy monolithic or generic headless platform.

Magento

Cheap to launch, expensive to maintain

The total cost of ownership for Magento can grow very high. This is partly because a great deal of technical expertise is required to modify, develop, troubleshoot and maintain the platform.

Key features for fashion not included

Additional cost associated with building and setting up custom features needed to support operating a global fashion and lifestyle store.

Time-intensive development

Magento requires constant care and development due to its performance issues. Because Magento is a very popular platform, it is more open to attacks. Security updates, however, need to be done regularly by an in-house or outsourced IT team.

Modules cost extra

The modules cost extra money on top of the monthly fee. Magento is not as widely used as some other ecommerce CMSs. This caused there to be fewer theme developers and also made the premium themes to be quite expensive.

TCO

A big part of the cost of ownership goes on maintenance, upgrades, infrastructure and not on development of new features and improving customer experience. Also, on top of the development cost you have to do your own QA since everything you develop is a custom development, so it requires separate testing which increases costs and extends the relapse dates. It takes 2 or 3 times longer to develop new features vs other platform tools

Shopify Plus

Cheap to launch, expensive to maintain

When starting an online business, most brands choose Shopify. This approach allows brands to launch the store without paying through the nose. However, it also makes it difficult to build your brand’s global presence, and makes it hard to grow fast.

Key features for fashion not included

Additional cost associated with building and setting up custom features needed to support operating a global fashion and lifestyle store.

Apps cost extra

Shopify’s stock answer for solving any problem is "there is an app for that". The problem with that approach is your costs go up and your performance goes down. The more apps you add to solve these problems the slower your site gets, negatively impacting your consumer's experience. Shopify Plus pushes apps to drive their revenue which is on top of the already lofty monthly fees.

Additional transaction fees

Shopify merchants pay additional transaction fees on top of credit card processing rates if they use a provider other than Shopify Payments. The transaction fees range from 2% (on Shopify Basic) to 0.5% (on Shopify Advanced).

Why brands migrate to Centra

With 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.

Centra

No transaction fees

Running Centra, you can use any payment processor – independently for each market. The platform never charges additional transaction fees no matter which credit card processing provider works best for your business.

Fashion-centric features out of the box

Centra offers all features global fashion brands need out of the box – spend money on a great custom design and the features that differentiate your brand.

Competitive pricing

Centra’s pricing is comparable to Shopify Plus, but lower than the average Magento Commerce license or Salesforce annual cost. The headless architecture entails costs associated with the front-end technologies, but the total cost of ownership is comparable with its big-name competitors.

Challenge #8

Analytics and reporting

Commerce needs reports to give you the means to review your store's recent activity, get insight into your visitors, analyze your online store speed, and analyze your store's transactions.

Magento has historically been bad at reporting, even with third-party modules.

A few years ago, Magento acquired RJMetrics (now Magento BI), which is a fairly strong solution that adds a lot of value to merchants. Magento BI is essentially a data warehouse and you can also pull in data from other systems and sources, which is really powerful.

Magento

The out-of-the-box Shopify reporting is much better. Although it doesn’t cover everything, Shopify has a much nicer and cleaner reporting interface and covers all of the core metrics, as well as having a really good API to support this. You can then use third party solutions like Glew or Daasity or build out your own data warehouse / bespoke reporting for broader business reporting.

Shopify Plus

Why brands migrate to Centra

Centra has an intuitive dashboard, giving an instant overview of sales. It is possible to analyze data through numerous different dimensions and time periods. The dashboard is powered by a high-speed database, making working in it fast and intuitive.

Centra has extensive report generation capabilities. Report generation methods exist to analyze virtually any part of the business data stored in Centra. Reports can be exported as csv or xlsx files and can be set to be automatically generated at set times or intervals and emails can be automatically sent once a report is generated.

Centra is your complete digital control room, giving you analytics and reporting modules for a detailed overview of your business performance.

Centra

Fashion-centric reporting capabilities

Centra provides fashion-specific reporting capabilities, e.g., sales by size, color, attributes from the size chart and some general sales reports. Detailed reporting on product performance, sales, customers and other areas.

Detailed reports for re-orders and pre-orders

Reporting by collection, wholesale reports for re-orders and pre-orders

Business analytics

Centra stores all data in one place. This allows you to create extensive reports or move data to your BI solution.

Demand forecasting

Centra allows you to aggregate demand, create forecasts and place orders to your suppliers with minimal overstock risk.

Inventory reporting and prediction

Predict how much safety stock you’ll need to avoid over-ordering, or worse, overselling. This can be especially important in Q4 and during times of unexpected demand fluctuations. Centra connects to your inventory channels and can support a merchant-fulfilled strategy. This can give you more autonomy and control over order management operations.

Minimize capital needs

With Centra, you can take orders on incoming stock before it arrives at your warehouse, to minimize working capital needs.

Challenge #9

Bundling, promotions and upselling features

Centra has a really impressive set of features for trading and also supporting marketing activity.

Magento

Bad promotions feature

Limited promotion capabilities. For example, there is no possibility to implement Buy Two X and Get Y Free promotions. It's also difficult to do promotions other than % and flat $ discount. Magento only allows you to do “Buy 2 of the same and Get Y (of the same) free” kind of promos. Also you can't offer different discounts for different products with the same voucher code. Creating other seemingly simple promotions can be very difficult as the platform was clearly built by developers for developers, not by developers for marketers/merchandisers. This limitation leads to a lot of time being inefficiently spent testing these promotions instead of other more valuable work.

Shopify Plus

Centra

Challenge #10

Suitability for fashion and lifestyle products

Most popular monolithic platforms don’t support the business logic and complexity of fashion lifestyle commerce. They are good if you want to launch fast without paying much, but then hold back your growth by not offering core, fashion-specific functionalities.

	Shopify Plus	Magento	Centra
Features for fashion	Through apps/extensions	Through apps/extensions and native integrations (limited)	Native

Shopify Plus

Variants

By design, Shopify Plus supports only 100 variations on a single product and lacks fashion-specific features. This is a design decision that was made years ago with the initial coding of the Shopify platform. To change this, Shopify would have to completely change the architecture the stores are built on. The 100 variant limit is too restrictive for certain complex fashion products (bras, trousers, shirts). Even slightly complex product offerings will require you to pay additional fees to 3rd parties for custom builds. As a result, it’s cumbersome to work with many sizes as each size becomes a separate row in all admin UI and reports.

Order editing

Until recently, Shopify Plus offered no way to edit an order. This has changed now, but there are still limitations.

Advanced Product Options

Adding additional images into products with multiple variants doesn't exist out of the box. You have to install apps to get some of this done.

Order management

Order management system is fairly basic.

PIM

What brands running on Shopify end up doing is usually investing in a PIM system, either as a Shopify extension, or more commonly stand-alone (the extensions offered still have many limitations).

Magento

Launching a second brand

Like most legacy monolithic commerce platforms, Magento doesn’t support the house-of-brand fashion store approach. Launching a second brand basically requires a second storefront, making you pay twice for everything and have to maintain twice as many integrations.

Bad handling of variants

When changing prices, you need to enter every SKU (all sizes within all colors) to make updates.

Why brands migrate to Centra

Centra is built for original fashion and lifestyle brands, and supports complex lifestyle products. Centra makes handling styles, colors and sizes, different product displays, collections and drops easy.

Supported by Centra, fashion brands can focus on growing their fan base and global expansion rather than on maintaining complex technology. The features and roadmap are 100% designed for the needs of brands with global ambitions and no retailers influence the prioritization of features.

Centra

Variants

Centra supports multiple styles, colors, sizes, collections and more – all the complex logic of fashion products. Products can be managed as variations, in three levels. The first level represents a product and the second a variation of that product. The third level represents the size of the variation and is used to simplify product management for brands dealing with products such as clothes or shoes.

Order editing

A merchant on Centra could just update the size of the product on the order inside their control panel.

Native fashion-centric features out of the box

No need to install and pay for advanced third-party extensions. Centra comes with all the features you need to do fashion commerce at scale.

Direct-to-Consumer and Digital Wholesale modules

Direct-to-consumer, Wholesale, Orders, Inventory and Payments in one platform Manage the core aspects of your business from one place. Direct-to-consumer, Wholesale, Orders, Inventory, Payments and more.

Lightweight PIM for complex lifestyle products

Centra offers a lightweight PIM for fashion and lifestyle products with unlimited variants, and supports the specificity of fashion commerce.

Social media integration for influencer sales

Create pre-made carts for influencers and put buy buttons on blogs. Built-in affiliate tracking.

Support for the house-of-brands business model

With Centra, launching a second brand is as simple as setting up a new store. All backend integrations can be used by both the stores, helping you achieve synergy in operations.

Bundles

Centra supports all types of fashion bundles out of the box.

Eliminate manual processes

Centra’s order management system provides automation wherever possible, from calculating shipping costs, to sending fulfillment requests.

Multi-currency, cross-border sales and tax handling

Facilitate cross-border ecommerce orders and payments from any country and currency type.

Omnichannel order management

Managing inventory across different channels is the third largest challenge for supply chain executives. Keeping track of the volume, velocity, and fulfillment of omnichannel orders will bottleneck your business if you haven’t set the right foundations for scalable growth. With Centra’s OMS, you can fulfill customer needs across all of the ecommerce platforms and sales channels you’d expect, including your website or ecommerce store, marketplaces, or whatever primary sales channel you sell on.

Challenge #11

Omnichannel capabilities

Brands want to sell to consumers and retailers across channels, countries and marketplaces to scale globally.

Magento

Shopify Plus

Why brands migrate to Centra

With Centra, you can sell through distributors, agents, resellers, marketplaces, and their direct-to-consumer websites – all from a single platform.

Centra

Marketplaces and beyond

Connect marketplaces with APIs. Export and import order data from B2B and B2C marketplaces and display your products in Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Etsy and more. Open APIs enable listing products on marketplaces and receiving orders back into the standard order flow.

OMS integration with company systems

Centra OMS can fulfill customer needs across all of the ecommerce platforms and sales channels you’d expect, including your website or ecommerce store, marketplaces, or whatever primary sales channel you sell on • See physical store item availability in online store • Buy in online store, ship from own physical store • Buy in own physical store, fulfill from online store • Return item bought in online store to own physical store • Buy in online store, pick up in own physical store

Social sales tools

Increase brand awareness and drive sales on the most popular social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, TikTok and more.

Embedded selling

Let your influencer partners insert a Buy Button and on-page full checkout with a single line of code.

You’re in good company

International fashion brands choose Centra as the only platform that fully understands the needs and complex business logic of fashion commerce.

Join the vanguard of original brands that scale fast and expand on new markets without the limitations imposed by their legacy ecommerce platforms. Centra have a very impressive portfolio of brands using their platform, including Nudie Jeans, Sandqvist, ETON, iDeal of Sweden and Norse Projects – with some of these being on the platform right from the start.