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.

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How do brands score Centra on G2?

See how Centra compares to Shopify and WooCommerce, below

Read the full G2 comparison

	WooCommerce	Shopify	Centra
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.

Past

Legacy platforms

WooCommerce

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

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 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
Built for...	WooCommerce is built for retailers. Retailer-focused e-commerce product. Industry-specific adaptation needs to be added through plugins.	Built for retailers. For any entry-level retailer that wants an easy-to-get-started webshop.	Built for both established and aspiring brands that need a flexible platform that scales easily and will help them reach their global ambitions.
Powerful vs. ease of use	WooCommerce is built to be highly customizable. However, the platform is not as easy to use as Shopify. You’ll need to learn WordPress and manage hosting and updates by yourself. It requires more technical know-how from the users, especially when the brand starts to grow internationally.	Shopify is easy to learn. It's the easiest platform to set up of the three. It is a good, user-friendly solution for beginners and startups, but Shopify is limited in terms of scalability.	Built flexible and globally scalable. Centra is the right platform for power users. It requires an experienced e-commerce manager to make the most out of the system, but it becomes very powerful with the right person.
Wholesale vs. direct-to- consumer	WooCommerce B2B is only a simple B2C-style ecommerce plugin for business customers, not wholesale.	Shopify doesn’t enable wholesale. The wholesale sales channel is available only to stores on Shopify Plus.	Centra serves both wholesale and direct-to-consumer sales. It enables brands to handle all channels from one platform - both Wholesale B2B and Direct-to-Consumer B2C.
Single vs. multi-market	Requires a variety of plugins to allow you to sell internationally. For example, separate storefronts are needed per each market. Everything else like multi-currency or assigning the warehouses for each market requires additional plugins.	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.	Centra enables multiple markets, multiple currencies, multiple languages and prices and size charts depending on the location. You can have multiple storefronts with advanced internalization.
Custom design/dev vs. closed templates	Template-based design system with forty-nine highly customizable templates available. A good choice for businesses that don’t want to invest in on-brand design.	Template-based design system with one hundred themes available. A good choice for businesses that don’t want to invest in on-brand design.	Centra's headless architecture ensures complete freedom of design and enables the use of any CMS. Front end is fully separated from the back end, which allows agile development and choice of any technology.
Payment options	WooCommerce Payments available by default, multiple other payment options available via plugins.	Few fixed payment options with a focus on Shopify payments, which are tailored for the North American market. Extra fees when using other PSPs.	Centra supports over 200+ local payment methods through off-the-shelf integrations with PSPs such as Adyen, Stripe, PayPal, Klarna and Qliro.
Hosting	Self-hosted product. A hosting provider needs to be contracted separately.	SaaS platform. Hands-off setup that’s perfect for any business that doesn’t want to manage a self-hosted platform.	Centra is a SaaS platform running in the cloud, with a 99.9% availability guarantee covering sales periods such as Black Friday.
Automatic updates vs versions	Software needs to be manually updated to the latest version, driving cost, risk and creating plug-in compatibility issues.	Automatic platform updates.	Always up-to-date Centra is always running on the best and latest version with automatic updates fortnightly.
Licensing fees	WooCommerce is initially free, but there are fees for plugins, customization, hosting, updates and upgrades.	Monthly subscriptions start from $29/month. Any subscription requires an additional transaction-based fee. Transaction-based fee percentage depends on the chosen pricing plan.	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 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.

Shopify

Ease of use

If you stay within the basic features set, running the small B2C brand, Shopify is a great, easy-to-use platform. Whenever you need any industry-specific features you will be forced to switch plans or migrate to Shopify Plus to enable features like adding new stores for international expansion, wanting to offer multi-currency, or just saving time via features like the launchpad, scripts, flow etc.

User limit

On regular versions of Shopify, there are limits to the number of users you can have in your store. Shopify Advanced limits you to fifteen staff accounts. On the lower plans, you’re limited to one, two, or five accounts. A medium-sized Shopify shop requires about five team members, multiple people from the development agency, consultants, an SEO resource, third-party handling, an integration team, etc. Of course, starting brands don't require such a big team.

Omnichannel integration

Your Shopify account can be linked with a number of different channels. However, it has to be done one by one.

Versionless

New features are added automatically with no costs on the client’s side.

WooCommerce

Locked with on CMS

WooCommerce isn’t an independent platform. It’s an advanced plugin for WordPress, so if you’re using this CMS it’s a natural first choice.

Complexity

If going with this product, you will want a dedicated WooCommerce developer to ensure that your shop's plugins work together smoothly.

Upgrades

WooCommerce is self-hosted, which means you get full control over updates and maintenance.

Specific skills required

Using WooCommerce also requires certain level of WordPress expertise.

Payments

WooCommerce payments enable you to accept payments through PayPal and Stripe. Other PPS are only available through additional plugins.

Data liability

With WooCommerce, you have 100% control of the customer’s data.

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.

Centra

High-density interface

Clean, high-density interface showing lots of information.

Filters

Powerful filters, search and sort functionality working across all data grid views.

Split views

Split views allow to maintain a listing of items while working with one item.

Batch actions

Batch actions enable simultaneous editing of multiple items at once.

Export and import

Export and import, quickly pull data out or batch import from spreadsheets.

Large-screen friendly

Centra makes good use of large screens by responsively expanding the interface horizontally if there is space.

Key features included out of the box

Brands launching on Centra get a comprehensive set of features they need, integrated into a tight package. There is no need to install additional apps to build a setup that serves a specific purpose. This makes the whole setup much easier to integrate and use, and saves a lot of money and effort connected with installing third-party applications to add specific functionalities.

Versionless

New features are added automatically, free of charge.

Frameworks developers love

Centra can be used with common front-end technologies including Vue.js and react.js.

Iterate faster

Launch new features and fixes in days with Centra’s decoupled architecture that developers love. 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.

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.

Shopify

Limited front end design freedom

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

Limited checkout design

Shopify checkout is well-known for being locked-down and rigid. It’s a choice that’s making Shopify easier to manage.

Some functionalities cost extra

Shopify's focus is on selling simple standard and shipping products. If your store requires functionalities that don't come out of the box or aren't offered by third parties, you would need to wait for the company to offer it.

Limited API flexibility

Limited API flexibility makes deploying an omnichannel strategy a bit challenging for ambitious brands.

Spotty support for themes

Majority of the website themes are developed and overseen by third parties. It allows Shopify to offer a wide selection of standardized options to their customers in terms of website design. On the other hand, there are no standards as to how customer service is to be delivered by these third-party providers.

WooCommerce

Front end design

Designed to work with one CMS vendor. WordPress is one of the most known CMS services.

WooCommerce development is costly

Maintaining and customizing WooCommerce outside the plugins is expensive in the long run.

Custom design is challenging

By default, WooCommerce is a template-based platform without a possibility for a custom design. You can personalize it with a lot of additional extra-paid plugins, but it still doesn’t provide you with true design freedom.

Upgrades

New versions are released quite frequently. You can run upgrades by yourself or hire an additional team. Some WooCommerce updates can cause plugin conflicts.

Custom marketing and campaign efforts

Marketing and campaign efforts are tempered due to the amount of required development and cost of taking these campaigns live.

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

Faster site

Future-proof headless platform built for speed and growth.

Robust API coverage

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

Scalable hosting

Hosting is included, and scalable global performance is guaranteed with SLA.

Versionless

Features are launched automatically with no extra cost.

Frontend design

Centra is built to work with a custom frontend and external CMS. It 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 anything.

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

Brand-authentic marketing

Robust headless architecture allows freedom of design and localized brand-authentic content marketing. Full control over the feel and look of the website – from the landing page to the checkout.

Any CMS

Contentful, Storyblok, Prismic – any CMS. Custom online experience crafted with a best-of-breed CMS, no templates baked into an ecommerce platform.

Any agency

Headless architecture supports the use of any agency or software developers.

Iterate faster

Decoupled architecture is easier for developers to work with. Any changes or debugging can be done faster, significantly reducing the time to market. You can release new versions of your site fortnightly, weekly, or more often, independent of any backend changes.

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.

Shopify

Multi-store capabilities

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.

Not possible to share a back end database by multiple front ends

Sharing a backend database, e.g., a product catalog, is not possible on Shopify.

Multi-currency

Shopify's multi-currency option is available through Shopify Markets.

Checkout localization

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

Automated tax compliance

There is an extra fee for Avalara if doing automated tax compliance for charging US sales tax.

Size chart localization

Localized size charts are only available through third-party plugins.

Complex allocation rules

Limitation for multichannel retailers, with the checkout, if you have complex requirements for things like shipping from multiple warehouses for a single order, click and collect, shipping from store it needs to be taken out from the platform because Shopify can not handle that.

WooCommerce

Localization

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

Size chart localization

Only available through third-party extensions.

Multi-store

WooCommerce allows users to manage multiple storefronts from a single back-end, allowing for multi-currency, multi-language (and multi-brand etc) through an extension. Multi-store capabilities of WooCommerce highly depend on the plugin that you’ll use.

Checkout localization

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

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.

Centra

Multi-store

Native multi-store architecture allows for full management of core data locally and globally across different stores.

Gradual localization

Smart 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

Centra serves 100+ countries globally with one single site tailored for every market. Offering different products and prices in different regions, independently of language and currency settings.

Robust localization capabilities

Multi-language allows any information to be translated, and uses the best-converting payment options everywhere. 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 multiple storefronts.

Capture new markets quickly

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

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 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.

Native support for tax compliance

Free of charge automated tax compliance for charging US sales tax with Avalara.

Routing to the best PSP

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

Any payment method

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.

Fallback handling

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

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.

Shopify

WooCommerce

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.

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.

Boost your wholesale

Save time by moving small retailers and reorders to self-service. Save time and sell more with the tool buyers love. Find new retailers. Invite retailers globally to visit your beautiful digital showroom, browse online lookbooks and place orders. Digitize your marketing efforts. Leverage the personalized digital marketing techniques known from B2C ecommerce to boost your wholesale. Rapidly increase sales. Integrate our intuitive online showroom and see an immediate 10-15% increase in in-season re-orders.

Automation

Remove errors. Control all orders on existing, and incoming future inventory, with corresponding delivery windows Automated fulfillment. Use Centra’s clever automated backend, and integrate with other IT systems to eliminate manual file transfers.

Collaborative ordering and showroom capabilities

Centra gives you a simplified order entry, empowering your sales staff, agents and customers to make digital orders on desktop, tablet or mobile more easily. The platform's real-time, collaborative showroom environment allows working on multiple orders with multiple buyers simultaneously.

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
Features for fashion	Through apps/extensions	Through apps/extensions and native integrations (limited)	Native

Shopify

Apps

Shopify allows merchants to introduce new functionalities to the store through extensions. While it’s a good, quick solution for small retailers, a typical fashion brand needs 30-60 apps.

Slow improvements to core functionalities

Shopify is 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.

Lack of industry-specific functionalities

Rules for offering promotions/discounts, shipping logic, bundling, payments, etc. to different customers or based on different variables are available only on Shopify Plus.

WooCommerce

Plugins

WooCommerce is modular by its nature. It has a few basic native functionalities, and other features are only available through plugins. You can use WooCommerce's original plugins or third parties offerings. The majority of apps are expensive and international fashion brands may require a lot of extensions or bespoke development. Extensions may work great individually, but they frequently don't play well together.

Native functionalities

Poor set of native functionalities.

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.

Centra

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.

Shopify

SEO

Shopify offers some SEO capabilities out-of-the-box which require work to prevent some issues (e.g. indexation of dynamic pages etc). It is way more restricted than WooCommerce.

Customizable URLs

URLs are not customizable, which negatively impacts SEO.

You can have full control over the URLs if you use Shopify in a headless manner, as Shopify 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.

Mobile performance

Shopify tends to be slow on mobile unless you invest in AMP & PWA addons.

WooCommerce

Speed

Since WooCommerce is free with limited support, you’re responsible for maintaining it in tip-top shape. It can get really slow when overloaded with plugins. Store owners complain about poor performance and stability of the platform, mostly because of plugin conflicts.

Mobile performance

WooCommerce mobile is known for a poor features portfolio, lacking basic functionalities and a complicated UI.

Stability

With over 900 WooCommerce extensions available and another 50,000 plugins from the WordPress repository, you’re likely to find a different combination of plugins on almost every WooCommerce site. While plugin conflicts and breaks can occur on any WordPress site, they are particularly problematic on ecommerce sites where downtime translates directly into a loss of sales.

SEO

Although a lot of plugins are available, WooCommerce provides natively a lot more SEO flexibility than Shopify. WordPress itself has built a reputation for providing a solid SEO foundation as a CMS and WooCommerce is taking an advantage of that.

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.

Centra

Fast everywhere

Centra’s distributed model and NoSQL databases ensure fast site load times, wherever your customers are located, globally.

Guaranteed performance

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.

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

We improve functionality and performance every day, 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 #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.

Shopify

Support

Shopify offers support via phone, email or live chat, reducing the ongoing support costs with your agency. The team will help handle technical issues and answer any platform-related questions.

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 (non-plus). Unless the budget is exceptionally tight, it is often better to get a website developed properly from the get-go.

WooCommerce

Support

The free version of WooCommerce doesn’t come with any dedicated support and WooCommerce provides support only for their own plugins. It’s available through live chat or email. Unfortunately, as the most problems on WooCommerce come from plugin conflicts, support won’t be very helpful. You can choose to work with the specialized WooCommerce support company, however, this comes with a price tag.

Community

WooCommerce has strong community support.

Spotty support for third-party plugins

Most themes and plugins are offered by third parties that are not obligated to offer support or regular updates. What you’ll have to do to fix the plugin problem, is remove the plugin itself. After disabling all plugins, you can later reactivate them one at a time to detect a faulty one.

Centra

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.

Shopify

Cheap to launch, expensive to maintain

When starting an online business, most brands choose Shopify. This platform allows brands to launch the store without overpaying initially. However, it's hard to build your brand’s global presence, and grow fast.

Key features for fashion not included

Additional cost associated with acquiring or creating custom functionalities needed to support operating a global fashion and lifestyle store.

Apps cost extra

Shopify is the modular platform where customization is based on apps. The problem with that approach is your costs go up and your performance goes down. The more apps you add to acquire new features the slower your site gets, negatively impacting your consumer's experience. The majority of apps are available as a subscription with a monthly fee.

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).

WooCommerce

Cheap to launch, expensive to maintain

The total cost of ownership for WooCommerce can grow high. This is mostly because of the number of plugins that have to be purchased and maintained.

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.

Extra development cost

You may choose to hire a development team to do the updates, maintenance or new features development. It’s costly, but sometimes crucial.

TCO

While the WooCommerce plugin is free, you still need to be aware of other spendings that will be crucial to have a functioning ecommerce site. You can expect to spend some money on web hosting and more than half of the budget on the extensions you will need to run your online store. There are also upgrades and maintenance expenses. These costs will depend on your business type and size and how many features your site will require.

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.

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 functionalities that international fashion brands need out of the box – you can invest saved money in a unique custom design and the features that differentiate your brand.

Competitive pricing

Centra’s initial pricing is comparable to competitors, but TCO is lower than for any other platform. 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 #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.

Shopify

Reporting

Reporting isn’t suited for fashion or lifestyle business logic. There is no way to visualize how different collections perform and within one collection which product is selling the best and the worst. Although it doesn’t cover everything, Shopify has a clean reporting interface and covers all of the core metrics, as well as having a really good API to support this. You can easily use third-party solutions like Glew or Daasity or create your own data warehouse / bespoke reporting for broader business reporting.

Analytics

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

WooCommerce

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.

Centra

Fashion-centric reporting capabilities

Centra provides fashion-specific reporting capabilities, e.g., sales by size, color, attributes from the size chart as well as more general sales reports. You can use detailed reporting on product performance, sales, customers and other important areas.

Detailed reports for re-orders and pre-orders

Real-time 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 #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.

Shopify

WooCommerce

Centra

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
Features for fashion	Through apps/extensions	Through apps/extensions and native integrations (limited)	Native

Shopify

Variants

By design, Shopify 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 of the platform. The 100 variant limit is too restrictive for certain complex fashion products (bras, trousers, shirts). The variant and option limits can only be increased by using a third-party app.

Order editing

Limited order editing.

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).

WooCommerce

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.

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.

ERP

Centra can synchronize to, and enrich, an ERP system’s basic product info. If you ever grow out of Centra’s PIM, it can integrate with a dedicated product info system. Store and categorize rich product information, images, videos, arbitrary visible and invisible metadata, and more, and distribute it to all channels.

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.

Displays

Centra’s Displays feature allows products to be presented in different ways in different 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 department of an online store.

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 #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.

Shopify

WooCommerce

Why brands migrate to Centra?

One platform, unlimited channels: distributors, agents, resellers, marketplaces and their own direct-to-consumer websites.

Centra

Flexible and powerful product feed

Standard XML feeds are offered as default by Centra, taking into account multi-market, multi-currency, multi-price list and multi-warehouse settings. Grow global audience across 100+ social media channels and 80+ online marketplaces. Increase sales by leveraging top ad networks like Facebook and Google.

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 capabilities out of the box

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

Integration with company systems

Integrate Centra with your accounting system, inventory manager, warehouses, customer service departments, and more. Build third-party connections with open APIs if the integrations are not available.

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, Douchebags and Norse Projects – with some of these being on the platform right from the start.