Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Centra: A side‑by‑side comparison
Ecommerce has advanced. The design freedom and agility are more important than ever before, allowing brands to express their uniqueness and the character of the brand are crucial in the modern ecommerce strategy.

How do brands score Centra on G2?
See how Centra compares to Shopify and WooCommerce, below
WooCommerce | Shopify | Centra | |
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Meets Requirements | 8.8 | 8.7 | 9.1 |
Ease of Use | 8.5 | 8.8 | 9.0 |
Ease of Setup | 8.3 | 8.8 | 8.3 |
Ease of Admin | 8.5 | 8.8 | 9.1 |
Quality of Support | 7.5 | 8.4 | 9.1 |
Ease of Doing Business With | 8.5 | 8.8 | 9.7 |
Product Direction | 8.5 | 8.7 | 9.5 |
The evolution of commerce platforms
With a variety of different ecommerce technology and thousands of platforms it’s hard to find a perfect fit that will enable your business to achieve your goals. We hope this comparison page will help you understand the key differences between Shopify, WooCommerce and Centra, and choose the right platform for scaling your fashion and lifestyle brand globally.
This comparison does not cover Shopify Plus. If you’re interested to learn how this platform fares about the leading e-commerce systems, check our other comparisons.
Running a fashion brand? Pick an industry‑specific platform!
To successfully run a global fashion brand, you need a platform that understands the complexity of your niche and unlocks your growth potential. A platform that is ready to deliver the desired customer experience for your customers without the need for additional software, apps, or development.

At a glance
While there are many ecommerce platforms on the market, WooCommerce and Shopify are great options for each business looking to foray into ecommerce on a limited budget. This comparison will take a closer look at how these platforms are built, which industries they serve best, how they support growth, and how they solve the challenges of the next-generation fashion and lifestyle brands.
WooCommerce | Shopify | Centra | |
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Powerful vs. ease of use |
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Wholesale vs. direct-to- consumer |
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Single vs. multi-market |
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Custom design/dev vs. closed templates |
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Payment options |
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Hosting |
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Automatic updates vs versions |
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The 12 challenges of fashion commerce
To scale fast and grow internationally, dynamic fashion brands need an ecommerce technology that will unleash their full potential instead of imposing limitations. Modern business requires a platform that will be a solution for a variety of challenges. Let’s evaluate how different ecommerce technology approaches scalability, complexity, design freedom, internationalization, and suitability for selling fashion and lifestyle products.

Challenge #1
Ease of use
While easy to launch, platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce make it hard to deliver a unique experience to your buyers. Their limitations in the case of industry-specific business logic increase the need for developers working on the platform 24/7 and ensuring the ecommerce platform works.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra’s clean, easy-to-use backend is constantly developed and improved. The powerful admin interface is created by a dedicated team of UI/UX experts to make the daily work of managing a brand as intuitive as possible, while keeping up to date with changing conditions.
The guiding principle in Centra’s user interface design is to enable administrators to do as much as possible, as fast as possible.
Challenge #2
Design freedom and flexibility
In terms of website design, the fashion industry has very unique needs. Original brands need the freedom to express their identity, character and message – without compromises or limitations.
Design freedom means empowering editors with a full-scale modular CMS mixing content marketing and shop capabilities. This modern approach may not be easy to achieve through some types of ecommerce technology.
Agility is key to getting ahead of the competition. Each new feature helps brands to reinforce their position on the market. That’s why it’s so important to choose an ecommerce platform that’s flexible.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra represents a modern software development approach: microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, and headless (MACH). It offers some performance and growth benefits that are impossible to achieve otherwise. MACH architecture ensures a complete freedom in shaping the store, both feature-wise and design-wise without compromising on performance or scalability.
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 #3
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 require different customer journeys.
Offering a localized website and local payment methods can often increase conversion rates by over 10%, and the best local shipping options can often add another 10% to that figure.
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 to things like category management, promotions, customer management, etc.
Challenge #4
Wholesale
Wholesale experience is a new competitive frontier for fashion brands. It requires a solution that is built with a specific business logic. Modern brands' goal is to design a unique B2B experience for their customers and they need proper tools.
Why brands migrate to Centra?
With Centra, you 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. It allows personalization and full control of customers’ experience.
Challenge #5
Native features vs plugins
Apps and plugins are an easy way of adding new features to an ecommerce platform, but native integrations are more stable and cheaper in the long run.
Extensions are often extra paid, require separate maintenance and support. Overload of plugins can destabilize your platform and cause extentions conflicts.
Shopify | WooCommerce | Centra | |
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Features for fashion | Through apps/extensions | Through apps/extensions and native integrations (limited) | Native |
Why brands migrate to Centra?
Centra chooses to offer a comprehensive set of native features out-of-the-box instead of being a modular, plugin-based platform. This approach ensures the best user experience and stable performance of the platform.
Challenge #6
SEO, performance, scalability and stability
Faster store means better SEO and more sales – it's common knowledge today. Because most SEO is happening on the front end, ambitious ecommerce stores need a decoupled architecture to gain fuller control of the SEO aspects of the website.
Website speed impacts the entire digital strategy, from visibility (SEO and SEM), through traffic, the user experience, and ultimately, conversions and revenue. This directly results from Google’s growing focus on speed. Stores running on bloated monolithic commerce platforms with customized themes and many extensions lack the speed you need to rank high in SERP.
Also, most sales in fashion ecommerce happen on mobile devices, which makes mobile SEO and performance super important for fashion brands.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Your store will never run slow on Centra setup. It’s a future-proof headless platform built for speed and growth.
Challenge #7
Support
Fast and responsive support is, apart from the features and capabilities, an important factor impacting the store’s time-to-market, overall performance and spendings.
Challenge #8
Cost of ownership
The total cost of ownership (TCO) estimation lets you examine the financial impact of the investment, by combining the initial spend with operational costs over 3-5 years. Depending on the platform type, operational expenses can make up about 40%-60% of the TCO. That indicates how important it is to consider them from the start to avoid strain on the budget.
Why brands migrate to Centra
With many industry specific features offered by default, Centra significantly reduces the long-term cost of maintaining the platform and ensuring its stable, good performance in peak sale periods. Centra is the most affordable e-commerce platform for fashion and lifestyle brands, without hidden costs and the need to acquire additional plugins or third-party solutions.
Challenge #9
Analytics and reporting
In the heart of every successful ecommerce store is the process of discovering, interpreting, and communicating data patterns related to business. Platforms offer analytics that helps measure user activity, performance, and return of investment and find customer behavior patterns.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra has a user-friendly dashboard, giving an instant and clear overview of sales. You can analyze the performance of your store through numerous different dimensions and over any user-selectable time. Centra’s analytics is powered by a high-speed database, making it fast, accurate, and intuitive.
Centra has extensive and highly-customizable report generation capabilities. You can choose from a variety of existing report generation methods to analyze any part of the business data stored in Centra. Reports can be exported as csv or xlsx files. They can be set to be automatically generated at set times or intervals. You will be notified automatically by email once a report is generated.
Challenge #10
Bundling, promotions and upselling features
In ecommerce, product bundling, promotions and upselling are a must have. The more freedom you have when it comes to marketing - the better sales can be expected. Centra is built to enable any type of offers that you believe have the biggest potential for your store.
Challenge #11
Suitability for fashion and lifestyle products
Implementing industry-specific business logic during ecommerce platform development allowed us to create a perfect-fit solution that’s ready out-of-the-box. You won’t have to buy other plugins/extensions while paying for unnecessary features developed for another industry.
Shopify | WooCommerce | Centra | |
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Features for fashion | Through apps/extensions | Through apps/extensions and native integrations (limited) | Native |
Why brands migrate to Centra?
Centra is built to power original fashion and lifestyle brands, and supports complex lifestyle products. Handling styles, colors and sizes, different product displays, collections and drops has never been easier.
With Centra, fashion brands can maintain their focus on growing their fan base and global expansion instead of maintaining complex technology. More is coming, the features and roadmap are 100% designed to answer the needs of brands with global ambitions.
Challenge #12
Omnichannel capabilities
Sell to consumers and retailers across multiple channels, countries and marketplaces. Provide customers with a seamless shopping experience, whether they're shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, or social media.Scale your brand without any limits with the only headless ecommerce platform built for fashion & lifestyle.
Why brands migrate to Centra?
One platform, unlimited channels: distributors, agents, resellers, marketplaces and their own direct-to-consumer websites.
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, Douchebags and Norse Projects – with some of these being on the platform right from the start.
