Centra: Best Shopify Plus alternative? vs A side‑by‑side comparison

Shopify checkout is locked down and rigid. You can customize a certain level of the checkout’s functionality and appearance but the theme-based system limits it.

Majority of the website themes are developed and overseen by third parties. It allows Shopify to offer more options to its customers in terms of website design. On the other hand, there are no standards as to how customer service is to be delivered. 

All data accessible using powerful and flexible APIs. You can replace components in an agile process and ensure platform extensibility with no technology vendor lock-in.

Centra is designed to work with a bespoke front end and an external CMS.

Centra offers direct API access rather than relying on cookie-cutter standard integrations.

Design flexibility with GraphQL API access to all data in Centra enables fast integration of any tool you need.

Centra’s Displays feature allows products to be presented differently in various channels or categories. A product can be presented in different ways in two different direct-to-consumer stores, or in different ways in the men’s and women’s departments of an online store.

Complete freedom of UX/UI design.

Centra can be used with common front-end technologies including Vue.js and React.js., and Gatsby.

With Centra, brands get a tightly integrated comprehensive set of features they need  – no need to install additional apps to build a setup that serves a specific purpose.

Centra's robust headless architecture enables design flexibility and localized branded merchandising. Brands get full control over the website's look and feel – from the landing page to the checkout.

You can use any CMS you want – Contentful, Storyblok, Prismic. Centra allows for a custom online experience crafted with a best-of-breed CMS, no templates baked into an ecommerce platform.

As a headless platform, Centra supports the use of any agency or software developers. 

If you want custom experiences for each market, you'll need to set up a separate store, which creates inventory sync issues, and impacts your reporting as you can’t see data from all stores in one view.

Also, if you want multiple currencies for any store, or choose products per region, you’ll need Shopify Markets.

Alternatively, you’ll set up another expansion store, but this requires lots of copying and pasting. But you can have one main store and only nine expansion stores. For any extra store you’ll pay $250.

Shopify Plus promotes using the platform’s native Shopify Payments gateway. The vendor charges you:credit card fees, and transaction fee for using another payment provider: 0.15-0.3%. 

You also pay currency conversion fees for accepting payments in other currencies 1-2% which makes selling in local currencies quite expensive using Shopify.

Shopify Plus does not natively support sharing data such as product information, prices, or promotions. This can cause issues, for instance, if you run a wholesale store – it means there’s no inventory synchronization and lots of redundant, manual work. You also can’t see data of all your stores in a single view.

Shopify lets you create unlimited online stores, but you can have only one brand per contract. This cost can add up if you have multiple brands and intend to have separate stores per brand. If you operate multiple brands, each will require a separate Shopify Plus contract.

Shopify Plus does not allow you to use multiple currencies unless you use Shopify Payments. However, Shopify Payments comes with extra cost and is available in 23 countries, excluding Norway and Poland. 

With Shopify Payments, all transactions are converted to the store's currency regardless of their currency of origin.

With Shopify Plus you can localize the checkout to a certain extent. For instance, the multi-currency option is tied to Shopify Payments, which is only available in certain countries. It’s not possible to use local price lists, local payment methods, etc. without multiple storefronts.

There is an extra fee, $250 per month,  for using Avalara for automated tax calculation.

If you have specific requirements for warehouse selection, click and collect and ship from the store, you may need third-party applications. In advanced setups, additional considerations like inventory sync maintenance and other specialized functionalities might require the integration of further third-party applications.

With Centra, you can launch your store globally or gradually localize it.

With Centra it’s possible to localize the checkout with local payment methods, price lists, currencies etc., without using multiple storefronts. 

Centra serves 100+ countries globally with one single site tailored for every market. The platform allows brands to offer different products and prices in different regions, independently of language and currency settings.

Centra is multilingual by design, so any information can be localized. Additionally, you can pick the best-converting payment option in every market.

With Centra, you can serve multiple markets, languages, currencies, price lists, warehouses, and users – without extra admin work and multiple storefronts.

All stock and order information for multiple countries and platforms in one backend and pull data that is filtered by country.

Multiple stores running from one back end with the possibility to filter out data per market. All markets can have different content etc.

With Centra, you can use separate price lists per territory or currency. It's perfect for businesses with global wholesale relationships.

Centra offers free automated tax calculation for charging US sales tax with Avalara.

With Centra you can route payments based on location to optimize conversion. You can get the best auth rates and lowest costs with local PSP agreements.

Centra allows you to combine payment methods like PayPal, Stripe, Adyen, Klarna, and Qliro to get the best conversion rate.

No extra commissions, no hidden fees.

With Centra, you can add fallbacks if one payment service goes down, or let your customer choose a payment method from different payment service providers.

Shopify Plus is a general platform, not well-suited for the business logic of fashion wholesale. It lacks support for seasonal collections, preorders, and delivery windows. 

Blended stores allow you to sell to both business and consumer customers. However, it’s hard to offer a different experience for B2B and D2C — any changes you make to themes or navigation using the theme editor apply to B2B and D2C customers. To differentiate this experience you’d need to change the code.

You can reorder products. 

With Shopify Plus orders are limited to 500 line items – product/variant. 

In Shopify Plus, card payments are preferred over invoicing.

Dedicated stores operate independently from other stores under the same Shopify Plus account, which makes managing them complex and expensive – each store requires its own resources, themes, and settings It also results in duplicate effort or managing product catalogs, promotions, and marketing strategies across each store.

With blended stores B2B and DTC, customers have the same shipping settings and rates. To offer different options for B2B and DTC customers, you’d need to open a separate dedicated store. 

With Shopify Plus it’s possible to pay via invoices, however, it’s tricky if you sell in domestic currency and not opting for card payment. Creating and managing invoices isn’t as smooth and user-friendly as desired for the buyers and the store admins.

Shopify Plus recommends customers use “draft orders'' for invoicing. This involves manual work and can be time-consuming, especially for businesses that handle a large order volume. 

B2B Wholesale, B2C direct‑to‑consumer and in one neat package.

With Centra, you can build a wholesale process that mirrors your B2C sales. You get ​​D2C-like features for wholesale. 

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

Centra lets brands digitize wholesale with a comprehensive, buyer-friendly Showroom with individual pricing, global tax calculations, and shipping management. Retailers can place orders via desktop, tablet, and mobile via the Showroom, including preorders, reorders, and orders on incoming stock.

With Centra you can find and invite new retailers globally to visit your beautiful digital Showroom, browse online lookbooks and place orders based on the preferred delivery window.

With Centra’s real-time, collaborative Showroom environment, you can work on multiple orders with multiple buyers simultaneously.

Use Centra’s clever automated back end and integrate with other IT systems to eliminate manual file transfers.

You can move small‑scale retailers to self‑service ordering and reordering to save time for both parties.

Centra lets you define different prices for the same products in different delivery times to adjust to fashion trends, manage excess inventory and production capacity.

You can separate products based on the stock type of delivery window, distinguishing between immediate availability and future production.

Centra helps you control all orders on existing and incoming future inventory, with corresponding delivery windows.

You can use linesheet templates to make placing orders and managing accounts easier for B2B buyers.

Using Shopify Plus apps, merchants can extend their store's functionality. It is not uncommon for fashion brands to use 30-60 apps, but in more complex sites, this number can exceed 100.

While adding apps can be easy, integrating and synchronizing them quickly becomes an issue. Since most apps are paid, costs start to rise, and support becomes patchy since it’s all done individually with each app developer.

Despite deactivating and removing an app, the code remains 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.

Shopify Plus offers some SEO capabilities out-of-the-box, which require work to prevent some issues (e.g. indexation of dynamic pages etc), but it's restricted.

It's hard to customize URLs.

With Centra being a "Software-as-a-Service", you can scale it easily and make sure it's always running at its best.

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

Wirth Shopify Plus, brands get 24/7 support via live chat, email, phone support, and community.

You also get dedicated support through the merchant success program.

Centra offers premium support known for its reliability and availability. Our support hotline is always available to answer any questions. 

The support covers platform implementation and maintenance, updates, client onboarding, data migration, and more, to make sure you get up to speed quickly. 

You’ll get practical advice on the features and functionalities of Centra that suit your fashion brand’s use cases.

Centra’s customer success managers offer ecommerce expertise to assist you at each step, helping migrate your store to a new platform or start from scratch. You’ll set business goals to grow your business with the support of experienced professionals.

With Centra’s experienced tech team you’ll get technical partners that assist you through migration, deployment, and upgrades. No external hires required. 

Centra also gives brands onboarding teams that will walk you through the ins and outs of the platform so you can get the most out of it.

You get access to a support center, our step-by-step guides and tutorials, and product updates to learn how to make Centra work for you. Centra also offers detailed documentation written by developers for developers.

Built for mid-size retailers and brands, Shopify Plus comes with a hefty price tag. And the costs increase as you add third-party apps, transaction fees, and conversion fees for using multiple currencies.

However, it also makes it difficult to build your brand’s global presence and makes it hard to grow fast.

With Shopify Plus there are additional costs associated with adding apps that let you customize the platform to support operating a global fashion and lifestyle store.

Platform fees include your main store and nine expansion stores. You'll pay $250 USD per store per month for additional stores, or a revenue share. Using Shopify Markets you’ll also need to pay transaction fees and conversion fees.

Shopify Plus offers more built-in features and capabilities than the standard version. However, to achieve a desired level of customization and expand functionalities you’ll need to invest in third-party apps.

Shopify Plus pushes apps to drive their revenue which is on top of the already lofty monthly fees.

Shopify Plus merchants pay additional transaction fees on top of credit card processing rates if they use a provider other than Shopify Payments. 

Centra allows brands to use any payment processor – independently for each market.

The platform never charges additional transaction fees no matter which credit card processing provider you use.

Centra comes with all the functionalities that international fashion brands need already built in – saving you money and allowing you to focus on your brand's design and unique features.

It's crucial to consider all aspects of costs when comparing TCO between platforms, including plugins, third-party consultants, and FX fees.

Centra has transparent pricing without hidden transaction or exchange fees.

Centra has native core features for fashion and lifestyle brands, so you won't need to pay extra and manage countless add-ons to achieve core non-customer facing functionality.

As a headless platform, Centra gives you the freedom to create the best possible customer experience. You will instead spend your resources together with front-end agencies on creating a great and distinct brand and customer experience.

Making upsells with Shopify Plus is difficult.  For instance, the platform enables fixed bundles and multipacks through the Bundles app. More advanced options are available via third-party apps. 

Ok capabilities out of the box and flexibility to customize with custom coding. 

Shopify Plus enables using discounts via features called Shopify Functions. You can enable gift cards by using the API.

In the case of B2B orders, you need to contact Shopify Plus support to activate discounts and gift certificates. 

Centra offers advanced promotions. You get high flexibility in terms of pricing, stock, discounts, inheriting of attributes etc.

The built-in bundles cover all fashion and lifestyle use cases.

Centra features an advanced discounting engine to set up any discount you want using vouchers and campaigns.

Shopify Plus has a clean reporting interface, covers the core metrics, and has a good API to support this. It offers more in-depth analytics, such as data on customer behavior, sales performance, and inventory levels. Shopify Plus also supports customizable dashboards. 

Analytics, however, isn't suitable for fashion or lifestyle businesses. It doesn't let you see how different collections do and which products are selling best and worst within collections.

Analytics integrations are a little tricky unless they are one of the built-in partners that Shopify supports.

Shopify Plus provides various useful reports, but if you run multiple stores, you won’t be able to view all stores combined. This makes it difficult to see your entire business performance. 

With Centra, you can generate reports specific to the fashion industry, such as sales by size, color, and the attributes of the size chart, and you can also generate general sales reports. It shows best-selling collections, items within those collections, and even sizes that are doing well.

Centra can create detailed reports about your products, sales, and other important areas.

Centra’s intuitive, flexible dashboards let you understand specific parts of your business, such as stores, currencies, or accounts. You can also see a complete picture of how your entire business is performing across all channels and markets.

Using Centra, you can aggregate demand, forecast, and order from suppliers with minimal overstock risk. 

Centra allows you to predict how much safety stock you'll need so you don't overorder, or worse, oversell. This is especially important in Q4 and during times of sudden 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.

Centra lets you take orders ahead of incoming stock so that working capital requirements can be minimized.

Shopify Plus supports only 100 variations on a single product and lacks fashion-specific features, such as size charts.

This limit makes it challenging to sell certain fashion products like bras, trousers, or shirts. Even slightly complex product offerings will require you to pay extra for third-party extensions. However, you’ll lose the convenience of native integrations as each size will become a separate row in the admin UI and reports. 

There’s no size chart localization, which can be problematic if you serve multiple geographies – clothing and shoe sizes can vary significantly between, for example,  the US, UK, and Europe.

Adding additional images into products with multiple variants doesn't come out of the box. You have to install apps to get some of this done. However, these apps and plugins vary greatly in quality and generate additional costs.

With Centra, you can create pre-made carts for influencers and put buy buttons on blogs. It also has built-in affiliate tracking.

Centra supports all types of fashion bundles by default.

You can group and organize products into categories to enhance the shopping experience. With collection-based merchandising, you can strategically display and promote these collections throughout your store. 

Centra uses size charts to maintain and display inventory levels. You can freely create multiple size charts and attach them to products in order to insert inventory level. 

Centra provides textual representations of the sizes and dimensions of fashion items, to give customers information about the fit and size of items before they buy. You can use those charts for back-end reference as well. 

Centra allows you to freely group products to create unique categories, showcase products based on a specific attribute, like material, design, or occasion. This allows brands to highlight their unique product offerings and selling points. 

Centra’s order management is suited for managing the lifecycle of each new fashion collection released, from preorders, reorders to end off-season and clearance sales. 

Centra uses customer feedback to shape its product roadmap – the product development follows best practices and know-how from top fashion brands on the market. 

Integrations are only possible through apps, e.g. POS, or third-party plugins.

It comes with all Shopify plans. The app lets you collect and manage customer data across different channels. It’s used for managing products, accepting payments, and interacting with customers. However, to get the most out of Shopify POS you need using Shopify Payments. Also, POS works well for in-store operations, but connecting it with online, wholesale, etc. becomes problematic.

You can use online channels, such as social media, and in-store if you use POS Pro – a paid app, $79/location/month, that allows brands to sell in person. 

The app lets you collect and manage customer data across different channels. 

POS Pro allows merchants to process orders and accept payments whether in-store, online, or through mobile devices. The app offers features like advanced inventory management, unlimited staff PINs, omnichannel selling capabilities, and more. 

However, the POS Pro is geared towards mobile and social media channels.

Shopify Plus lets you connect with various marketplaces and other social media channels. 

Centra allows brands to implement endless aisle functionality. This enables their customers to browse items that are out of stock or not sold in-store on a device, e.g. tablet or in-store kiosks. The customer can then decide to order and ship such items to their home or store.

Centra uses standard XML feeds as default, taking into account multi-market, multi-currency, multi-price list and multi-warehouse settings.

It’s possible to connect Centra with marketplaces via APIs. It enables you to export and import order data from B2B and B2C marketplaces and display your products in Amazon, FarFetch, ASOS and more.

Centra lets you expand your global audience across any social media platform and marketplace in the world.

Open APIs allow listing products on marketplaces and receiving orders back into the standard order flow.

Centra lets you tap into top ad networks like Facebook and Google to improve sales. 

You can integrate Centra with your accounting system, inventory manager, warehouses, customer service departments, and more. Centra lets you build third-party connections with open APIs if the integrations are not available.

Centra's order management lets you handle orders from multiple ecommerce channels, such as websites, ecommerce stores, marketplaces, wholesale, and whatever else you sell through. Centra uses clever allocation rules to fulfill orders while helping with store restocking and avoiding overselling.

With Centra, you can employ popular social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok to improve brand awareness and increase your sales.

Brand’s influencers can embed a “buy now” button and add checkout on their pages with a single line of code.

Centra’s omnichannel capabilities allow brands to create a seamless shopping experience, merging the online and offline worlds. Brands can sell products directly to customers online, via wholesale to retailers, via marketplaces, via social media, via their own stores. 

With Centra, brands can offer:

• Endless aisles

• Click and collect

• Buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) 

• Buy online, ship to store (BOSS) 

• Buy online, return in store (BORIS)

Shopify Plus order management system is designed primarily for managing orders within a single store.

It also lacks the enterprise-level functionality that a dedicated OMS offers. 

If you run multiple stores, for wholesale or for different regions, order management is harder since orders, inventory, and sales aren't synced.

Shopify Plus offers access to Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN) – a 3PL logistics solution. This app lets you manage your inventory and fulfill orders. 

The pricing depends on the fulfillment and logistics services you use, but it might be difficult to estimate it upfront. All the services are for US-based brands only.

Advanced distributed OMS capabilities are only possible through third-party integrations e.g. Deck Commerce.

Shopify Plus has built-in inventory management. Advanced features such as batch tracking or multi-location inventory management aren't included by default and may require third-party apps or custom development.

With Shopify Plus, you can access all orders, by only store by store, so you don’t get a view of all orders in one place.

You can set up multiple locations in Shopify Plus stores to track inventory and fulfill orders. However, the number of locations depends on the plan.

You can split an order if one item in the request is out of stock so the rest can be delivered quickly to customers.

Centra specifically handles warehouse locations with uncertain stock levels, such as brick-and-mortar stores. When allocating to those types of warehouses, Centra can do a safety allocation at a central warehouse to ensure the selected products are available. 

Third-party stock owned by regional distributors and retailers can be easily integrated into Centra and used to fulfill orders according to the configured allocation. 

Centra helps you optimize fulfillment across multiple channels, including wholesale and direct-to-consumer, from a single admin panel. You can handle complex scenarios such as split orders, backorders, and multi-channel inventory. You can also use built-in ERP for inventory replenishment, keep accurate inventory levels, and automate key processes.   

Order data in Centra is synchronized to integrated systems such as warehouses, TA/freight systems and payment service providers in real-time. This allows for instant viewing of shipments, return tracking numbers and refunding of orders without leaving Centra.

With Centra you can automate order routing, order splitting, shipping, inventory forecasting, reordering, and inventory management.

Centra gives you a real-time look at products, inventory, returns, and processes in a single view covering all stores, regions, and channels such as DTC and wholesale. All commerce data is stored in one place and managed from a single admin panel.

You can route products intelligently to the perfect location. Centra lets you optimize space usage in click-and-collect shipments and handle returns to simplify inventory replenishment across your stores and warehouses.

Centra helps you reduce overselling risks by making sure no backorders happen and you never sell more than there is in stock.