Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Centra: A side‑by‑side comparison

Salesforce CC is feature-rich, but complex – with many parameters which make it hard to maintain. It takes experienced specialists to administer and maintain the platform. UI is often difficult for inexperienced or non-IT users.

Due to the complexity and amount of parameters needed for setup - brands tend to have to rely quite heavily on third-party consultants for setup and ongoing support, which further increases the total cost of ownership.

Centra has s a clean, information-dense interface with all vital information in one spot. It’s built for merchandisers and brand users, not IT professionals or developers.

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

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

This setup is easier to implement and use, which saves money and effort.

Updating the front end on Salesforce requires hiring Salesforce specialists, which costs extra money.

When you customize a part of the stack, you have to test it across the entire stack, which slows down development.

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. 

You can have one backend to power multiple brands and stores. Salesforce CC allows users to manage multiple storefronts from a single back-end, allowing for things like multi-currency, multi-language (and multi-brand etc).

With Salesforce CC you can localize content, use different images, products, sizes, descriptions, etc. for different markets.

You can set up multiple currencies per each store.

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.

Salesforce offers B2C and B2B separately — which can drive up costs, pile on complexity, and eat away at development resources. It also lacks fashion-specific features such as delivery windows, preorders, splits etc.

Running wholesale on the Salesforce CC comes at a cost of an additional 1-2% of GMV.

Depending on your pricing plan you can have only 2 or 10 storefronts.

In the two lowest pricing plans Salesforce limits the number of orders you can take – 1000 per license. 

Salesforce Commerce limits the number of SKUs and unmanaged orders you can have. Depending on the pricing plan, you can have 10 or 40 unmanaged orders per license. In the case of SKUs, it can be only 7,500 for Starter and 75,000 for Growth plan.

Salesforce prioritizes invoicing and billing, which can be limiting for businesses. 

Retailers can move to selfservice.

Sellers can customize their offerings based on individual account attributes and behaviors.

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.

Additional features available through Salesforce AppExchange Apps and other integrations developed and maintained by third-party Salesforce partners.

Salesforce CC has a strong offering around localization, including merchandising, and can handle large, complex catalogs from a merchandising perspective. However it lacks fashion-centric features.

The platform comes with visual merchandising, machine learning and 1:1 personalization capabilities.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a comprehensive SaaS ecommerce platform. It adds new features and functionalities approx. every four to five weeks. Some of them are designed to speed up your page loads.

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. 

Salesforce CC offers customers  24/7 support via live chat, email, phone support, and help portal.

Free assistance is limited to help and success portals, community, and some basic technical support. 

Most support offered by Salesforce CC comes with paid packages based on your existing platform/licensing costs. 

Only the highest package includes account management, automated monitoring and similar proactive services.

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.

Salesforce CC is expensive. Any changes to your ecommerce solution often gets complicated, time-consuming, and costly.

Salesforce’s pricing accounts for a significant percentage of the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) – up to 5% with B2B and DTC. Also,  you pay extra for support and order management, and on top of that you pay $0.15 - 0.5 per order.

Salesforce is a much larger platform built for enterprise customers, but it requires much more effort to get up and running. 

The level of customization and personalization they provide comes at the cost of setting up all these parameters. This can severely slow down your store's time to launch if you are not already entrenched in the Salesforce ecosystem.

Because of its complexity and advanced features, implementing and configuring Salesforce CC to meet specific business needs often requires hiring external experts, which involves paying high fees. 

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.

Salesforce provides an if-this-then-that rule engine for vouchers and discounts. 

Salesforce offers a comprehensive promotions engine and supports various types of products, including bundles. However, it requires significant effort and time to set it up. 

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.

Salesforce has extensive analytics options. However, some parts of Salesforce such as reporting and dashboards have quite a steep learning curve. 

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.

Salesforce is a comprehensive platform with strong visual merchandising but it has very few fashion-centric features. It offers bundles and supports variants, but it lacks e.g. size charts, etc.

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. 

Salesforce offers flexible omnichannel capabilities with order management. It allows you to offer “buy online, pick up in store” (BOPIS) and curbside pickup capabilities.

However, a high degree of customization often involves significant development effort which drives cost and complexity.

With Salesforce's endless aisle feature, retailers can enable customers to shop online for products that aren't in stores and buy them straight from the retailer's site.

Salesforce CC is designed to integrate with other Salesforce products, but connecting with external systems like ERP or legacy, can be challenging and may require third party solutions.

With Salesforce CC you need third-party plugins to integrate with social media platforms, or hire a developer with Salesforce technology know-how. 

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)

Salesforce order management is a separate module that comes with tiered pricing. Merchants also need to pay $0.15 - 0.5 per order. With standard inventory tracking, you get basic functionalities. 

This module is key to handling order routing and multiple warehouses smoothly.

Implementing and configuring Salesforce CC order management can be a complex process, especially for businesses with unique requirements or complex workflows.

In Salesforce CC there are two ways to monitor inventory availability: at locations and at location groups. You can set up fulfillment locations and segment inventory based on channels using location groups.

Basic inventory tracking comes out of the box, allowing you to connect a single location / warehouse. You can get distributed warehouse capabilities by purchasing additional SSFC plans and modules.

Available as a separate add-on, only with the most expensive Salesforce CC Growth plan.

Available through plugins.

Salesforce order routing is available with Omnichannel Inventory add-on and Distributed Order Management add-on in the highest pricing plan (Growth). It includes some flow core actions. More complex routing rules can be developed via the Connect API. 

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.