This article was last updated and validated August 2023
Shopify vs Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Centra
Ecommerce has advanced. Design freedom and agility have become the backbone of every successful ecommerce fashion and lifestyle brand strategy.
How do brands score Centra on G2?
See how Centra compares to Shopify and Salesforce Commerce Cloud, below
Salesforce Commerce Cloud | Shopify | Centra | |
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Meets requirements | 8.6 | 8.7 | 9.0 |
Ease of use | 8.2 | 8.9 | 9.0 |
Ease of setup | 7.3 | 8.8 | 8.5 |
Ease of admin | 7.9 | 8.9 | 9.1 |
Quality of support | 8.2 | 8.4 | 9.2 |
Ease of doing business with | 8.3 | 8.8 | 9.6 |
Product direction | 8.2 | 8.7 | 9.7 |
Running a fashion brand? Level up your game with the perfect tool of the trade!
Choosing the most suitable ecommerce platform is key to your brand’s global success. Running a fashion or lifestyle brand on a monolithic ecommerce platform is likely to limit your brand's growth. Most leading monolithic SaaS platforms can’t handle the business logic and intricacy of modern lifestyle commerce.
However, you can unlock your brand's full potential with the right technology. It's best to opt for a platform that allows you to scale fast, understands your industry's needs, and offers all the key features out of the box.
The big picture
Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Salesforce CC) and Shopify are well-known and respected platforms. Salesforce CC is an all-in-one enterprise ecommerce platform for companies with the time and resources to maximize Salesforce's potential. On the other hand, Shopify is a well-rounded platform for small-scale retailers looking to launch an online store quickly, with no tech skills required.
However, the design, intended industry focus, and ability to support global growth of both platforms highlight their limitations, particularly in addressing the challenges faced by modern fashi.on and lifestyle brands.
Shopify | Salesforce Commerce Cloud | Centra | |
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Localization |
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Payment options |
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Omnichannel capabilities |
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Order management |
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The 13 challenges of fashion commerce
Modern, dynamic fashion brands face a variety of challenges when it comes to scalability, complexity, design freedom, internationalization, and suitability for their specific products.
They need ecommerce technology that will help them achieve their goals and expand their reach without restrictions on design or development.
Here we look at how popular platforms such as Shopify and Salesforce CC deal with these challenges, and how they compare with Centra's headless, fashion-focused approach.
The comparison does not include Shopify Plus. If you’re interested, check out our other comparisons.
Challenge #1
Shopify vs Salesforce CC vs Centra: Ease of use
Setting up a headless store and customizing it to your liking is a nuanced, costly and time-consuming project. Going with a platform that makes the whole process easier may initially sound like a great choice, but may negatively impact the customization and scalability going forward.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra continually enhances its user-friendly and intuitive back end. An expert UI/UX team designs the admin interface to simplify the day-to-day tasks of managing a brand. The user interface is designed to enhance productivity and let users access all necessary information in one place.
Challenge #2
Sopify vs Salesforce CC vs Centra: Design freedom and flexibility
For fashion ecommerce stores, flexibility and design freedom are critical as they allow you to craft on-brand, flawless sites without compromises or limitations. However, most ecommerce platforms don’t offer that, making it hard for brands to grow.
Shopify | Salesforce Commerce Cloud | Centra | |
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Fully headless, composable and API-first architecture | 🟡 | 🟡 | ✅ |
Why brands migrate to Centra
With Centra, you get a modern approach to software development: it’s API-first and composable. The platform is also compatible with MACH architecture.
With composable architecture, brands can build platforms that fit their needs by selecting best-of-breed integrations. The store can adapt seamlessly to technological advancements and changes in customer behavior. It's a great way to make sure the store stays relevant in the future and offers great customer experience. Thanks to the composable approach, you can customize your online experience both in terms of design and features without compromising on scalability.
Fashion brands with ambitious goals love Centra's API-first approach. The headless CMS most of Centra's clients use combines content marketing and sophisticated ecommerce to create a great front-end stack. Brands can customize their storefronts with the platform’s extensive API, without having to deal with the limitations of many well-known, monolithic ecommerce platforms.
Challenge #3
Shopify vs Salesforce CC vs Centra: Multi‑market and localization features
Localization is key to international sales success. Depending on the region, prices that are effective in one region may not be as effective in another. Besides language, payment methods matter too. Even different climate zones can affect when certain items sell better from place to place.
In order to do so, they need the freedom to offer different payment options and localized checkouts. Traditional monolithic commerce platforms make localizing and SEO harder. With popular ecommerce platforms, brands require building a separate storefront for each market.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra's native multi-store architecture lets you manage core data locally and globally across stores, making it perfect for brands with global reach as well as those looking to expand internationally.
Centra lets admins manage products at store level, at language level, or globally. You can use different product descriptions for each store based on the language, and the same images everywhere. You can apply this to categories, promotions, and customer management as well.
Challenge #4
Sopify vs Salesforce CC vs Centra: Wholesale
B2B commerce is evolving and is no longer the domain of wholesalers alone. Fashion and lifestyle brands are increasingly embracing wholesale operations to tap into new markets and drive B2B sales.
However, they need an ecommerce platform that meets the particular needs of wholesale operations and unique requirements of their niche industry.
Why brands migrate to Centra
The Centra wholesale module helps your brand have an edge over your competitors. The integrated B2B portal, designed for buyers and sales reps, supports wholesale business logic, including seasonal preorders, reorders, collections etc.
Centra's B2B module fills the functional gap commonly encountered by brands utilizing other platforms such as Shopify. Using this module, fashion brands can handle both B2C and B2B operations in one place.
It allows personalization and full control of the customer experience.
Challenge #5
Shopify vs Salesforce CC vs Centra: Native features vs plugins
Although plugins and extensions make it easy to expand your ecommerce platform's functionality, native integrations are cheaper and more reliable long-term. Apps are often an extra cost, often overlooked in TCO calculations, and require additional time and maintenance to work right with your platform. Also, too many plugins can destabilize your setup.
Shopify | Salesforce Commerce Cloud | Centra | |
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Features for fashion | Apps/extensions bought and downloaded from Shopify App Store. | Additional features available through Salesforce AppExchange Apps and other integrations developed and maintained by third-party Salesforce partners. | Native |
Why brands migrate to Centra
With Centra, you can take advantage of a wide range of native features, which distinguishes it from plugin-based platforms. This approach ensures excellent user experience and platform stability. You can integrate top-of-the-line services with Centra's API without redundancy or data silos.
Challenge #6
Shopify vs Salesforce CC vs Centra: Performance, scalability, stability, and SEO
Speed is critical to every aspect of your digital strategy, from visibility (SEO and SEM) to traffic, user experience, and conversions. The problem is that websites with many extensions and customized themes are not fast enough to rank well in search engine results pages (SERP).
Mobile SEO and performance are particularly important for fashion brands since most sales occur on mobile devices.
For greater control over SEO aspects of their websites, modern, ambitious brands opt for decoupled architectures.
In a recent study, Limesharp tested how fast products are added to carts in popular ecommerce platforms. While Centra showcases high performance, with an average add-to-cart time of 125ms, other platforms exhibit slower response times, as seen in the following examples:
• Shopify - 490ms
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud - 525ms
• Adobe Commerce Cloud 915ms
• SAP Hybris - 1.7 seconds
200ms is the ideal time for Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – a new responsiveness metric that falls under Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics for evaluating the quality of a web page experience in terms of responsiveness and user engagement.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra is a modern headless ecommerce platform built for speed and scalability.
Challenge #7
Shopify vs Salesforce CC vs Centra: Support
Customer support is essential in choosing the right platform. From around-the-clock guidance to a comprehensive resource library, finding reliable support can impact your store’s time-to-market, your brand's growth, revenue, and performance.
Why brands migrate to Centra
With Centra, brands can rely on experienced, high-touch support from migration, through implementation and onboarding to post-launch optimizations.
Challenge #8
Shopify vs Salesforce CC vs Centra: Cost of ownership
The total cost of ownership (TCO) assesses the financial impact of an investment by considering upfront expenses along with ongoing operational and maintenance costs associated with implementing and operating an ecommerce platform for a period of three to five years.
Operating costs constitute a significant portion, typically ranging from 40% to 60%, of the TCO, which highlights the importance of considering them from the outset to keep your budget under control.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra's extensive built-in fashion-centric features let you minimize the ongoing expenses associated with platform maintenance and ensure optimal performance during peak sales periods, ultimately reducing long-term costs.
Centra offers a low cost of ownership, free from hidden expenses or the need for third-party plugins and apps.
Challenge #9
Shopify vs Salesforce CC vs Centra: Analytics and reporting
Brands need to monitor their business performance, making it a must to have analytics and reporting capabilities built in to their ecommerce platform. This allows brands to spot growth opportunities, optimize inventory management, improve fulfillment processes, and make informed decisions to meet customer demands effectively.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra’s intuitive dashboard gives you an instant snapshot of your sales. You can analyze your store's performance in numerous different dimensions and over any time period you want. The dashboard runs on a high-speed database, making it easy to use, fast, and accurate.
Centra offers a wide range of reporting options. You can export reports as csv or xlsx files or have them auto-generated at set times or intervals. You'll get an email when the report is ready.
Centra’s analytics and reporting modules show you your business performance in detail with.
Challenge #10
Shopify vs Salesforce CC vs Centra: Bundling, promotions and upselling features
Leading ecommerce platforms usually offer bundles, promotions, and upselling to run successful campaigns. However, these functionalities can vary significantly across different platforms as regards their configuration and user friendliness.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra has all the features you’ll need for trading and also to support your marketing efforts. Centra's robust voucher engine integrates seamlessly with your CRM system, enabling accurate customer segmentation and targeted promotions.
Challenge #11
Shopify vs Salesforce CC vs Centra: Suitability for fashion and lifestyle products
Many popular monolithic ecommerce platforms lack the capability to effectively manage the business needs, nuances and challenges that come with fashion and lifestyle commerce. These platforms can be a good choice if you want a fast launch without straining your budget. But their lack of fundamental, fashion-specific features can hinder your growth.
Shopify | Salesforce Commerce Cloud | Centra | |
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Features for fashion | Through apps/extensions | Through apps/extensions and native integrations (limited) | Native |
Why brands migrate to Centra
Designed for original fashion and lifestyle brands, Centra supports complex lifestyle products by making it easy to handle styles, colors and sizes, and different product displays and drops.
Centra strikes a balance between simplicity in setup and flexibility. The platform is designed to handle multi-dimensional fashion products, so getting started is a walk in the park. In addition, the CMS and business logic are separated, so it's easier to develop websites.
Rather than maintaining ecommerce technology, fashion brands can focus on growing their customer base, catching up with global trends and going global. Centra’s features and roadmap are exclusively tailored to cater to the specific requirements of brands with global aspirations.
Challenge #12
Shopify vs Salesforce CC vs Centra: Omnichannel capabilities
Brands need to sell to consumers and retailers across channels, countries and marketplaces to be able to scale globally. Here is how the platforms address omnichannel capabilities enabling a boost to a brand’s growth.
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.
Challenge #13
Shopify vs Salesforce CC vs Centra: Order management
Fashion brands in ecommerce require efficient order management to operate smoothly. The challenges posed by geographically dispersed shoppers and a constantly expanding array of sales channels have enhanced the significance of order management in today's ecommerce landscape. Order management is becoming more complex and sophisticated as consumers demand faster, more flexible, and sustainable delivery methods.
That’s why brands need scalability and elasticity beyond what many monolithic platforms provide. In contrast, headless ecommerce platforms with advanced capabilities such as distributed order management (DOM) and overselling protection can fill this void.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra has strong native distributed order management capabilities. You get tools to automate order routing and splitting, shipping, inventory forecasting and management. With Centra, brands get robust wholesale features for preordering, reordering, and seasonal orders with delivery windows.
Centra allows you to integrate any third-party tool you use now or may use in the future. It means that you stay ahead of the game and can offer the experience modern customers want, with multiple flexible delivery and return options across the full range of channels. Thanks to that you can ship orders quickly with short lead times, reducing your working capital needs and increasing profits.
You’re in good company
Global 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 have grown fast and conquered new markets without limitations. Trust Centra’s impressive portfolio of brands: Nudie Jeans, Sandqvist, Eton, IDEAL OF SWEDEN, and Norse Projects – some of whom have been on the platform from the very beginning.