Centra is a multichannel e-commerce solution for fashion and lifestyle brands. The Swedish platform has built a solid reputation since 2016, becoming the partner of more than a hundred apparel, sports, and accessories brands (Paul Smith, Craft, POC, Stronger, Sandqvist, Nudie Jeans, Björn Borg).
Antoine Caillet, founding partner of Ultrō, and Henrik Setterdahl, sales account executive at Centra, hosted a workshop presenting the solution on September 19, 2024, at Paris Retail Week.
Centra: Strategy and Positioning
Centra is a Swedish e-commerce solution created in 2016. The company has nearly 140 employees spread across Sweden, Poland, and the United Kingdom. In ten years, Centra has become the leading e-commerce solution in the Nordic countries, supporting over 300 fashion and lifestyle brands. Its uniquely specialized positioning differentiates it from major competitors like Adobe Commerce, Shopify Plus, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
«Mid-sized fashion brands have enterprise-level complex businesses.
Just as enterprises, they have a global audience to serve localized experiences to, multiple warehouses, legal entities in various countries, tax and trade laws to comply with complex B2B businesses, with preorder and reorder, regional distributors, account-based pricing and terms, super high requirements on website editorial content capabilities and visual webdesign, an inventory management and sales forecasting nightmare. But unlike the enterprises, they don't have huge teams. A few people are expected to manage a global enterprise business. »
Martin Jensen - Centra CEO
Why we chose to partner with Centra
Ultrō was created in 2009 and has been designing e-commerce websites since then. For several years, the agency worked with open-source e-commerce solutions like Magento, Woocommerce, and Prestashop, without being fully satisfied or convinced. From 2018, the agency gradually shifted towards new SaaS providers, including Centra. The philosophy of this new generation of providers aligns more closely with the agency's philosophy: better UX, complete freedom in design, API-first, and a better understanding of the business needs of brands, whereas traditional solutions have focused more on the needs of retailers.
The agency-platform relationship also makes a difference: true collaboration during pre-sales, the ability to communicate with technical teams, and client support throughout the project. These are just some of the reasons why we recommend Centra to our clients.
Some key e-commerce features of Centra
- Exclusive features designed to meet the specific needs of the fashion market: multi-year collections, carry-over, and size guides by product type.
- A native international environment: Centra allows brands to sell globally through market management (languages/currencies/separate product catalogs) and price lists.
- One of the most advanced discount engine on the market.
- A native wholesale/B2B channel.
List of conditional criteria offered by Centra to create discounts.
Price list: entering a price for each offered currency.
In terms of UX, Centra stands out in every aspect.
Firstly, by allowing agencies to create custom shopping experiences with complete freedom of design. A decisive advantage for fashion, jewelry, or cosmetics brands that place great importance on the digital representation of their universe. This creative value does not come at the expense of performance: Centra is a «headless» solution, whose technical design enables exceptional response times compared to its direct competitors.
Evolution of the loading times for Aulp's brand website before and after migrating from Magento to Centra.
Platform cost
Unlike other providers like Shopify, which charge a percentage of sales revenue, Centra applies a cost based on the number of orders. A volume-based model rather than a value-based one, which prevents penalizing brands with products priced at several hundred euros. The total cost is calculated by adding this variable to the subscription fee and the customer support package (10 days).